Thetownend.com

I know this topic will potentially descend into political territory, but I've had a bee on my bonnet for a while about the shite that supermarkets seem to now be putting out.

I forget all of my issues (until I next encounter them), but it boils down to quality. It seems that of late some products are poor almost everywhere.

Garlic for instance. It's all stale and starting to go green within. It doesn't always ruin my cooking, because I can see and smell it first, but I hate getting it home to cook and then not being able to. After going in all the supermarkets, they're all the same and universally sell shit garlic. The missus pinched some from work that was ok, but still, that can't sustain us. We've resorted to using dried garlic for the most part, which irks me somewhat.

Prawns seem to again be crap. I love my fish and I can't even remember the last time I purchased supermarket prawns and found them anything other than totally flavourless.

Spicy things. I'm sure this has always been the case, but why is almost nothing spicy even though it says it is? Please don't sell me "Extreme Jalapeno Hummus" that a 6 year old eats without complaint.

Bread. Years ago you could buy a fresh baked baguette and the crust would crumble and fall apart and it'd be a great light airy texture. Now you buy fresh bread and it looks nice and crusty, but it has a slightly rubberised texture to the curst, is dense and wouldn't make a mess anywhere. They've also done away with sesame and poppy seeded bread seemingly in its entirely. (Allergy issues perhaps?)

I know there are other things, but I don't recall them now. Does anyone else notice any of these things or others?

Have noticed that garlic is a lot smaller than it used to be.  Try lidl bread, it's lovely and crusty (at least in my local one). I was a real snob about going to Lidl and was surprised how good it is now, amazing tomatoes too

Spot on and can see why many are choosing Aldi and Lidl

 It's the downside of having cheap plentiful food... as someone alive when post war rationing was still in place, I know what it's like when things like chicken were luxury food, and exotic fruits like bananas and oranges were Christmas treats. However when you got these things they certainly tasted.

Mushrooms would be a classic example.... when you got them straight out of the field, turned your eggs black in the frying pan... todays tunnel grown things have next to no taste.

You can still find foods which taste, for example allotment produce, but they tend to be expensive and more time consuming to find.

As a meat eating kid, always a lot of offal... tongues, kidneys, liver, chitterlings, tripe, pigs trotters, black puddings and combinations like proper faggots all tasty stuff. Now a bit niche....

I guess farm shops or markets is the answer but not too many local

Road kill. It’s they way forward.

I nearly bought some dates for lunch today, as I cant remember what they taste like. I looked at the wrapper and it said they'd been carefully selected, frozen and stored to retain their freshness. Straight back on the shelf.

Another vote for Lidl bread. Excellent quality and value!

Asda is truly a pile of shite.  If - and I mean if - they have any stock on the shelves, it is shit. Not a lot to do with food quality, more to do with the Hell on earth, soul destroying, misery inducing, life force sapping experience that is trying to buy a pint of milk as Asda


And there is a woman who works there who looks like Kirsten Somebody who used to be in the broom cupboard or whatever on kids BBC :(

If you want decent produce, shop in whole foods. Superb shop, but super expensive.

I’m an aldi man, but their fruit and veg have a very short shelf life.

Their village bakery stuff is good.

Kirsten O'Brien according to Google chunkyhair. Must have been after my time

Have I accidentally stumbled onto mumsnet?

Aibu to think that supermarkets are rubbish

Supermarket stuff tends to be pretty ropey, but as we have become a nation that prioritises price over quality, you get what you pay for.

Being out in the sticks unless we want to traipse 20+ miles into Kendal (and both myself and Mrs Horlock07 hate the supermarket experience) its home delivery sadly and that means Tesco or Asda and on basic experience Asda seems to be marginally better quality. On the occasions we do find ourselves in Kendal on other stuff we will usually pop to Sainsburys or Aldi, often for clothes for the little un at the former and a food shop at the latter!

Thankfully we have a fantastic bakery a 2 min walk away in the village so fresh bread comes from there every other day, plus there is a green grocer in the town 5 mins away which also has a Tesco Express and poky Co-Op for emergencies.

If we really want a treat there are Booths (northern Waitrose basically) in Kendal and Ulverston where the stuff is 10x better, but 10x more expensive!  

You cant beat big soft baps.

Hate food shopping so we use Ocado. No complaints at all.

Find the big supermarkets absolutely shite these days. Empty shelves, shocking service and shite produce.

Best avoid a crusty cob though.

Booths is dreamy. So much good food but we'd be skint if we did our weekly shop there!

We do most of our shopping in Aldi. Our experience is that the fruit and veg from there last longer than Lidl's, but this is only based on a couple of stores. We pay a bit more for vine tomatoes etc as they taste so much better, but still save a lot overall compared to other supermarkets. Shame they don't have the Lidl style bakery though as they do some good stuff.

I love shopping in Booths whenever we are in the North West.

My biggest issue with supermarket produce is chicken. If i buy some chicken and i dont plan on using it that same day, it goes straight in the freezer regardless of its use by date.
It doesn't seem to matter which supermarket sometimes, even 3/4 days before its sell by, i can open a packet and it smells funny. Not to the point where its gone off, but it just smells odd.

Is it with everything? have you considered it may be your fingers smelling? :D

We used to use Ocado but after switching to Lidl we just realised that it wasn't value for money. Had no issues with the service, always on time, generally the food is good but whereas a weekly shop would cost say £60-80, we can get more or less the same in Lidl for £30-50. Yes we have to take into consideration having to get a bus back etc but for the saving, I can handle the hassle.

That said, there are some right idiotic zombies that go shopping. If they are not dicking around on their phones they are blocking the aisles with their trollies or just generally being a pain in the arse.

Get that, but Ocado order by 930 every Sunday morning rather than spending an hour or two of a Sunday in a supermarket is worth the £20 to me. Maybe if they opened for more than 6 hours on one of only two days most people have off it'd be less hellish.

I completely understand where you are coming from as well. Its annoying that shops open for such a short time on a Sunday, I generally go to the gym and then head to Lidl for 11/12. As you say, its half a day gone so I guess depends on how important your time is to you versus money spent.

Good old Sunday Trading laws.  I remember when B&Q or Homebase got around the previous laws by selling Apples for 50 quid but you got a free Black and Decker.

Over here they can open whenever, but a lot of shops don't open until 12pm as everyone is in Church in the morning.  They even have Police managing traffic around some of the churches.  Then you can pop into a supermarket and see everyone in suits doing their shopping!

The big warehouse style shops have horrendous quality of meat and veg here, apart from Beef.  You can get Tomahawk steaks and the like in a Walmart, huge beasts.

Over the last year or so I find myself buying more stuff from Lidl as opposed to Asda where I previously done the majority of shopping. I don’t understand supermarket snobbery that some people suffer from, as someone else already said the bakery and bread in Lidl is top notch, I used to think Sainsbury’s was the only place that did decent bread but even their stores seem to have dropped standard.

Come 2028 when Commander Trump is elected as permanent leader of Gilead, hopefully you will have evacuated your family to Canada by then.

It's happening as we speak.
More than happy to upset the flow of a perfectly reasonable Mumsnet thread. :)

There will come a time when people get fed up with paying the same or more for increasingly reduced content.

If fast food chains go down the road of more healthy offerings then they could become a serious competitor to the big supermarkets.

The consumer might also eventually favour a return to a more neighbourhood based grocery shopping experience, over the weekly trawl to the edge of nowhere retail park.
An outfit like Co-op should be in prime position to take advantage but won't have the wherewithal to do so.

Ultimately, the best bet would be to get rid of the lawns and paving slabs in the back gardens and grow your own.
And ditch the second motor at the same time.

A couple of people have said they use Ocado and so you may need to be aware of this:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/feb/27/marks-and-spencer-agrees-750m-food-delivery-deal-with-ocado

Basically M&S have bought them and they will phase over to delivering M&S food instead of the 'trose. Obviously Waitrose will just make their own brand of delivery service to replace, I'd imagine.

I find Tesco's the worst. Particularly the vegetables.

Buy some from Aldi or Lidl (they're usually for 39p for a bag full)They last a week no worries 👍

Got an Ocado delivery this morning. Missus said she's impressed with the produce.
Only really did because they had a 30% off first order. Normally our weekly shop is around 60/70 quid, sometimes more if a lot of household stuff is needed but with Ocado, is was just short 100 quid. Luckily we had the 30% off :-)

If anyone else wants a free 1-year delivery pass for Ocado let me know.

Same, I think Sainsbury have a similar introductory offer so may do the same with them :)

Don't hold your breath, there is a Co-Op in Grange and the service has always been dreadful, I hoped that once the Tesco Express opened down the road they would up their game, they haven't its still woeful and thus Tesco gets all our emergency shops.


Don't have a great problem with Asda veg, but then again we get through a hell of a lot and thus its used quickly, I imagine the uplifts in price are due to the weakness of the pound on all imported stuff, sadly we will have to get used to it.

Keep an eye on moneysavingexpert (or whatever they are called) for Sainsbury's. They put together a deal a few months back where you got 'x' off your first delivery and when combined with various multi buy savings, new customers awards etc we got 3 cases of Prosecco for about £3 a bottle if not less.

Problem is you need to be a new customer, so not I have an account, my wife does and various relatives in the village have received deliveries on on our behalf.

Just need to manufacture new email addresses. An ex work colleague did this with all the major supermarkets and kept swapping the around for new customer deals. Of course he got found out eventually by some of them but had the best part of six months discounted shopping.

I guess they tagged on by the fact a single address had multiple email addresses attached to it?

I think it IIRC was down to the drivers coming to the house multiple times on a promotional voucher.

I say this to anyone who’ll listen: if you have a gmail address, you can have a near limitless supply of new emails without opening new accounts. Simply add or remove full stops throughout the address (although no more than 1 concurrently) and/or add a + and a number before the @ and you'll receive it all.

For example, all the below would go to the same inbox and for the most part be accepted as unique emails (some systems refuse a + in an email address).

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Just cooked some sausages I purchased from Morrisons, "Morrisons The Best 6 Fiery Chilli Sausages." This is the first time in as long as I can remember I've purchased something that's actually hot, and not a little bit hot. Shit the bed they're good.

If you like Spicy food, get some, they're proper hot. The missus is dying. They're sweet, tasty and about as hot as Vindaloo/Phall.

https://groceries.morrisons.com/webshop/product/Morrisons-The-Best-6-Fiery-Chilli-Sausages-/494105011

One of the lads at work had some of those. He couldn't finish them and had to go home the next day because his stomach was hurting. I went straight to morrisons that night but they didn't have them!!! Not sure if they are going to continue stocking them or not.

Ha, ace.

We've just polished ours off. They're absolutely great and if you like spicy food and can find some, buy them all.

We'll be back tomorrow to see if they still sell them (ours were from our freezer and purchased a few weeks back - sell by 04/11/19).

No good for me then,  I'd be on the white trombone for a week.   Anything stronger than a korma and I'm struggling !!  (Curry lightweight).

Was in Aldi the other day and they had some Carolina reaper sausages for sale. I wasn't brave enough to try them.

The lad at work cooked his out the freezer too. I think they might have just been doing them for a limited time.


Not in the one I just went to they didn't. It's a conspiracy I tells ya!