Penny Pinching

Today

I was chatting to my sister today when we got onto the subject of shopping. "You know when money's tight", she joked "it's when you have to buy own brand Marmite."

Apart from the routine taking advantage of "bogofs" and keeping a sensible eye on the best bargains, I long ago stopped thinking about what my weekly shop costs. When did that happen?

In My Day

In our early days, paying attention to what each item cost was vital to getting through the month. We had a constant balancing act going on between variety, enjoyment, nutrition and cost. If there was a way do things cheaper we did it.

As previously blogged, Paul and I used to buy weekly a huge boxful of fruit and veg for about £3.00 as part of the Infinity Food co-operative in Brighton. This was good and fresh and certainly ticked the nutrition and cost boxes.

In Eastbourne, back in the '70s, there was a retail "cash and carry" outlet called Consuma. This was a vast warehouse where the ordinary shopper could buy food in bulk, thus keeping costs down. Shopping there could involve the purchase of 24 catering tins of baked beans, 5kg slabs of cheddar and industrial quantities of instant coffee. To be able to take advantage of this bulk buying opportunity, you had to be able to shell out a fair bit of cash in one go, be able to transport the stuff home and have at least reasonable storage space. We shopped there about once every six weeks. Once home, the items had to be divvied up; sometimes we shared our purchases with friends and neighbours and stuff like meat and cheese had to be cut, wrapped and frozen. I remember carelessly leaving the shopping boxes on the floor one day to discover that Caspian the dog had affectionately taken the entire slab of cheese into his bed where he was gnawing it contentedly; another time he made himself very ill gorging on a 5lb bag of mixed dried fruit. So this system of shopping did have its pitfalls.

We became freezer addicts. Beatrice at one time worked in a vegetable warehouse in Wisbech. We combined a visit with buying nets of onions, cabbages, carrots etc. These we lugged home and had to blanch, bag, label and freeze. This was a grim job, took hours, the stuff never tasted as good as fresh and there's a limit to how much frozen turnip you can get through.

There is no doubt that we made compromises; we bought huge tubs of cheap margarine and ice-cream, both of which didn't stand up to nutritional scrutiny. (Becky rather liked the marge and often tried to take scoops straight from the tub; later she would secretly cream this with sugar and (sometimes chocolate) and stuff it after school. It was only when I mysteriously ran out of bowls and spoons and discovered a stash of unwashed crockery and cutlery in her room that this little habit was ended.) We consumed a fair amount of tinned spaghetti, fish fingers and drank the cheapest instant coffee. We even sometimes bought own brand Marmite.

On many occasions, trundling around the supermarket, I would be anxiously adding up every penny as we went, knowing that any error would lead to embarrassment at the checkout. Often I had to make the decision to remove some items at the checkout (to the annoyance of the queue behind me) to bring the total down.

These days, I guess, Lidl and Aldi are the equivalent of Consuma and many friends and family extol their virtues. But I have no idea how long it might take me to get through 5kg packs of rice, a lot of food items are unrecognisably German and I am now sufficiently well-off to be able to choose not to go there because I just don't like it!

Of course, having only two people to feed does make a difference.