To compare, these are the screenshots I took earlier, showing how Carrots, Onions & Oranges are much cheaper in packaging.
Very useful if your council doesn’t provide free food waste bags, as they are significantly cheaper than the ones that you can buy! Admittedly a lazy option because you could line your bin with newspaper instead.
Because there are more foreigners in London than say, the far north of Scotland (or Scotland in general).
I believe the comment may have been referring to Morrisons practice of not providing anything for you to put your loose veg in - i.e. no plastic or paper bags on the sections.
I'm not sure what prices are like instore as we usually shop online with Asda, but their website is currently showing:
The "benefit" of having "package free" is that those products are separated from the main sections of the store where such items would normally be located, making it more difficult to compare prices. The same happens with gluten-free products - if they were side-by-side with their non-GF equivalents it becomes very apparent how much extra is being charged.
These are going to cost extra anyway because they are produced in far smaller volumes and require dedicated facilities for their production, so I don't think the higher price is really resented.
Casting my mind back to my childhood, we had the following supermarkets in town, all located on the High Street, or not far from it:
I would probably say it goes some way to explain why the UK has the third lowest food bills as a proportion of household income out of all developed countries in the world, and also why our food bills are, on average, 8% cheaper than nearby countries in western Europe.
That's a pleasant surprise when I've read so many times how we always seem to have the worst of something or the least of something good in Europe/rest of the developed world.
When I moved to Penzance in 1988 we had a small town centre Tesco and small Co-Op, though it wasn't branded as such. The nearest medium size supermarket was Safeway's, located at Pool. midway between Redruth and Camborne, a 45 minute round trip. In 1989 a medium size Safeways opened just outside Penzance on land sold by British Rail as surplus to requirements. It was an immediate success, such that a year or two later it became common knowledge that it was Safeway's second best performing in the whole of the U.K. based on square footage. At the same time trade in Penzance town centre on a Saturday deteriorated markedly, and not just for food shops, as the lure of free parking drew people out there to shop. A few years later Tesco secured a greenfield site slightly nearer to Penzance, again on the east side, to develop another medium size supermarket: in order to retain their town centre staff, who were not going to transfer to the new store, they were assured verbally that the store would remain open. A week after the new store opened, all town centre staff were given four weeks notice, at which time the store would close. There are still some locally who won't shop at Tesco in consequence. Then, a few years ago, the operators of the Isles of Scilly helicopter link announced they wished to sell the airfield site to Sainsbury's, with the millions of profit thereby achieved 'helping to secure the helicopter business for the future', with no indication of how this would be achieved without somewhere to fly from! I'll skate over what happened next, as I became quite 'outspoken' on local media as to the only possible outcome of all this, and, lo and behold, Cornwall Council gave planning permission, the store was built and the helicopter co. b*ggered off, never to return. Oh, by the way, the Sainsbury's is located midway between Tesco and what has become an unloved Morrison's (unloved by its operator as much as most of the public, who've deserted in droves). So, with no great increase in population and a depressed and depressing town centre, a lot of trade has moved out of town.
I don't drink any beer, so the prices don't worry me.
