Taking sides - poor people's supermarkets?

Is Iceland a, mrm, poor people's supermarket? I hadn't noticed it being especially different (apart from specialising in frozen stuff) to the other supermarkets round here, but then we don't often go there either because it's only small and it's not very conveniently positioned.

Poor people's supermarkets tend never to have much at discount prices- - loss-leader bargains are limited to people who have options on places to shop, and extra money for non-necessary purchases-- but have a lot in the way of shoddily produced and less than nutritious foodstuffs at prices slightly under comestibles of better quality available at supermarkets in better-off areas.

As for the "produce," the less said the better.

There used to be a place called Kost-Kuttah in Mare Street, but I was only ever going past by bus and it's gone now. Costcutters is something else entirely.

Iceland = rebranded Bejam. What was wrong with Bejam, eh? Other than the name being a bit pants, like. It's capitalism gone crazy, I tell ya.

I know you are all closet Waitrose shoppers. Beware - John Lewis owns the world. Check out Park Royal for indications of forces being mobilised against Oceania (new missile silo under construction).

I had the indignity of shopping at Lucky when I was living stateside for a bit. Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Lucky? There's a fukkkin' misnomer if ever I heard one.

My friend nearly ended up as an Aldi manager in the great jobs drought of the early 90s.

My least favourite cheapo supermarket was Kwiksave. As one walked in, rather than been confronted with the traditional store psychology trick of fresh fruit and vegetables, one was overwhelmed with the stench of putrid meat. Aldi's cereals are just as good as more Xpensive brands

This is not true. At least not for the cornflakes.

I like Tesco. I used to live near the HUGEST TESCO EVAH in New Malden and became hopelessly devooootted, toooo yoooooooo, I mean, the supermarket. Yes. I drunkenly bought a digital camera from there and if I had a credit card with enuff MUNNY on it I would have bought an iMac too. Open 24 hours? YES PLEASE! Sainsburys is a bit hmmm apart from SAINSBURYS HARRINGAY which bestrides the J.S empire like a collossus and um yes. Brixton Sainsburys Local is quite pants APART FROM their wine in a plastic squeezy stylee cordial bottle. I've never drunk it but BOY! do I want to. The queues are too long. But luckily we have good old Tesco Acre Lane nearby ah tha joy. I have nevah properly shopped at Brixton market and for that I am a LAMXOR. Or just too lazy to get up early on Satterday.

Our local (suburban; only non-car access supermarket for old/poor folks) TEsco has just gone 'Metro' to laughable effect. There's all the upmarket trappings aimed at the yuppiefolk, but it's still full of old ladies with exact change for tinned potatoes and condensed milk.

Nick OTM re: KwikSave (which I thought was only a NW phenom); the concrete box I used to visit with my mum in the 70s along Poulton Road is still a venue for nightmares.

How about the Co-Op? Where does this stand in cheapsville? In East Greenwich, it was our nearest 'market (but the Eco-Sainsbury's on the peninsula was well worth the bus-trip; the Somerfield in Greenwich town centre was not), and seemed to be forever completely out of one vegetable or another. Terrible selection of booze too. But I imagine they treat their staff better than Netto.

Emma, Food Giant in Cricklewood was an absolute hole!

Supa-save in Chesterfield was amazing, like a department store but full of cheap tat, food downstairs and furniture and stuff upstairs, I used to go with my Grandad to get his cheap fags and Mackesons there when I was a nipper in the holidays.

So do other people have CHEAP Costcutters? All the ones I've been into have had all the appeal of a kwiksave, but double the prices. What a con. My local Costcutter has the WORST fruit and veg section I've ever seen, though its stocks of Iranian delicacies are superb.

I've taken to shopping at Waitrose, because I really like it. I have more money than sense, although I did see the first girl I ever kissed in the East Sheen Waitrose last week. Aaw! I didn't have the balls to say hello, though.

I would rather pay a few pennies more for nice food I will eat than for mouldering stuff or bad, cheapo cans which I will not eat 'in time'. Eeugh. Fortunately my mother, when on food stamps, proudly took her coupons to Byerly's, known for its carpets, chandeliers and massive deli section. Not Red Owl or something dire. Here I go to Safeway and M&S and the Brigadoon French Market, my Italian shop, and loot the Sainsbury's local for QUICK! It's going cheap! stuff.

Lawks!

Gateway/Somerfield/Kwiksave empire is one which deserves to die for uniformly lousy service and the lousiest quality Froot n Veg ever, if Twickenham S'Way is owt to go by (now thankfully a Waitrose. Incidentally I've seen La Horrocks in there about 10 times, which is a bit disloyal to Tesco, don't you think).

Best cheapo food is Tesco's value range e.g perfectly good tins of baked beans for 3p - KwikSave ultra-low pricing is a fallacy unless you want to buy sacks of broken biscuits.

However, even this wasn't a patch on Wavy Line. I was half-convinced I must have dreamt a shop with such a daft name, but extensive research insists not only did it exist, it also sold "jellied veal" (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~kelsey/shop02.htm).

Who will buy my lovely VG FOODS??

http://www.showbus.co.uk/models/vgtkartic.JPG

Nick D, those pictures are unbearably poignant.

The Wavy Line in Honiton became a Spar, as I remember. No doubt the lure of being able to stock Spar Super Strength Dutch lager was too great for them to resist.

Fine Fare were great if only for their fab football strips.

However Iceland win for bargain fun!

This forum is not my natural habitat, I know, but I find it compelling in a horrific kind of way.

Regards,

Anthony Sanderson.

Okay, here's one for all you corner-shop afficionados:

Happy Shopper!

there are no shelves. the "aisles" are created by simply stacking the palettes of cartons in rows and the top box cut open for access to the dented cans and whatnot. the produce is, of course, pitiful.

Hear this: Grafenwalder lager, a proper German pils with a real taste and everything - 65pee a can.

Multi-vegetable juice, like V8 but NICER - 60p a LITRE

An impressive range of German cheeses and salami for notmuch cashes.

Wouldn't touch their fresh meat or veg tho, to be honest.

Oh, and I bought an amazing pair of those hiking trousers wot zip off at the knee, for like £4 - lasted me a whole year in Australia and I still wear them, three years later!

More non-food bargains: http://www.lidl.co.uk/gb/home.nsf/pages/c.o.20060102.index

man, they should be paying ME!

I generally don't trust any brands that use all three primary colours in their logo.

I might brave the Netto in Stamford Hill soon purely out of cat-killing curiosity.

Surely this is the simplest way of making all of life's important decisions!

I once thought aldi and lidl were one and the same - I'm now less sure of this, but they sure are similar when you're standing in the aisle/between the palates.

there are no shelves. the "aisles" are created by simply stacking the palettes of cartons in rows and the top box cut open for access to the dented cans and whatnot.

This is not the case at the local one. There are two-tiered shelves in the middle of the store, and pallet displays along one wall and at the ends of aisles.

the produce is, of course, pitiful.

Yeah, pretty much, but handy for things that ship well: potatoes, storage onions, bananas, cabbage, garlic.

If we wind up moving out to my wife's family farm this year (I'm not holding my breath), Save-A-Lot is what I'll miss most.

http://static.flickr.com/11/15407438_90f5dd9d81_o.jpg

the closest store to us is what we call the "ghetto mart" (real name Texan Mart). It's one of these fastly dying Affiliated food stores.

The produce is actually pretty good. Fresher and cheaper than bigger stores (Fiesta, though, rules with produce). wouldn't touch their meat however. Everything else I'm highly skeptical of. I always check the expiration date on shelved items b/c they're often passed. A friend of mine who works at Target claims they take the old items Target and bigger stores like HEB throw out. blech.

the store's tiny and run-down, is usually playing fantastic old soul music, and has wild dogs running in the parking lot.

Classic!

Recently sighted in my home town. As awful as you'd think. The Ocean State Job Lot in Rhode Island is wicked awesome though.

uh-oh!

The 'Shrimps in Garlic Sauce' thing I have for lunch today may change my opinion...

One complaint: every Lidl I've ever been in seems to have the wrong number of aisles. You walk up down up down up and end up at the far end of the shop away from the checkout then have to double back on yourself. One more aisle of bizarre things please Mr Lidl!

Miss out the boring pet food aisle and BINGO! The correct upsy downsy ratio for finding yourself at the busiest till.

plus they started this cool thing now where everything seems to be priced in £1 or multiples thereof (and somehow always cheaper than elsewhere), makes maths so much easier!

Depends whether there's any nice looking women there, I have been known to develop a sudden interest in Kennomeat

Especially the one in Blackheath, what a rip-off.
-- chris (cbrown...), December 11th, 2001 1:00 AM.

Is completely and utterly on the money.

they are much more reliable than tescos/sainsburys though.

but if you get shitty delivery (tescos and sainsburys) you end up having to go to the supermarket anyway, and so... that's why i use waitrose.

I get a lot of funny looks, esp. if Dianne Abbott's there

The aforementioned supermarket the Save-a-Lot replaced had a pretty nasty reputation that it earned over the years, by stocking rotten produce, expired meat and dairy products, and suspicious-looking canned goods. Its name is Handy Andy, or was until virtually all the Handy Andys in town closed. I remember my family going there quite a lot when I was little. It's a miracle none of us suffered from food poisoning.

There's another "poor people's supermarket" chain in town, still very much in existence, that has a much better reputation. La Fiesta actually stocks some very good produce and meat, and some of the items in the dry grocer sections are quite reliably good. I wouldn't purchase any dairy products or frozen food items there, but I do enjoy their bakery's cinnamon rolls, and they're good to go to if you've got a need for votive candles. There's a location far on the other side of town that I do drive well out of my way for, because I trust it a lot (it's even a member of the BBB).

And finally -- until I move out of this neighborhood, I will continue to live in one of the few "ghetto Wal-Marts" in existence today. You know the kind -- they look exactly as Wal-Marts did many years before they became any kind of powerhouse. They're the regular ones that built up the kind of reputation that Wal-Mart is now striving to break away from. The aisles are always packed as tightly as a jar of pickles ((tm) Ellen DeGeneres) and there's a limited but still generally trustworthy selection of grocery items. I don't know if I'm going to miss it or celebrate its absence once I move away from here, but I know I'm not going to miss the clientele I regularly see there. Unlike a Wal-Mart Supercenter, where the range of people you run into cuts across all socioeconomic strata, ghetto Wal-Marts are largely filled with the kind of people whom NASCAR and those huge megachurches regularly court. You know the kind.

You can't do that in Lidl. You might miss out on a £9.99 mitre saw tucked away between two bags of dog biscuits.

'Shrimp in Garlic Sauce' turned out to be quite nice! Lidl stays in my GOOD column!

Haha except parallel Aldi of course xpost

Haha exactly, this is the joy of Lidl. I rarely go to the Brighton one, which is mainly weird mango juice and men's underpants, but the German one we were staying near in June was ace. Beer so cheap it was practically in minus figures and weird sausage for everyone, hurrah!

i went to Lidl only once, since we don't have one near us. it was round the corner from our band practice studio, i went to get some water. it was kinda eerie, and i couldn't put my finger on exactly why. then i realised - there was no music being piped in, so all you could hear was the slow shuffling of customers' slippers on the floor tiles (yeah, all the customers seemed to be wearing slippers, and there was an old guy with his shirt off and bare feet, looking hella, hella creepy). i never went back.

I like to go to Lidl and pretend i'm in a lost episode of Sliders.

It's the people who shop there I can't stomach. Apologies to everyone here who shops there! Esp. you Ed!

Spar & Wavy Line were always more of a rural thing, weren't they? I associate them with being on holiday in small towns. Also Maid Marian.

So very true - we just switched from Tesco delivery to Waitrose, they're so much better and it actually doesn't cost much more, maybe a fiver a week. They always bring everything we ordered.

Tescos used to somehow always manage to run out of anything that was buy 1 get 1 free - they'd always find one though so they could still charge us.

Why has no-one mentioned the very worst poor-person-supermarket in the world, i.e. FARMFOODS. 2 frozen donner kebabs for £1 and big bags filled with cubes of frozen reconstituted meat of questionable heritage. Their frozen veg is very cheap though, which was nice when I was a student and very poor and they were situated about two minutes walk from my flat.

Oh god it was all media blokes in cropped trousers and leather flip flops discussing salmon on their mobile phones, and women with hemp-clad toddlers called Amelia and Finn. Oh and the odd sighting of Nick Cave or Zoe/Norm of course.

Surely that's not specific to Waitrose, that's just Brighton in general?

M&S? Waitrose? those indie organic places?

Ed in never truer word spoken situation there, Waitrose were always by far the best to deal with, some of the others were absolutely terrible, basically they were bullies and didn't just demand lower prices, but also over-riders.

my last three visits have busted the £100 barrier. :(
in all fairness, that includes two weeks worth of cat food for THE BEAST , household cleaning shit, shower gel'n'face shit and toothpaste and stuff. and that's for a couple of weeks (with trips to tesco metro to fill up on fresh stuff). but still...

B-b-but you can't get a decent reception anywhere that's not next to the wine section there!

my kind of scum!

Oh, yes, and to pick up some organic goats cheese for my souffle or something.

But that would be childish, wouldn't it?

If we had Booths down here that'd be my supermarket of choice, as it is, I'd always prefer to go to Waitrose, the food is better, simple as. Plus, I know for a fact from supplying them, they insist on much better quality ingredients than any of the others we used to deal with, barring perhaps Co-op.

I spent £56 today, but £54 of that was wine since my local Somerfield is closing and the wine was reduced to about £2 a bottle. Currently drinking a rather nice Chilean fairtrade red.

I used to go to Fedco too, which had their own gas station. I got my first portable CD player there, a Sony car unit that I still use on my stereo.

still can't get alcohol there either though :(

I went to Aldi and wow has it changed. Less "downmarket" and more trendy products. They now have Boca Burgers for under $3!

They had bagels but NO cream cheese, just some fake La Vache Qui Rit that was underwhelming. Who sells bagels without cream cheese. Also NO sour cream...what can I cook with the cheap vegetables I bought?

Dollar stores have cheap pet food now and pasta, if you're into cost cutting.

I was quite a fan of the savings to be made at Aldi and Lidl until I found an even cheaper option in the form of a place called McBarra Discount. It was in a part of Glasgow you could only reach by illegally entering a one-way traffic system, taking a sharp right, crossing a scrapyard full of rusted trams, parking behind a skip, entering an alley that smelled violently of piss, then using bolt cutters to force a set of chained doors.

Once your eyes adjusted to the dark, McBarra Discount was pleasing indeed to the food bargain-hunter. They had own-brand McBarra Beans at 10p. Well, I say "beans", these were actually "insect filth" sold on by confectionery manufacturers and batch-injected with tomato sauce. Their eggs (hen eggs, I mean, not insect ones) came in clear poly bags so that you could see in advance which ones were broken and haggle at the till (I actually got paid to take some away once). And they did a great line in sustainable sea-slurry fingers that came with a little bag of plankton sauce. The knack was to get them deep fried at your local chippie then eat them so quickly that the vomit reflex didn't have a chance.

I read in the paper that McBarra was closed down in 1999 following over 4000 health and safety violations, but the last time I looked in it was open for business as normal.

"poor peoples" supermarkets.

why did you repost part of the thread title but put part of it in quotation marks?

I was expressing a little disdain at the phrase "poor people" in the context, is all.

supermarkets that cater to the economically disenfranchised?

Do they, tho? I know a lot of very wealthy people who shop at Aldi for example. Its why they are rich! Theyre tight asses!

Well ok I dont know a LOT of v wealthy ppl at all. But my point stands.

i now live in a much poorer city than i did a year ago. the supermarkets are different, especially the discount ones.

aldi gives me the total creeps

Yeah I dont go there often.Not because its skanky, it just has weird non-brands!

is there a richie-rich equivalent to this thread? i like buying specialty items at gelson's and whole foods; it makes me feel fancy.

as far as "downmarket" stores, i used to go to one called superior when i lived in walking distance from it in grad school. it smelled like rotting meat. but it was good for stocking up on frozen food, candy, things like that. anything fresh or supposedly shelf stable was too much of a gamble.

the richie-rich supermarkets and specialty shops you like to go to

tacoma has lots of poor people's supermarkets. there's a "grocery outlet" just a few blocks from where i live. old, overstock and damaged "edibles" at discount prices. lot of shoppers on fixed incomes. after a while, you get a sense of what might be worth taking a 79-cent shot on. store logo used to look like bart simpson's head, but they changed it recently.

http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/restaurants/grocery-stories/2010/03/grocery-outlet-tacoma-lakewood/uploads/articles/9675-banner-groceryoutlet625.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4067/4284153638_2e19349b4b.jpg

never a bad time to post this photo

http://www.tcs-plc.co.uk/media/yyyyao.jpg

most of my food shopping that isn't fresh or frozen is done here

See also... Tesco Value, Sainsburys Economy Ect Ect

After spending 3 years working next to John Lewis Food Hall (the only thing I miss about Central London I have discovered there is a Waitrose in Croydon. It has all the wonderful things about Waitrose without the vegan-sandalled phone-braying meejah types. Win-Win.

like five of these have opened up near me recently:

http://i.imgur.com/lMQKl.gif

the big secret is that though some of their daily necessitie are mcuh cheaper than others (88 cents for a dozen eggs!) - everything else is overpriced vis a vis local supermarkets

88 cents for a dozen eggs

what's the marketing term for something that's priced so low as to be actively offputting? because this p much nails it to my mind

how could u eat those eggs without thinking of what was being done to the chickens to get eggs that cheap

idk man but my dad buys 5 cartons every time we go

That's shameful ova pricing

you can't beat these prices but you can beat these eggs

lidl is alright, i have only ever rly bought alcohol from these places

the security in these places is usually more intense...like only having exits via the tills and security staff with the demeanour of people who are used to getting into scraps with the nonpaying clientele

the first time i went to aldi they didn't have any tills/cash register things and so the staff had to add up the cost of your shopping in their heads. that was pretty nuts. my mum didn't trust the place while dad told us it's where clever people go shopping and that supermarkets are evil.

the best thing about aldi is that you go in to get something to eat and end up leaving with a blow up boat, some oars, a minijack to phono lead, some battery powered speakers and lots of booze.

Man you must have been hungry.

What I don't understand is how the founder of Aldi got to be the 10th-richest person in the world. And yeah, I know they own Trader Joe's.

8000 shops around the world!

Bearing in mind that four individual members of the Walton family also have around $25bn each, it's not so surprising.

when the lidl first opened in my old hometown it had a distinctly post-apocalyptic feel - an extreme lack of natural light, no sound but that of the electrical equipment, four expressionless security guards blocking the exit, small cardboard boxes instead of trolleys or baskets. if you didn't walk in a lockstep trudge you'd feel out of place. they then spruced it up a bit after not long, not a bit of character left now. :'(

Oh man, my mom is absolutely obsessed with deep-discount, second run groceries – I spent so many hours in Grocery Outlet as a kid. She also buys a lot of food from Big Lots – waits 'til it goes on clearance, though. Clearance food at Big Lots! She was bragging she got a bunch of bottles of ranch dressing from them for ten cents a bottle, the fact that they had already expired didn't bother her. The expiration date is viewed by her as a loose suggestion.

have Lidl and Aldi lost their functionalist roots?
Which one seems more bourgeois at the moment. JUst seems a deeply significant question that I thik there must definitely be a definitive answer to or not.

JUst wondering if my current viewpoint has more to do with having grown to know the one I think is less genteel from its basic roots and I might think the other way if it had been the one that I was around at the turn of the millennium and for the next few years.

Find it difficult to view Aldi or Lidl as poor people's supermarkets given number of Range Rovers and Beamers I see at my local Lidl. I think that mantel has passed to Farmfoods, Mecca for ultra processed foods.

RIP Aldi Vegan Choc Chip Brioche Rolls, hopefully just a temporary casualty of supply chain foobars.