The UK and Ireland Supermarkets Poll

Wot no Nisa?

Hang on. Dunnes Stores? Isn't that an Irish clothing store??

Oh, Nisa is there. I am blind.

Voted Waitrose because I'm a ponce, and there's one a miunute's walk from my flat.

Nisa-Today's, is that the one you mean? That's on here

(don't know it meself)

xp

Got to know Booths for the first time on holiday in the Lake District last couple of weeks, with only a Co-op with no parking spaces as an alternative (no alternative): I've never been so completely and professionally stripped naked, robbed of my cash in a humiliating way. They joyously overcharge a bottle of wine you get at an off-license - or any other store in the world - for three, four quid less. Pricing of fresh fish and simple things like milk or bacon too seemed ridiculous. I won't even get into *paying* having to park at their lot (this was touristy Keswick, but still). Bloody Nora.

Only two days left to shop in Haldanes!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-13716691

Haldanes went bust last week, and Whole Foods is just one shop so far as I know (albeit a very nice one)

Oh dear @ Haldanes

@Ismael, yeah soz, I culled them from Wiki, never been to Whole Foods myself. Decided to include the LOLindie shops too.

costcutters are amazingly well stocked for their size, the corner one near me is v useful, good beer selection too for a corner shop. sainsburys is far nicer than tesco. i like waitrose too but i spend too much money there...

marks and spencer has its place, occasional visits. it's v anti cooking tho, i always buy something ready made if i go there, never ingredients to cook.

As someone who works for Tesco, I can easily say... anyone else.

costcutter charge £7.50 for buckfast

Gah xp. Love Waitrose but haven't lived near one for years. We've just got a new Sainsbury's nearby though which is lovely, so that. Otherwise I'm fond of huge megastores and my local Asda is football-pitch sized (probably a lot bigger actually). Such interesting places to wander in, if only they weren't full of other_people.

try 11.40pm on a tuesday evening

Massive fan of m&s too, love the place.

Ronan totally OTM about M&S being anti-cooking, but I appreciate the lane space and all (not a frequent M&S customer me, though).

I'm voting Morrisons. Good value, good products that aren't too dear, decent lane width, usually decent amount of cashiers. Sought for Fisherman's Friends for ages though, turned out to be next to the paracetamol... but otherwise, no complaints.

i was in a huge supermarket late the other week and had to restrain myself from taking crappy andreas gurkyish iphone shots of seemingly endless corridors suffused in that sickly despatializing weak strip lighting that makes it feel like you have a bad case of flu

My favourite ever random supermarket find - my former local south London council estate Londis inexplicably running a special offer, in a big display on the counter between the fags and the lottery machine, of special-edition hardcovers of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo

thank god they didn't use that other conrad novel

don't really care, find process of grocery shopping equally hellish in them all (but marginally less hellish than attempting to buy ~ingredients~ from ~farmers' markets~ or whatever)

i really like eating when i'm, y'know, eating, but when i'm shopping or contemplating cooking i resent the fact that we have to eat so so much

ha

i thought you had forsworn cooking entirely?

Sainsbury's seems to have a decent balance of quality and price. I'd probably shop at Waitrose if i wanted to spend the extra money.

Whole Food Market in Kensington is remarkable. It's the size of an aircraft hanger and i've never seen more than about six people, usually looking like the willowy wives of embassy staff, shopping in there at any one time. It has an on-site art director but no actual customers. I always go in looking for something, fail to find it, and come out with an obscure type of cooking salt.

Aldi and Lidl are great - particularly around Christmas when half the stock is taken up by unusual German biscuits. I like the fact that all the Costcutters in my area have a distinct identity - Turkish spices in one, Brazilian stuff in another, Polish food in a third.

Dunnes Stores is ok - they seem to have finally cottoned on to the fact that there's a recession and and cut the prices to something more reasonable.

I remember the 'flagship' Whole Foods opening in London but there was already one in Bristol that was actually called 'Fresh & Wild' but had massive Whole Foods signs inside. It was pretty shit though, just any old collection of food that had 'organic' on the label and therefore way expensive. Good for getting a few one-off things I suppose. Whole Foods is my nearest store in the US and it's completely different; I expect that London one is more like it. Anyway, the Bristol one is a Waitrose now which is far better.

Will avoid Tescos if I have the option. Used to have a decent Sainsburys on the way home from work which was actually pretty good. Would like a fresh meat counter though. What is great about Sainsburys: good online delivery and awesome 'Taste the Difference' sticky toffee pudding.

Hang on. Dunnes Stores? Isn't that an Irish clothing store??

Also a supermarket.

This poll misses out Ireland's only vaguely premium supermarket: Superquinn.

As a student I worked as a product demonstrator in both Dunnes and Supervalu, and my god, Supervalu was where it was at. Smaller, more accessible supermarkets where the staff didn't get treated like complete shit and didn't (for example), have to call each other by their surnames. Not cheap, but handy and usually pretty good.

i like the way sainsburys has an "adult cereals" sign in the cereal aisle. porn flakes.

^^ I'll go out of my way to try that sticky toffee pudding, ta!

xxp

ha ha xp

gonna throw Lidl a vote because I get a weird sense of calm from their mixture of German efficiency, east European austerity and the scatterbrained dottiness of a white-haired grandma

also they used to do a bottle of Kentucky bourbon for *£8* which actually managed to be pretty drinkable, think that might be a distant memory only mind

Lidl has some great stuff in it but you'd struggle to do a satisfying whole shop i think. there's none of these that are near perfect tbh but we had a dope Moussaka from Waitrose last week and apparently they're not complete rip-off fascist cunts like what i thought? i mean within the limits of being a rip-off cunt capitalist business like.

i really like eating when i'm, y'know, eating, but when i'm shopping or contemplating cooking i resent the fact that we have to eat so so much

i love cooking once i can be arsed but otherwise lex otm

i thought you had forsworn cooking entirely?

by "cooking" i mean any process i can manage to fuck up, which has included over the past week boiling an egg (ripped in half when i tried to peel it), making toast (burnt), warming up a ready meal (completely burnt despite my timing it EXACTLY) and buttering crackers (broke in half and fell on floor).

anyway my actual experiences

Asda - only been to one or two of these in my life, think of them as gargantuan out-of-town warehouses full of horrible loud families
Co-op - i like their font
Costcutter - kinda grim and unsuitable for anything resembling a meal, depending on where you are you can get nice turkish/polish/caribbean snacks though
Iceland - i don't know why anyone would put anything sold here into their mouth
Lidl - probably the best, ie super-cheap but pretty full of decent quality continental food - salami/cheese etc products in partic
Marks & Spencer - i think 90% of my M&S purchases are salad pots to eat on trains, those are always quite reliably nice
Morrisons - nice deli stuff i think, everything else pretty par for the course, would not object if i had to shop here regularly
Ocado - isn't this just waitrose delivery service?
Sainsbury's - probably the one i've shopped at most in the past few years, no real complaints tbh
SPAR - like costcutter except without the random ethnic food
Tesco - i wish there were more proper tescos and fewer tesco metros that stock the same disappointing 5% of their range. no real complaints otherwise, don't see anything wrong with having to shop here
Waitrose - never really lived close enough to one to assess their food, i'm sure it's nice
Whole Foods Market - offensively expensive and disgustingly smug

like doing a big shop makes me tired then irritable then a shade suicidal

I find doing the Big Shop in Tesco to be quite a pleasant experience. Waitrose is rare enough in The North to be a bit exotic and therefore exciting. There's a dead space which is too north for Waitrose and too south for Booths, where nobody is expected to have any culinary expectation whatsoever.

the giant Tesco in town has lots of good things in it but i think my enthusiasm wears off quite quickly whereas Mrs V is efficient and thorough and at some point during that process i go thru the tired-irritable-suicidal process

if i manage to time it so that i need to do a massive massive shop of every possible thing i need, online delivery is the only way to go really (always go through sainsbury's) - removes allllll the stress

yeah that's the prob with lidl, for me i'd have ro walk 20 mins to get there, which would be grand except they don't have tons of the basics. one thing that bugs me about supermarkets lately is that a lot of them seem to have stopped keeping the discounted stuff in one place. don't know why but you could get some amazing bargains in waitrose in particular...

x-post think i said this before on ilx but personally i really enjoy food shopping, i find it cathartic and relaxing once i go at the right time. it's a nice place to think and i walk about 15 mins back from supermarket too...

Tesco Metro or whatever tend to infuriate me because OK, I understand you're a convenience store so go ahead and sell lots of snacks instead of rare herbs and spices or whatever, but why use about 25% of your shelf space to stock 8 million 2-litre bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi and bottled water when you could be expanding the range of pizzas?

I hate the small shops like that...they're just frustrating and I always end up cooking something boring, facile or unhealthy when I shop in them.

we have started ordering online lately, i thought it was mad decadence at first but you end up buying less than you would when you're impulse-trawling in a bricks and mortar shop so it works out okay. also we still have proper butchers and greengrocers and awesome cheap freezer shops on our street so i can buy local out of laziness rather than pomposity

i've still never done it but i know i should...

as someone who's worked in tesco, them

Waitrose,though im hardly ever in it because it is on byre's road in the wanky west end.

Online delivery is a lifesaver. I haven't done a "big shop" in about 10 years (mainly due to not having a car and luckily having a largeish sainsburys on my way home from work). I used to get fresh stuff every other day from there and order online all the bulky stuff like loo roll, kitchen cleaners, multiple tins/jars of tomatoes/tuna/pasta sauce, big packs of pasta, frozen stuff, etc.

if i could afford to do my shopping in waitrose my life would be immeasurably better. as it is i go in there to buy a few things i really like and to scan the shelves for reduced stickers which can produce some amazing bargains.

It's got to be Waitrose, but a good Sainsbury's will stock most of the stuff I need. I buy quite a lot of stuff in Lidl though, they have some good odds and sods, but the one near me never seems to be fully stocked, you can't depend on it for a weekly shop.

I like the Budgens near to us as well, lots of local produce, great bread, but they are very variable.

lidl/aldi yeah same problem, go for a look but you never know what will be there.

although a lot of waitrose stuff is reasonable e.g their pizzas - the frozen ones are particularly good believe it or not, much better than the chilled ones. other things are pricier than tesco but worth the spend. a hell of a lot of it is still ridicly expensive but in spite of that you never actually feel like you are being ripped off like you do in tesco. it's probably, generally dear for a reason or maybe i've just fallen for it.

Aldi and Lidl are great - particularly around Christmas when half the stock is taken up by unusual German biscuits.

Oh yeah, they deserve at least one vote for this. And a fraction of the price of Waitrose. Love me some pfefferkuchen.

The 4 supermarkets within on-foot grocery-lugging distance of me:

an Aldi - good for brand-x snacks, sauces, cured meats and chocolate - lots of fresh veg too but I don't buy fresh anything here after some unwashably insect-covered broccoli
(to me Aldi and Lidl are almost interchangeable, but apparently Aldi has a v good reputation and Lidl a v bad one in Germany?)

an Iceland - mainly frozen ready meals and always full of OAPs and wailing children, but the small non-frozen section is often the cheapest place for everyday branded products (soap, household products, lager, Heinz tins, bread, crisp multipacks)

a Co-op - my main choice, but slightly odd combination of the organic/whole-food/expensive Waitrose market for some stock and the bare basics for others makes it hard to guess if they'll have the product you want or how expensive it'll be

a Tesco Metro - the stock is OK and prices are good but always v understaffed, you always have to use the self-checkout because the tills are rarely staffed, and other obvious cost-cutting measures like the thinnest bags ever

we also occasionally drive to:
a big out-of-town Sainsbury's (range and prices OK, food is usually good, experience is about as non-stressful as a giant out-of-town shop can be)
a big out-of-town Tesco's (this shop is a scrum and reduces me to an angry wreck every time, so many people driving trolleys like they can't even see you, like nothing must stand between them and the groceries)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Tie!

I know it is lazy observational comedy at its very lamest, but that Tesco "unexpected item in bagging area" voice makes me want to stab people. Except there are never any people around except the very large queue growing behind you and laughing as you keep removing the offending handbag/single banana that's fallen off the bunch or whatever and failing to find anywhere that the stupid automated voice woman will let you put it.

anyone ever get any of the heston stuff from waitrose? normally i cook but today was 99p for two veal burgers with "all the ingredients of tartare sauce", so kind of flavoured with cornichons, anchovies etc...i came here to say how great they were!

might be 3 quid normally...

you just waived your right to survive the revolution

f u i am reading beckett and behan at the moment and i love guinness

your executors will be reading kavanagh and o'casey and will be sthrong men for the pint of harp

Feel like this whole thread has been a proxy 'what class are you?' poll. (thanks for tip re burgers)

I went into my first Booths yesterday (Milnthorpe). - they have a juicing machine where you can do your own orange juice and bottle it up

Keep seeing Dunnes Stores bags around Russia. Having investigated it looks like there are off-brand versions too:

http://i.imgur.com/U6CBYyv.jpg

http://www.rte.ie/presspack/files/2012/08/CLOCH-LE-CARN-JOE-LYNCH-RTE-2310_004.jpg

In the absence of a tartare sauce thread (that I could find) I shall report here that M&S own-brand tartare sauce tastes mainly of vinegar with a hint of marker pens

in case that sounds delicious, it was not

mmmm!
I did sort of miss my M&S staple foods this year. More than offset by not having to cook anything.

two or three times in the last month i've popped into Marks's to ogle their Christmas food and then walked out thinking "i'm not paying THAT"

Colman's tartare sauce is pretty good.

That's what I usually get. Co-op own brand is a lacklustre but tolerable substitute, as is Aldi's iirc though it's been a while. I think the M&S one even cost more than Colman's would have.

Christmas food seemed really expensive this year. Not just at M&S/Waitrose (not surprising) but even the Co-op had fridges full of "luxury" xmas everythings for way more than I could justify spending. I spent the post-Christmas week returning sporadically to eye the reduced to clear fridge but no luck.

(I too went to M&S to ogle Christmas things and buy small boxes of chocolates for random acquaintance gifts, but even the latter were more than I remembered from previous years. Was amused by the little chocolate balls wrapped up like "sprouts" though and bought some for acquaintances who are easily entertained like me.)

asda stuff was good

ya i shopped up in the six counties whit av ut

I got some half price mixed/stuffed olives for £1.65 at the local co-op. Nice accompaniment to my last dregs of whisky.

The m+s in this shithole was closed down 10 years ago. It had been there since the 1930's as well, somehow. The Jack Fulton's around the corner always had at least 100% more customers. Christ, even Woolworths usually had more customers.

Jack Fulton's does a tasty bargain now and then if you keep your eye on them

Just learned Aldi owns Trader Joe's in the US, never knew.

My nearest shops are Waitrose and Sainsbury's, supplemented by the amazing butcher on Theobald's Road and a couple of good fruit and veg stands. My upstairs neighbour runs the big one on Kingsway that's great for cheap fruit and £1 bunches of asparagus in season. The other is the Asian stall outside Marchmont Street post office with good 50p bunches of parsley and coriander.

I got 15p change this morning despite paying with my card. How does that work?

Did you bring your own bags? I've heard of some places giving you money back if you reuse old bags.

how the fuck did waitrose win this?

lol ilx

I would have to travel halfway to Bradford or to the t'other side of Leeds to find my nearest Waitrose. But I will say their own brand products which I often purchase from Ocado are decent. I could imagine after 5-6 more years of austerity much more of the squeezed middle of ILX would have realised LIDL is ace for cheap fresh produce and booze and their bakery products are rather good as well, Alan.

Co-op are underrated imo.

my parents are middle-class and retired and they do half their shopping in lidl and the other half in m&s food. the two shops are conveniently a stonesthrow from each other. i was legit impressed at the prices in lidl last time i was there. "22p for a tin of tomatoes wtf" sort of thing

I live in between (sort of) a Waitrose and a Morrisons, the novelty of Waitrose has long since worn off for me though and you'll invariably find me in Morrisons.

... the novelty of seeing Charles Dance doing his weekly shop, for one.

xxp co-op?? Their fruit and veg is always the worst where I am - have had mouldy herbs etc. And mostly overpriced except for the offers on big brands. There are about 4 of varying sizes on my nearby high street and I find them all infuriating

where i am the local co-op is pretty ace for fresh produce, and basics like tinned tomatoes, passsata, cream and minced beef etc. The local Asian supermarket is better, but double the walk.

I bet Charles Dance doesn't ever buy any reduced asparagus - the posh twat!

Co-op are underrated imo.

― calzino, Friday, 26 May 2017 20:55 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

co-op has this problem where quality is unknowable, I had "posh" chilled pizzas from there that were ineptly bady. Once had a frozen margarita that was oddly delicious, but the other frozen pizzas in the same line were completely disgusting, miserable smear of odd tasting orange tomato sauce. also, often very expensive. not waitrose expensive though.

Do any of you savages actually cook anything other than readymeals? As the resident council estate scratter I'm getting worried!

I've just been to the local Co-op. They are selling succulent looking 230g packs of Dutch vine tomatoes for 69p. I'll really miss offers like that in the post-Brexit depression.

Fruit and veg in my local Co-op is perversely expensive. You can currently get a pizza, wedges, garlic bread, frozen corn and ice cream for the price of 12 apples. The bakery is decent and the three-for-£1 Magnum dupes are amazing though.

For all the ethical positioning, the staff at my local one are vocal about hating it and say their benefits / perks are being stripped down. They are also moving towards only selling British meat to capitalise on Brexit sent, which is nagl.

https://s14.postimg.org/m9t9kqva9/IMG_0084.jpg

My other half wants to boycott them over this, not unreasonably. I can't bring myself to go to CostCutter instead tho.

I hadn't noticed the UKIP style marketing tbh.

I just got tomatoes, bell peppers, bananas, asparagus, double cream, passata, tinned tomatoes and a loaf of wholemeal bread. It came to £11 odd, that probably is a few quid more expensive than the same would cost at the Asian supermarket.

I don't believe all the ethical trade posturing for a minute. The staff do generally seem miserable as fuck, but at least they don't look at you like your an alien if you ask if they sell ginger, as happened in the local One-Stop.

went to big tescos this morning. can manage about 3 months at a time with the local small sainsburys but i do need things only the big tescos stocks from time to time (vitamin tablets, the shampoo i like, the good veggie soap that smells of lemons...)

anyway, sainsburys have prices and then big red stickers with sales prices on them.

tescos now have prices and then big yellow stickers with the *club card* prices on them. very easy to pick something up thinking it's on sale only to have to pay the higher price because i don't have a clubcard (actually, it wasn't obvious to me whether they were clubcard prices or clubcard PLUS prices, their paid discount card thing). there's now a two- or three-layer pricing system in tescos and it's ruined the whole thing for me.

(also, no skimmed milk in anything other than 4-pint bottles. i've noticed this other places too, that skimmed milk is becoming less favoured)

Totally agree. It makes forgetting your clubcard like a punishment. 'Here's what you could have got...'

I always keep a few bottles of skimmed milk in my stores and prefer it sometimes tbh. It's fine for making macaroni cheese and if full fat milk is even slightly going off I can't abide the taste of it.

I live in between (sort of) a Waitrose and a Morrisons, the novelty of Waitrose has long since worn off for me though and you'll invariably find me in Morrisons.

There's now an Aldi (or is it Lidl?) almost beside Morrisons. I've only been in it once because it opened at the height of the pandemic and the queues to get into it were horrendous. I know people swear by them but I didn't like it. Just checked, it's a Lidl.

when I lived in Ely there was a Waitrose opposite an Iceland, very different customer bases, Waitrose was good there because they would heavily discount soon-to-expire food and all the people in there were too well-off to be looking for it.
In Cambridge Waitrose there are masses of boho hippies who go straight for the discounts, so no point going.

Well, yes, I've only ever shopped in Waitrose for discount items, except when they were selling potato farls (or potato scones, as we call them).

brief trot to tesco because i had to go the other direction but didn't want to go to the faraway sainsburys... and the 4 self-service tills have been replaced with 8 self-service tills in the same space, meaning each has just enough space for a basket in front of it. so you scan your purchases and then there's nowhere to put them. back in the same basket? on the floor?

baking potatoes were 3.5 times as much as the sainburys ones. they'd better be 3.5 times better.

still livid about waitrose

twice in a little over a week I've scanned something and the price was more than the one on the shelf. and when i pointed this out they treat it like it's something I've done.

their solution is to remove the sticker from the shelf so now nobody knows what the thing will cost.

On the rare occasions I go to the supermarket in person, I'm astounded by Dunnes Stores' decision to introduce a delay into the checkout process. They do a coupon for €10 off your next shop with every €50 you spend, so the checkout line often has someone trying to make their shop up to a multiple of €50 so that they'll get the coupon. And sometimes they will LEAVE THE CHECKOUT and go back into the shop to get an extra loaf of bread or a couple of pizzas out of the freezer or something, instead of choosing batteries or gum from the rack right beside them, as God intended. It's so annoying. Sometimes you want to offer them the €10 so that they'll just pay up and piss off.