Why the squeezed middle loves Aldi and Lidl

Sorry, Iceland will always be frozen out of the middle-class league of supermarket smugness

Akitchen table supper with friends deep in the heart of Middleclassville. “Lovely veg, very crisp and fresh,” murmurs one guest. “Farmer’s market?”

“No, we’ve been to Iceland,” trills the hostess.

“Very glamorous. All the same that’s a lot of food miles for a bag of mange tout,” comes the smiling reproof.

“Not Iceland the country. Iceland the shop.”

Cue an appalled clatter of cutlery against Royal Doulton, followed by a nonplussed silence. There are no words.

“But Iceland has pledged to remove plastic packaging from all its own-label products within five years,” blusters the hostess. “I just wanted to support them in their environmentally pioneering endeavour.”

Her guests make their excuses and leave. One couple hastily grabs the rather special bottle of Chapel Down Sparkling English Rosé they brought, on the grounds that their parvenu host had wrinkled his nose because it came from Kent.

Such are the subtle signifiers that guide middle-class mores; wine from Kent is chic, greens from Iceland are not. Keep up.

In an age when the middle classes feel squeezed on every front, food – what we buy, where we buy it and whose recipe we follow to prepare it – has become the last repository of overt snobbery and covert oneupmanship.

And the unspoken rules are everchanging. Thus Waitrose is still top of the league table, but these days you can’t possibly buy all your groceries there as that displays a woeful lack of imagination.

At the other end of the scale, there’s no shame in shopping at Asda as long as you only drop in to pick up children’s party bags and Love Hearts.

Sainsbury’s is fine. Tesco less so and Morrisons a little more problematic; some years ago it launched a major advertising push with its “market fresh on market street” concept, only to return to keen price cutting to increase footfall. It’s my local supermarket, yet I rarely cross its threshold.

But only last week a friend of mine hotly defended its fresh meat and fish counters, making me feel quite inadequate for not knowing.

Nonetheless, I stored that nugget of wisdom away and resolved to pop in to look – and that, all you marketing gurus out there, is how word spreads here in the status-conscious middle.

We’re unimpressed by blatant corporate virtue-signalling or flashy campaigns because we prefer personal endorsement and the below-the-radar sense of satisfaction (did someone say smugness?) it brings.

Take the budget chains Aldi and Lidl, which are snapping at the heels of the big five supermarkets.

It’s where shrewd alpha females pick up £9.99 double-wick candles that could pass for Jo Malone and excellent cured meats for a (Eurovision) song. Vorsprung durch Deluxe Italian Fennel Salami, as the Germans say.

Then, when they reach the school gates and start trumpeting their superior hunter-gatherer skills, other women pay great attention.

Of course we do; evolutionary biology demands that we observe the most successful members of the species. And it doesn’t get more successful than picking up an awardwinning vodka for under £15 in Lidl.

But despite its best efforts, Iceland remains out in the cold. It’s tried before to lure the middle classes, when it announced in 2000 that all its ownbrand veg would be organic only to U-turn a year later after sales slumped.

The supermarket’s price-sensitive customer base wasn’t prepared to pay more and the expected influx of new middle-class consumers failed to materialise.

It doesn’t matter how inexpensive Iceland is, nor how often nutritionists reassure us that veg frozen within the hour is far fresher than the stuff that’s been leeching vitamins for a week.

Finding a bargain with a reduced sticker in M&S has connotations of canniness. Buying frozen food in bulk just makes the middle class feel uncomfortably cheapskate.

So will a ground-breaking purge of plastic sway opinion here in the precious, pretentious middle?

It might do, but, counterintuitively, only if Iceland stops banging on about it and lets the yummy mummy grapevine spread the word. Until then, the big freeze continues.