A nation off our trolleys
By Patrice Harrington Irish shoppers are spending hundreds of euro more per month on groceries than they need to because of ‘top-up’ basket shopping... Patrice Harrington gets to grips with some of her bad supermarket habits with help from consumer behav
UH oh. According to consumer behaviourist Ken Hughes, my grocery shopping habits are ‘the worst thing you can do’. We are half-way through our shopping trip around SuperValu in Lucan, West Dublin, when he gets this piece of information off his chest. Really, the worst thing? I’m comforted by the fact that a recent survey shows 40% of all Irish people do it too but we must be off our trolleys, in every sense of the phrase, because it may be costing us a small fortune over the course of a year.
Our crime? Top-up basket shopping — later we’ll get to why Hughes thinks we’re a bunch of basket cases.
From the get-go my shopping style has dismayed this consumer psychology expert from Cork, whose opening gambit is upbraiding me for having a list of questions and not a shopping list in sight.
When I toss the very first item into the trolley — a harmless bag of carrots — without either looking at the €1.79 price tag or assessing whether 2kgs might be excessive, he stops me in my tracks.
‘It might be much cheaper to buy fewer carrots loose,’ he says, asking me what exactly I intend to cook with the carrots, anyway? Seconds later he enquires, ‘Do you know why you’re buying those peppers?’
He has a conniption when I grab a sliced loaf of wholemeal Irish Pride for €1.89 without noticing the own brand version on a lower shelf for €1.15.
‘Often we put the most profitable items here at eye level because people are lazy,’ he says, giving me a side-eye.
Hughes, you see, usually helps brands to specifically target us timepoor shoppers, flying around the aisles as quickly as possible so we can go home and have lives.
They squeeze more money out of us by ‘hiding’ the cheaper products in plain sight.
Today he is off-setting some of that bad karma by helping me to see the error of my shopping ways. A sort of browsing and buying bootcamp, if you will.
‘I feel like Anakin Skywalker today, crossing over,’ he admits. Hughes has been hired by SuperValu to launch its new lower prices initiative, Make Savings. So I suppose he is being paid to tell me I should really think twice about my preference for fresh pasta.
‘Expensive,’ he scolds. ‘You’re paying €1.89 for that and it’s 79c for an entire bag on the next aisle.’
When I make the mistake of putting a packet of basil into the trolley he says a pot of the herb would have been a much more sensible choice. ‘But they keep dying,’ I argue. ‘Then water them!’ he cries. In fact, at every stage on this shopping expedition I am found wanting.
‘What is your plan?’ he inquires, early on, as if SuperValu is a minibreak in Paris. Apparently walking around the aisles putting items in the trolley does not constitute a plan.
‘The main tip for shopping is planning,’ he intones. ‘So if you leave your home without a plan of what you’re going to buy you are definitely guaranteed to spend between 20% and 30% more than you should.’
This sounds like an exaggeration — how could we possibly overspend to that extent, just for not having a list? But Ken is having none of my sceptically-raised eyebrows.
‘People think I’m making up this 30% saving. They say, “You can’t shave 30% off your groceries!” But you can,’ he says. Moments later he proves his point. ‘If you’re going to buy rice, why would you buy a branded basmati rice? It’s rice, it grew in a field!’ he scoffs, switching for an own brand version instead, which is almost 50c cheaper.
‘People might say, “Why bother for the sake of 40c or 50c?” In a shop of over 200 items, that kind of price difference is significant.’
According to CSO figures released last June, Irish people spend €123 a week on food, which includes €26 on eating out. If we could save 30% on that weekly shop of €97, that would mean savings of almost €1,400 at the end of the year. Meanwhile, the Irish Travel Agents Association (ITAA) found in 2016 that 36% of families spend between €1,000 and €2,000 every year on a holiday. Imagine how smug you’d feel lounging by the pool if you thought your holiday was paid for by savvy supermarket spending?
Of course, you’d have to do it week in, week out, and not just during that last lean week before payday.
But apparently, plenty of people are getting the idea.
‘I’ve met women over the years who do a whole stock check at the start of the week to see exactly what they have. They will pick up the circular to see what offers are on and they will plan only those recipes,’ says Hughes, of this breed of ultra-organised, money-conscious shoppers who circle things on those special offer leaflets the rest of us put straight into the recycling bin.
‘They will buy just those meats, some vegetables, then go home and for €40 of shopping feed a family of five for a whole week.’
Confession: our family shop for the month of November was an eyewatering €827.58, which shocks Hughes enough to comment, ‘That’s an unfair month to pick as you’re building up to Christmas.’
I’m fairly sure my family of four eats nothing much out of the ordinary. So the idea that there are people out there who can put food on the table for a fraction of that price is fascinating. How do they do it?
‘Up there we have a three for €9 offer right now,’ says Hughes, charging off to the meat section. ‘For €9 we can buy packet of mince, a whole chicken and some pork chops. So on Monday you could make lasagne or shepherd’s pie and use any leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Tuesday you could cook a whole chicken and you might get two days out of it — and do a chicken curry the second day. That’s Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday sorted. Thursday you’ll do stir fry pork chop — and you’ve already got four meals out of just €9 worth of meat.’
A survey carried out last year on behalf of Checkout magazine found that 49% of women claim sole responsibility for food shopping compared to 30% of men. The cleverest among them have three money-saving tricks up their sleeve — they really want to save, have budgeted down to the last euro and ‘they will go to the store with only cash’.
Isn’t supermarket shopping enough of a dose without the added worry of potential humiliation at the till?
‘If you have only €150 and you overspend, you’re going to have that awkward moment,’ he agrees. ‘I do like to teach people that awkward moment where you have to put stuff back. That’s when you really start to learn. Otherwise there’s no discipline. If you’re trying to save to buy a house and you’re trying to find that €10,000 this year, I could get you maybe €2,000 of that from your grocery bill but it’s about being clever.’
By the way, he’s not a total puritan; he advocates having a ‘treat budget’ and not ‘a frugal life’.
Several women in SuperValu today are carrying self-scanning gizmos,
‘With no plan you will spend 30% more’ €40 a week could feed a family of five
which allow them to pay for their goods without queuing at the end. It works on an honesty system and only one in every seven or so customers have their goods checked. These scanners also tot up as you go, so you can keep tabs on your spending. Likewise with online shopping.
The rest of us wandering the aisles of the world have a more vague idea of what we need and what the budget is — and we are open to suggestion, whether we like it or not.
‘Without a plan, a lot of people use the aisles as their trigger point. They walk up and down to decide what they want. If you do that, you are definitely going to end up with things that will go to waste in your fridge. Or you’re going to buy things you mightn’t need. The 100% guaranteed way to shave 20% off your grocery bill is to sit down and decide what you’re having for breakfast, lunch and dinner on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.’
It’s enough to make you want to nap in Francis Brennan’s fancy bed in the home section of Dunnes. How on earth can we be expected to be that organised when we are all so busy?
‘It takes about 15 minutes,’ argues Hughes. ‘Sit down, make about five or six ingredient plans in your head. Open the circular for SuperValu, see what’s on offer this week from meat mainly as your core of your meal and then plan around that. Look in your freezer, fridge and presses first. What do you already have in your house? If you want to shave some money off, you just have to get a bit disciplined. If you’re building an extension, you wouldn’t say to your builder, “Do you know what, build it away there and whatever happens happens.” That’s the way people shop.’
But what’s the point of having a plan if you’ve got kids in tow, badgering you to buy luminous cheese dippers, LOL dolls and Minion electric toothbrushes?
‘In an ideal world, don’t shop with your kids,’ agrees Hughes, himself a separated father of two. ‘Leave the kids at home if you can. Sometimes you can’t. Yes, your kids will throw one or two things in the trolley. But you throw more things into the trolley irrationally than they do. You just don’t realise it because you’re the adult.’
We can’t even blame the kids, folks. Our stressed out days, long commutes, office politics and relationship woes are more often to blame for any lolly wasted on our trolley.
‘In an ideal world only shop when you’re emotionally stable,’ he laughs. ‘From a psychological point of view we all know not to go shopping when you’re hungry because you’ll buy more than you should. But basically the hunger is making you emotionally unstable, therefore you do things irrationally. There are other emotional triggers — if you’ve just had a fight with your husband or your boss, all those things will make you behave in irrational ways. Then you’ll say, “I’m getting these chocolate biscuits because I deserve them” and really you mightn’t need chocolate biscuits this week.’
Another confession: my husband does our big weekly shop. There’s a shopping list on our voice-operated Google Home device that we add items to throughout the week by calling them out to the little speaker on the shelf when we notice we’re running low. Even our two children, aged seven and five, add things to the list by telling the speaker.
It is far from a comprehensive list of what we need each week, though useful all the same. I supplement that ‘big’ shop with basket top-ups during the week. Four out of 10 Irish shoppers now spread their shopping over two or more trips each week, according to the Behaviour And Attitudes Retail Deep Dive 2016.
‘It was a Celtic Tiger phenomenon — buy as you need, buy as you go. It’s great if you want to throw away money,’ reprimands Hughes. ‘You’re going to be exposed to potential impulse, you might put in an extra item every time. That means in the course of a week you could be putting ten more things in the basket. Whereas if you go to one store and do a big trolley shop, you minimise their ability to whisper in your ear.’
In a misguided attempt to defend our habits, I tell of spreading the love between my local Tesco, Dunnes and Lidl.
‘Shopping around is one of the biggest myths,’ Hughes counters. ‘It’s all about minimising your exposure to temptation.’
It’s true that since our nearest Dunnes began stocking the Joanne Hynes clothing collection en route to the supermarket section, popping out for bread and milk has never been so financially parlous.
‘What I do for a living is design stores like that. Why do you think they’ve designed the store like that?’ says Hughes. ‘We do things all the time to try and steer consumers a certain way to make you buy. All the brands here want to make profits. They want to fill your trolley. If you genuinely want to save money you want to win, you don’t want them to win,’ he insists. ‘You need to take control. You have to stay strong.’
If that means staying strong enough to push just one heaving trolley a week, I’ll give it a try.
Buying as you go is throwing money away