I rarely do the shopping these days, but I do pay the bills in the house and I’ve noticed a dramatic increase in our supermarket shopping bills AFTER oil prices decreased. Used to be the wife needed about £80 a week to feed a family of 5: two adults and three teens. Now she needs around £130 a week to maintain the same level of food intake: and my wife has tried to buy cheaper alternatives, I no longer get branded Weetabix for my cereal, now it’s Tesco’s own brand (tastes the same, can’t say the same for their muesli, had to keep buying Alpen).
Although we have plenty of spare cash, I’m not happy with the supermarkets rip off Britain attitude!
One of the main reasons we had higher food prices was because oil prices sky rocketed and so it cost a lot more to transport food to the various supermarkets.
OK, fair enough costs more to get the food so we should pay more.
However the oil ‘crisis’ is long over, last time I heard crude oil prices mentioned on the news it was because they had hit record lows! Yet the major supermarkets have continued to increase the price of near enough all food items!
Why??
By now our shopping bills should be decreasing, not continuing to increase.
I was listening to SKY news last week and heard one of the major supermarkets (think it was Sainsbury’s) was the first supermarket to release it’s earnings and it was significantly UP!
I’m sorry, but in hard times supermarkets should not be profiteering from the misery of the credit crunch. At worst their profits should be unchanged and at best profits should be significantly down to help their loyal customers (AKA: captive audience) through hard financial times.
I bet all the major supermarkets that aren’t high cost (like M&S) will show increased profits when they report earnings.
Shame on the supermarkets!!!
