By Dene Mullen and Elinor Zuke2026-04-17T11:21:00
With the cost of living squeezing shoppers ever harder, you’d expect value ranges to be expanding – but the opposite is true. What’s going on?
Jackie Stott is a smart shopper. The 32-year-old mum of four from Doncaster knows that at Lidl “you get 15 cheese slices for 83p” and “700g of minced beef for the same price as 500g elsewhere”. If she wants pepperoni, “I go to the Co-op, believe it or not, because it’s actually cheaper”.
“I’m really aware of prices and weights and what you get for your money. Because I’ve had to be. Tesco budget stuff tastes the best out of all of them. If you add some milk and butter into those beans, they taste like Heinz,” she says. “A good budget range does matter to where I shop, because without those low-value items we probably wouldn’t be able to go the whole month. The budget ranges are super-important to my family.”
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