‘Rip off’ supermarkets

‘Rip off’ is very strong accusation and often used to describe a huge price difference. In the case of supermarkets, even small price rises can be termed a rip off when they betray our trust after continually promising to be cheapest.

Interesting then that Tesco has been found to be operating two-tiered pricing, breaching an industry-wide agreement with the Competition Commission. Telegraph

To me this shows that supermarkets fix prices on what they think customers will pay, irrespective of what buyers pay farmers for the product. They know most of their customer’s buying habits from loyalty cards and will make sure they charge as much as they can get away with. Probably blaming, their responsibility to shareholders.

Why on earth do people trust them?

We really must build an alternative to the supermarket. We should shop locally and even grow food ourselves. And trade our surplus through local shops with our ‘Crop for the Shop’ initiative. The more we buy local the more likely local producers are to increase production.

Mind you we don’t need to make hard work for ourselves. It is much easier to get people to make the transition to local slowly and for good reason.

Start with meat for instance. Supermarket meat is cheap and nasty, but often not as cheap as your local butcher or farm shop. A fillet steak in the supermarket will be more expensive than a butchers sirloin, but not as good. Likewise, supermarket bacon and pork chops will be pumped with salty water.

We need to encourage people to use local shops as much as possible and help those shops get more local food, like a ‘Crop for the Shop’ table of customer grown produce.

Quality and price are the main drivers to get people shopping locally so please tell you friends, register for our newsletter, or follow us in twitter.