Getting Food in the time of Corona, Brexit and War

[Furby]

I wondered that about the inflation too especially as its on rishis 5 promises list. Maybe its a small percentage weighting in the basket apart from in alcoholics baskets that it won't make a big difference.

[OurCreature]

I did my weekly shop at Morrisons today, having remembered to turn 20,000 points (I earned 17k of them for exceeding £45 re my weekly shop in 4 weeks out of 6) into Fivers, so that meant I had £20 knocked off the bill.

I was quite pleased with that. However I noted that petrol there is £1.56 a litre; I don't need any petrol for a few weeks but I doubt if I shall buy any at Morrisons when there are cheaper filling stations on various of my regular routes.

[merry]

Ohhh that was quite a decent chunk knocked off your bill, OC!

I had £46 in Tesco vouchers (we get quite a decent amount since we started using a Tesco credit card to pay for everything) but i converted it to triple points on the last day of triple points, to use on Burnt City tickets.

So, I got £178 of credit, but minus the £46 I had lost on grocery vouchers, was still a really decent £132 'free', though obviously the points exchange is only useful if there's something you actually want. It's usually 'days out for the family' or 'paragliding lessons' or whatever, but theatre tickets is one of the options.

I don't think there is any 'cheap' fuel round here though it does vary by a few pence per litre, which mounts up.

[Furby]

Charging extra for fuel doesn't make sense really because it might work for food with people like myself who would pay extra rather than travel far away costing bus fares but with petrol every customer has their own transport obviously so will only get people who run out of fuel.

Paragliding lessons indeed. I have noticed offers on many things are such silly things with conditions like signing up to nonsense so I just ignore offers and buy what I need and forget about bonuses. I have some Morrison vouchers I got from my work as a prize I forgot about and then it was lockdown so I didn't go. They don't have a expiry date on but I tried and they say invalid so have lost 30 pounds there.

[Wildrover]

I always buy petrol at Costco now - it's generally about 6p a litre less than supermarkets and 12p less than the petrol stations. Right now it's 137p/l compared with the local Shell garage at 149p a litre. Petrol always seems more expensive in our area. The shocker for us on our visit to Sainsbury this week was that we'd finally run out of duty free cigarettes so we bought a carton of 10 packs which was £115 - twice as much as our shopping! Fortunately our friends all seem to be on holiday and we have three trips booked in the next 3 months so at least these are the only UK cigarettes we will have to buy this year. A duty free carton is £25-35 (except at UK airports) and in most of Europe even duty paid cartons are about £40 so it just makes no sense to buy them here. It does also explain why tobaccco smuggling has increased 1,000% in 10 years!