Supermarket Price Increases [Groceries]

Treasure ireland.

Itx gonna get worse,more increases coming,time to grow your own.

It was a bit more organic than you bargained for.

I would have been bringing that back for sure the second time.

Funny that.

I noticed twice recently that Dunnes weren't cooling the stacked milk. They were just relying on the existing cold temperature of the cartons.

I noticed it because the carton I picked up wasn't properly cold.

This really does impact the best before date.

I find Aldi best for milk staying fresh. I usually buy four or five litres at 30% off when it's hitting it's sell by date and it's grand for a few days after. My current stash is dated the 17th and it's still perfect.

About 25 years ago I was working as a fresh foods trainer in retail in the UK. The company policy, and what I was instructed to drill into every new employee was: any chilled or frozen food that was either found out of place (thrown back on an ambient shelf by a customer because they changed their mind, for example) or was rejected at the checkouts for any reason (again, customer changes mind, can't afford, packaging crushed, torn or opened etc) for food safety reasons was under no circumstances to be put back on the shelf for sale, it went to the appropriate area to be counted as waste. Reason being, you have no idea how long it sat on the ambient shelf, or was in the customer's trolley or whatever. It's clearly a food hazard.

I also had to train staff to not bring too much out the warehouse fridges or freezers, because again, it would sit in the big cages warming up while they were putting it out on the shelves.

I was in a local Aldi recently and in the one visit I saw a large cage of frozen goods being abandoned in the aisle and the worker going off to open a checkout, and then someone ahead of me in the queue decided they didn't want a package of sliced meat which the checkout person handed to a passing colleague, telling them to put it back.

I won't be going back to that Aldi.

Local manager skimping on fridge temperatures?

Try doing that in the crap weather we've had. Near impossible.

Similarly in Europe - it's either been raining (northern) or baking in hot drought (southern)

Both crap for growing potatoes.

Similarly, as noted a couple of months ago, chocolate is going to go crazy. Cocoa beans hit over $12,000 per ton recently. It's back about $8,000. That's three times the average price of last year.

I had this issue with all of them. Clearly, there are issues during the process but it can be anywhere in the chain (factory, transportation, supermarkets, etc..).

What I do now is squeeze a little the carton box. You can feel straight away if air is getting out or not and I take the sealed ones. Some batches are bad with many bottles not sealed properly.

Might be worth all reporting to tthe food safety authority?

https://www.fsai.ie/makeitbetter

Same with me with the milk- always push past the cartons at the front with only a couple of days left on the use by date and hit the ones at the back with a near 1 week date

Let's preserve the absurdity…

Anyone fancy chatting to them for a reason behind this? 😄

[EDIT]

And for good measure… today's exchange rate on Revolut:

Without UK VAT @ 20%, £34.99 is £27.99, which converts to €33.12

Without IE VAT @23%, €64.99 is €50.04

(which would be £42.28 for those converting the other way)

So basically Lidl's sending each and every microwave from its supplier to Ireland on its own Ryanair flight.

But wait, THERE'S MORE!! (and at this stage I'm just throwing numbers at a calculator)

£34.99 includes UK VAT…

That equals €41.40 at today's exchange rate…

€41.40 plus Irish VAT would be €50.92

€50.92 plus Irish VAT again…

…would be €62.60, a difference of €2.39, enough to take exchange rate fluctuations into account? 😬 🤔

Even if it's not that at all, a 23% logistics cost/markup difference is absurd.

(the £/€ pricing would likely have been set months ago, but even then, I don't think the exchange rates got that bad)

For what its worth here's what they just sent me about it. It's a 57% increase in price for us compared to UK. Complete spoofers.

EDIT: @oneweb Just seeing your calculations above. I did a straight 23.59 / 41.40 * 100 based on your revolut conversion to give the 57% increase on UK pricing. I indeed pointed this out to them and just got a reply:

I expect to see the price of the microwave in Irish stores amended to 45 euro by COB today. 🤣

Just beware that stock rotation is a forgotten skill these days, staff often just put fresh stock at the front and push the older stuff behind. I took a back-of-shelf bottle of milk home only to realise it had a Use By of the day before 🤦‍♂️

I absolutely always reach to the back. I was in Tesco on the 25th. Picked up mince at the front of the shelf. Luckily at the till I realised mince was the 23rd. They are well able to have the pickers going around doing home delivery etc but feck all quality control these days.