Getting sandwiches or other food items from Tesco or M&S or Sainsb or Co-op for next to nowt at days end, guilty pleasure or wot?

Hot sossij rolls for 9 pence!

Crayfish and rocket sammw, 50p, take 'em home and toast them!

Donuts for 10p! Bread rolls, fresh (OK, nearly), similar price...

(How long can it last, i wonder!)

full cooked chicken for 3 euros, dinner sorted ty

sandwiches tend to be soggy though

got hot chickn for 10p srsly at waitrose. there was a bit of a to-do at the deli counter though with some student trying to buy all of them.

one of the few situations where swift, brutal mob justice is ok

Oh yeah, the person with a trolley trying to buy *all* the stuff...

Have you never heard of "from each according to his facility, to each according to his need" ?

I need that chicken fajita wrap, you greedyswine!

"First they came for the egg mayonnaise, but I said nothing, because I don't like egg mayonaise.."

^^^

sorry but you can't block the discount shelves with your massive trolley.

when i worked in tesco we had the equivalent of the old ladies that hang around the slot machines in vegas, waiting at the reduced section to badger the man with the pricing gun. they'd bring the stuff to him to reduce. savages.

this is a subject pretty close to my heart.

My best was when the family were staying with (grand)parents up north, I had caught the shuttle down, then rail into home town, popped into Tesco and got Hoummos, Taramasalata, some smoked haddock, salady bits, and a few other bits which fed me for the week's evening meals (add some full-price pittas and a milk) for a total of £2.35

you don't wanna be buying your fish/meat int he reduced section imo, and certainly not for the week

Waitrose are particularly good at reducing stock. I often wonder if I could survive healthily on just reduced food, but worry I'd end up eating rather a lot of mini scotch eggs.

sorry but you can't block the discount shelves with your massive trolley.

This should be written in massive letters above the discount shelf.

mini scotch eggs

"party eggs"! i have only ever seen them on the reduced shelf.

The smoked had was vacuum packed, and I ate it within 2 days.

(The week consisted of Mon-Thurs, Fri I travelled back up)

'Party Eggs' conjures up so many amusing/strange visions, I'm trying not to wake the missus up with my lolling.

despite being a very profligate person when it comes to money, frequently eating out, and even more frequently spending the day in public houses, i do love a good forage through the vulture section of tesco. i actually get a bit annoyed when i feel like the discount isn't as good as it should be, i.e. something going out of date that day that's a few pounds and has only had 50p reduced.

is there some secret party egg section i don't know about?

I recently had this eye-opening realisation that I've never seen a reduced section/ yellow stickers at Whole Foods which means I've probably spent 3x as much on food/groceries than I wouldve back home :((( - I used to get half-price decent ready meals at Waitrose even at lunchtime.
I am not as posh as the above makes me sound.

i'm not posh but i would shop in waitrose, if there were one nearby.

work next door to a tesco so can pick up the odd early-reduced readymeal for lunch, though i try not to cos they're obv terrible for you

Sometimes you see discounts that aren't discounts at all. Like the time I saw some packs of mars bars for a quid but the special offer said you could buy two packs for two quid. Ffffuuuu---

And then when they do that price match thing 'hey our beans cost the same price here as they do in asda' - that's like admitting the rest of the food you sell is a rip off, right?

Ftr waitrose is across the road so I shop there through convenience. Only amenities like bread and milk and things, mind #noposho

Buying really discounted raw meat (steaks etc) can be a good find as long as you put them in the freezer the moment you get home. I got 2 huge porterhouse steaks for $5 recently. Not too shabby.

I want to go to an egg party. I bet those little eggs got some bangin' choonage

I live near Waitrose, M&S and Sainsbury's and I see a lot of reductions to clear during my shopping hours - many of which go straight into my freezer. Otherwise, the best ones are from the Waitrose deli counter - ridiculous posh smoked ham at 49p per 100g? YES PLEASE.

About a year ago I became incensed by some totally middle-class woman who essentially grabbed a reduced box of eclairs from under my hand - complete with smugface - and decided this wasn't acceptable. While she was totally vulturing the poor 19-year-old guy who was on markdowns, she was too attuned to him to notice that I surreptitiously removed the eclairs from her basket and left them elsewhere in the store for a more deserving person to spot and buy.

A+ !!!

You should've just chopped her in the gob, but yes this is stone cold classic

I did wonder through a field of red mist/Warner Bros-style steam from the ears whether I'd descended into CRAZY PERSON realms on being so incensed by this woman's behaviour but did a quick self-check and determined that no, I'd never seen anyone snatch goods out from under another shopper quite so brazenly, HOW RUDE. Opportunity presented itself because she was aggressively leaning into the discount scrum, leaving the basket hooked around her elbow unobserved. Ultimately I decided not to keep the eclairs because it was much funnier to observe this woman seeing 'her' cakes carted around by some completely random person who'd innocently picked the eclairs up from the dairy chiller.

"Aggressively leaning into the discount scrum" ... Ha ha this brings back memories of grocery shopping in Toronto's Chinatown. The old Chinese ladies are a fucking menace, they will fucking stab you if they have to, when the man brings out a fresh crate of something. It's war, a war on non-freshness.

Then the old Chinese ladies all crowd to get on the train, and will push and shove whoever. I saw a white guy lock his elbow in a moshpit-like stance as a surge of ladies made for the doors. One old lady nailed her face right into his protruding elbow. She was probably okay, but another white dude in the scrum silently raised his fist for a fist-bump, got one, and then they both just got slowly shoved onto the train in silence.

"appetite for reductions"

i actually get a bit annoyed when i feel like the discount isn't as good as it should be, i.e. something going out of date that day that's a few pounds and has only had 50p reduced.

backed - this to me is the consumnate definition of the phrase "go hard or go home"

Nobody's persuaded by a 50p reduction on a Taste The Difference item or similar because we're all thinking 'that's what this cost six months ago'.

I feel like I only spend about £20/week on groceries during the summer and a surprising percentage of that is opportunistic markdowns.

it's a summer thing then?

got a sogdeuce at Bletcher's yesterday pm. it was terrible.

Why would anyone who can afford to do otherwise do this a couple of hours before dinner? You're seriously going to stick that sandwich in the fridge and eat it the next day?

Oh yeah, the person with a trolley trying to buy *all* the stuff...

Now I feel guilty about the time I bought 70 creme eggs for 1p each. I just thought it would be awesome to have a lot of creme eggs.

It was tbh.

the way the word "sandwiches" is spelled in this thread title is going to annoy me as long as this thread is on new answers. please can a mod change it.

also i had no idea you weren't supposed to buy these items if you didn't "need" to, i don't begrudge anyone the right to be frugal

Blimey, that lex is all powerful!

thanks to whoever changed it :)

But most pre-packed sandwiches turn to soggy mush after that long, frugality is one thing but those things get disgusting.

Nah, they'll last a few extra hours in the fridge, I'm sure. Although usually they're best served as a kind of late afternoon snack if you know dinner's going to be late.

change the name back!

Well, as I say, we got two nice "taste the diff" sandwiches, and put them into the grill, they came out nice.

grilling them works? even if there's salad in?

Yeah, don't grill them for long: enough to toast the bread. Not to 'cook' the inside.

pro tip - if a baguette goes a bit hard, i sprinkle it with water and put it in the oven for about a minute or so.

Scored heavily yesterday: prawns for £1.50 to make into gambas al pil pil for supper and a posho steak pie for 99p, for lunch today.

don't know if it's still possible, but working a double of getting things discounted when they were already on offer and so sometimes actually making money from it (e.g. if something is £2 and 2 for the price of 1, and there you buy two that are discounted to 50p each, it'd still recognise the original offer and take off £2) was always something to be proud of.

though not as much as the time when i went in with a huge pile of vouchers, no limit to how many i could use, used them with items that were on offer, and ended up with something like 10 pretty good pizzas, 20 packs of cookies, and five bottles of pepsi for £3. that was about five years ago and i still bring it up from time to time. (like now.)

don't know if it's still possible, but working a double of getting things discounted when they were already on offer and so sometimes actually making money from it (e.g. if something is £2 and 2 for the price of 1, and there you buy two that are discounted to 50p each, it'd still recognise the original offer and take off £2) was always something to be proud of

Yeah, Tesco got wise to this, but not after several occasions on which they used to pay me to take strawberries off them.

not UNTIl after...

Oh yeah, recently I got given two vouchers to try iced lattes from Waitrose.

I took them to my local branch with another item I wanted, and the coupons had a value of £1.20 against purchase, even though the drinks were £1 each, so I got 40p off the third item I was buying.

didn't think i'd ever have such a receptive venue in which to bragg about this, but my all-time supermarket-maven-coup was buying a bunch of reduced mangos, maybe six?, that were like ten p each, and buying a single croissant, and on account of all the multi-buy offers based on an original mango promotion for some reason kicking in, the whole thing coming to iirc 9p. it was such a triumph. those mangos sure did taste sweet.

does that mean that, had you not bought the croissant, you would have had a negative bill

go back in time. find out.

2 x 300g diced lamb at £2.05 each in Tesco. will be good in tonight's curry. It's use by tomorrow - that'll be okay right?

go back in time. find out.

― thomp, Monday, 8 August 2011 14:24 (49 minutes ago) Bookmark

i feel like that was somehow part of it. i cannot do the math. but it probably would have created some kind of weird situation that required scrutiny and resolution rather than handwaving and profoundly discounted mangos.

for some reason I am utterly enthralled by this thread — universally translatable smart-shopper stories with just the right touch of lolbritisher foreignness (prawns and rocket! mangoes at the supermarket!! "aggressively leaning into the discount scrum"!!! and through it all, the menacing specter of 'poshness'...)

you're one of those nice foreigners

prawns and rocket! mangoes at the supermarket!!

This doesn't exist in (I'm assuming) the States?

I'm exaggerating a bit; we are aware of mangoes, but my (wholly unfounded) suspicion is that most 'murricans who eat them are buying them from the farmer's market or some upscale organic-foods chain, rather than getting them on sale for a quarter at a Walmart Supercenter

"rocket" = just a terminological difference; "prawns" = me o_O'ing at the exoticism of prepackaged foods in the UK — here it would be, like, a tuna-salad wrap or a club sandwich

... or if we're talking frozen foods, a pepperoni Hot Pocket

Mango, prawns and rocket are among my favourite cold foods. Without them the world would be a more depressing place. #gladiliveintheukforonce

The big chains around here throw food out rather than marking it down.

rocket -- aragula? arugula? i forget

i don't know, last time i was in the states i was surprised at how much better the supermarkets were. (in part because more out-of-town/massive ones, i guess?) - but, like, six types of squash! a whole bay of tofu/tempeh products instead of the choice of cauldron tofu or linda mccartney sausages! -- this was boston metropolitan area, though, which i don't know how much that maps onto the rest of the country.

'linda mccartney sausages' also probably quite a british idea

The big chains around here throw food out rather than marking it down.

― L.P. Hovercraft (WmC), Monday, August 8, 2011 4:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

Left my shopping triumph at work! Fucketybix!

Another slightly-stale baguette/roll protip is to microwave it for like 10secs, softens it up nice.

Dunno if that'd be a good idea if it was full of manky iceberg tho.