Latest Moan From You and Me 2025

I don’t have an App for my Waitrose loyalty cards, but every week, I get ‘virtual’ money off vouchers which I can see on my account on line. Always for things I regularly buy, but have to be used within a week. They often have some extra vouchers, which can be used for up to a month. Mostly for things I don’t want, so don’t use them, but very occasionally, there might be something I’ll try as it is discounted. Once a week, those with a loyalty card can get 20% off cheese, some fish and some meat items from the serviced counters. If I had a reusable cup, I could also have a free coffee from the machine!
Fortunately, customers now seem to collect their coffee on the way out of the store. When they first introduced this scheme, and provided paper cups, it was quite perilous making your way through the aisles. Too many people trying to manoeuvre their trolleys and fill them with one hand, while clutching a cup of hot coffee with the other!
Maybe they could start providing a sampler of wine or similar instead! After a few sips, I’d be tossing impulse buys into the trolley with gay abandon! On the down side, the standard of driving in the car park is sufficiently appalling at the best of times. As OH isn’t a big fan of shopping, he will often sit in the car and wait for me. I frequently return to find him white faced, wide eyed and open mouthed, with tales of the near misses (and occasional hits) he has witnessed. There seem to be a lot of people on the roads who really shouldn’t be!

 

I only get offers of stuff I buy after I have just bought some, it then only lasts a week so rarely gain anything out of it.
We only have a small waitrose and its about 6 miles away, more expensive, but I do like the quality.
I tried ocado on line but they seemed to have a fairly limited stock.

 

My favourite coffee Nescafé Gold Blend.
Waitrose are charging £8.35
B&M £5.99 same quantities.
I just don’t get it ,they obviously both make profit……
Of course we don’t have to buy it.

 

I buy a lot of my fruit and veg from Lidl. They always seem to have nice big yellow bananas when everyone else only had scrawny little green things. Can't really trust their mangoes though, the number of times I've cut into one and it's brown inside.

 

Not a fan of the fruit and veg in our local Aldi, the Lidl store is far superior, but to far away. I find the meat section in both Aldi and Lidl to be decent quality, especially the burgers compared to the likes of Tesco and Morrisons

 

How much longer can things keep going up it doesn't matter what you are buying it's going up quicker than our income

 

Being familiar with Aldi and Lidl in Germany, I would never buy any meat or poultry from them. I would also not buy any German sausage (what the Germans call Wurst and Salami) from them.
The reason why I turned to a non-meat eater in 2003 was a huge scandal which was an eye opener. I came to the conclusion back then: if you want to know why the Germans were able to put humans into concentration camps, you only need to look how they treat their animal farms today.

Due to medical treatment earlier this year, I fancied suddenly pork and bought 3x a pork chop from the farm shop in Cirencester. I can see how the pigs live there and the only compromise is that all animals - organic and non-organic - die at the same slaughterhouse.
I rather pay £15 for a chicken from Waitrose/M&S with High Welfare criteria or a Duchy chicken from Waitrose, than these poor chickens that are offered for a few quit in the low budget supermarkets or KFC etc, it's all the same. Manufactured animal cruelty.

I stick to the rules that I set myself back then in 2003. There is no justification for letting animals suffer like that.

 

Over 30 years ago I read an article about how pigs were farmed in the UK and decided not to eat any more pig products. That was hard; I kept finding myself eating an M&S bacon and egg sandwich and thinking "oh sh*t". Then we had the big salmonella outbreak and were told that we should treat a raw chicken as if it were a lump of raw sewage, in regards of how we should clean everything it touched. So now I was trying not to eat pig or chicken. Then the Mad Cow Disease outbreak occurred. I decided the only answer was to become vegetarian. Up to that stage I had thought vegetarians were dumb.

I was vegetarian for a year or two then bought my house and when I moved in, we still had a milkman and he was trying to recruit me by leaving free bottles of milk at the door. That drove me to thinking: do I sign up or do I now go all the way to vegan? Because after the Mad Cow Disease I didn't really trust the milk either. I hadn't at that point appreciated the extreme cruelty associated with the dairy and egg industries although I knew a bit about battery hens.

Well I went vegan, and I've been vegan ever since with no regrets. It was hard in the early days; the supermarkets didn't sell any dairy alternatives and I was reliant on the health food shop.

 

@roders I drink the same coffee and find it's very often on offer, so when it is i stock up.

 

I think that coffee is £6 in ASDA.

 

Congratulations to be able to eat vegan. I assume you don’t buy that so-called vegan pre-fabricated food at supermarkets.
I tried to eat proper homemade vegan at the beginning of the year but lost too much weight (from normal to underweight) inside 2 weeks.
I eat eggs and chicken but I know where they come from and can justify that.

 

Lentils are lovely and cheap ....and "milk" made from split peas is fab.