Supermarkets

Since we have been here, we have been getting a weekly delivery of our groceries from Tesco.  I am very used to getting all our food this way having done so for the last eight years.

Before that there hangs a tale though – when we moved to Lochgoilhead, we were shocked to discover that there were no food deliveries at all.  We were an hour’s drive from the nearest large supermarket (in Dumbarton) and we had presumed they delivered; a pretty daft assumption really and something we should have checked out before we moved.  But regardless, for four years we went to Dumbarton every two weeks, and Glasgow once a month to go to Costco.  At the cash and carry we would buy catering packs of things like fresh vegetables, and I would process them into meals which we then froze (I hate ready meals).  The problem was that it was impossible to have genuinely fresh fruit and vegetables for more than three or four days – so we would not be able to have things like bananas quite a lot of the time.  Anyway, a few years in, I got so sick of this that I wrote to the general manager of ASDA and asked them if they would consider delivering to the village; I was amazed when I got a positive response and they started to deliver.  Shortly after that Morrisons started to deliver as well.  You could hardly believe this but I got flack from some people in the village for “taking trade away from the Costcutter” – this being a mini-Mart on a holiday camp outside the village with a tiny range of expensive highly processed food.

So until we came to Cupar, I hadn’t shopped in a supermarket for many years and I just kept on doing it.  But J has been singing the praises of Lidl (he used to live next to one) and as it is our nearest shop I walked round it a few times and was impressed by the range and prices.   So we took the car (too much to carry to walk) and did our weekly shop there – it was a good deal cheaper than Tesco, and I think better quality as well. I’m planning on continuing our trial of shopping in person – but only if we do it once a week and stick to a rigorous list.  It is death to any budget to keeping “popping in” to the shops for just one thing – you inevitably end up coming out with six.

And…  Drum roll…  I could not help noticing that Lidl’s onions, whilst not from UK, are at least from our close European neighbour Holland rather than New Zealand like Tesco’s.