How Much????

Ice creams bought away from home have always been dear. Out with a granddaughter some years ago, she was insisting on having a white Magnum and foolishly, I caved in, paying £2.80. Outside the shop said granddaughter managed to drop uneaten Magnum onto the pavement whilst opening it. I was not amused.

If out as a family, we buy ice creams in a supermarket. If any are spare, we offer them to members of the public, generally very happy to accept.

So many people don’t know how to cook simple nutritious meals nowadays and rely on ready prepared or takeaways.
When I twas a child in the 1930s although from a well off family I can never remember having a meal out in a restaurant. Once a month we went to a matinee performance of an opera and afterwards went the express Dairy for a piece of cake and a yogurt.
When I came back to England in 1989 I was getting 13% on my savings now 0.08!

A lot of the supermarkets rip us off. I bought the large catfood this morning and the small lable said something like £4 per kilo but when I checked the small size it was about£7 per kilo. Im sure many people never check and compare.

Large cod and chips for £9 !!! Blimey
It’s about £5.50 here

Paid £3.20 for a black coffee and £3.30 for a sparkling water this morning. So expensive. Lidl ice creams/lollies are delicious and very cheap.

M & S still sell 2 pints of milk at 95p, and white and wholemeal loaves at 60p ( 65p until recently ). Lossleaders of course, but keeps me buying them meantime.

Milk from £1 at Christmas to £1.49 today
Newspaper 90p to £1.20

I now use my bus pass, and take a free Metro, just for one stop and walk back, good exercise and saves me £1.20 which, according to some Tory MP idiot equals my days meals (some hope!)

Yes, I’m just deciding not to buy things. I look at the price and just cannot bring myself to spend. I feel a bit like my old mum and dad who used to baulk at high prices, that didn’t seem high to me at all! Maybe it’s old age?

What a great idea!

Our chippy does a pensioner meal for £4.85 and there's plenty. I don't know how long that price will last through.

Timetogo. Re price of bread. Morrison’s cheapest sliced loaf was 35p last week. Aldi and Lidl have sliced bread for 45p and I think Tesco do too. I started to buy cheap bread when making bread pudding but soon realised that they are good enough to eat!!!!!!!

We pay £ 15 for one fish & chips now, very nice, but not overly huge portion either.
Everything over £ 2 has gone up 25p in Tesco during the last couple of weeks.

When my husband and I have a trip to our favorite garden centre, we call at Waitrose on the way but any favorite supermarket would do. We already have a vacuum flask of boiling water and a picnic basket in the car. We buy something for a lovely picnic, he will usually go for lemon cheesecake (2 pieces and fancy handcut potato crisps and sometimes a sandwich. Things we would not normally eat at home. I usually have either a prawn mayo sandwich on brown oatmeal bread or prawns with a marie rose dipping sauce and a carton of grapes. The garden centre is beautifully landscaped. We park in a quiet spot in the car park with a nice view, read a newspaper or book brought from home. We make coffee and enjoy our picnic for probably half the cost of a meal in the garden centre, After the picnic we go into the garden centre and buy some excellent Boston farmhouse sausages to replenish the freezer and then we buy something gardening related and drive home through the country lanes rather than taking the A roads and it feels like a little adventure every time we do it. Much nicer than eating in a cafe and much cheaper.

I wouldn't dream of buying takeaway coffee from anywhere, one cup costs about the same as a jar of instant which lasts me about three weeks. The only takeaway food I occasionly buy, ie about three times a year, is fish and chips, not because I am particularly virtuous but it's just too expensive

Our local food bank has a community fridge which contains the "almost past sell by" perishable food. Anyone can take up to 5 items a day. There's also bread, bananas, potatoes outside to rescue before it's dumped.
I often rescue these things though I know some friends would never be seen dead using a food bank. I feel I am stopping waste as well as having some "free" food.
There is also a community meal prepared by volunteers using donated food - mostly ex supermarket.
I realise this is not the answer to soaring prices and anxious families but I think there will have to be more acceptance that we all have to eat and we should be helping eachother. This is tackling waste as well as feeding folk. Win win.
I am about to start volunteering at the community shop which is like a farm shop and café and relies on volunteers to help keep it going.
I also enjoy the occasional meal out with a glass of wine.
Life has to be worth living.

I certainly do remember interest rates at 17%. Now so much is dependent on Ukraine that supplies most of the crops for cooking oil which is in an enormous range of products. Blame the Russians!

"If out as a family, we buy ice creams in a supermarket. If any are spare, we offer them to members of the public, generally very happy to accept."

That's a great idea Candelle and a fabulous way to start a conversation. I've no doubt that the boxes of ice creams and lollies have also increased in price but they're still a huge saving compared to individual ones.

Why has no one invented a freezer type cool box? Or perhaps they have?
We are leaving our holiday home in a few hours and will have to leave a couple of boxes of magnums/cornettos for the next people because we can't transport them home.
Even if you take ice bricks in insulated cool bags, frozen ice cream still melts. That's perhaps why ice creams are so popular and an obvious choice when people are out and about.

IN the 1980s, we were staying with a family in Germany who had experienced the second world war. Their small garden was filled with vegetables, hutches with chickens and rabbits destined for the pot and the freezer full of home grown produce, larder full of bargains bought from the no frills supermarket.
I was impressed, and we were very well fed, though I am not able to live like that. But maybe if I had survived a war I would feel differently.

We would be cushioned somewhat by rising prices if we were getting a decent return on our savings, but although I have noticed the rates have increased a bit, they are not high enough to offset the higher prices on goods.

Joseanne the Aussies have the Eskie

I've noticed it with ice cream.
Was at a family day attraction with my OH and bought 2 icecreams, single scoops with one flake.
£4 each! They didn't even have nice waffle cones.
They were those cheap and nasty orange cones.
I think anywhere they've effectively got you trapped, they tend to bump the prices up.
I can see people going back to the days of taking sandwiches and a flask.
Bet the sales of flasks have gone up.

25Avalon

I think my casual staff (I have 8or9) may find they want to work instead of leaving me in the lurch.

But if the basis on which you employ them is "casual", how can they leave you in the lurch?

Bluedaisy

Personally I think we are being taken advantage of, everyone is using Covid to not only add a £1 or 50p onto everything but pretty much either doubling prices or at least adding a third on and I think eventually people will not and cannot afford to pay these extortionate prices and the shops, restaurants, pubs etc will come a cropper through their greediness. It was my birthday last Sunday and DS and DDL took us out to a pub for a roast dinner, I couldn’t believe my eyes at the menu, £18.95 for roast beef, pork or lamb with only hard cold Savoy cabbage with it. 3 small potatoes and a large Yorkshire, if you wanted any extra veggies it was another £4. The roast beef was supposed to be topside, it was awful, chewy and inedible and to cut a long story short both my DH sent our dinners back 3 times due to being cold and tough meat. In the end I decided to have the nut roast after sending mine back for the 3rd time (wished we had walked out at that point) the nut roast consisted of a handful of Paxo stuffing with a few cashews chucked in….yuk disgusting! I didn’t have desert as I wouldn’t let them pay £6.95 for a small desert each either. It turned out to be a disaster for us, luckily for them my DS & DDL had burgers so they said theirs was ok, but with all the messing about sending ours back they finished at different times to us and had to sit and watch us struggle to eat a vile expensive meal. My DH is right when he said not only have prices gone up but standards have gone down with a lot of these pubs. In future I’ll cook my own I think.

You are right.
A lot of places are using covid as an excuse to bump up their prices.
Wouldn't be so bad if they bumped up their quality at the same time.
Sounds like they gave you the poorest quality of beef and the cheapest veg going. And charged you £20 for the privilege.
That pub will go out of business eventually.
People don't like being conned and taken advantage of.

A jar of coffee in Sainsbury’s yesterday had gone up from £5.50 about a month ago to £7. Himself went into Quality Save and bought it for £6. Shopping around and price comparing will be more popular.