Cheapest UK supermarket: Lidl beats Aldi, Tesco and Asda
The products included Hovis sliced bread, milk and cheese, and the consumer experts checked prices at eight of the UK's biggest supermarkets throughout July.
Supermarket average price for 76 items Lidl Plus £128 Lidl £128.40 Aldi £129.25 Asda £139.53 Tesco (with Clubcard)£141.92 Sainsbury's (with Nectar) £144.21 Tesco £145.10
According to the Which? report, Lidl was the cheapest overall, beating rival discounter Aldi by £1.25 if you had a Lidl Plus card, or 85p if not.
The third cheapest was Asda, which doesn't offer loyalty pricing in the same way as the others.
Tesco without a loyalty card was still cheaper than shopping at Morrisons with one.
What about loyalty card promotions?
Sainsbury's was running Nectar price promotions on 15 items, while Tesco had Clubcard prices on 16. Meanwhile, Morrisons had two More scheme discounts on items in our basket, and Lidl had three items on our list with a loyalty discount.
Waitrose had no loyalty deals on the shopping list items. It was the most expensive supermarket again this month, averaging £170.91 – that's over £42 (or 33%) more than Lidl.
Why are food prices going up so much?
UK inflation rose to a near 18-month high this summer as food prices shot up for the third month running.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said Consumer Prices Index inflation rose to 3.6% in June, up from 3.4% in May and the highest since January 2024.
The increase was unexpected, with most economists forecasting inflation to remain unchanged at 3.4%.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves says there's 'more to do' to help bring inflation down.
She said: 'I know working people are still struggling with the cost of living.'
'There is more to do and I'm determined we deliver on our Plan for Change to put more money into people's pockets,' she added.
Rob Mansfield, Independent Financial Advisor at Rootes Wealth Management, says: 'The cost of living crisis continues to bite. The rise in motor fuels was expected given the war in the Middle East and it shows how vulnerable our island is to events all over the globe.
"Most people can't avoid these price rises, so they ask for higher wages, which can in turn drive up prices.'
The figures come after gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 0.1% in May, following a 0.3% fall in April and leading to fears of a contraction overall in the third quarter.
Recommended reading:
Borrowing costs are set to ease further as the Bank of England contends with stagnant growth and rising unemployment, experts have predicted.
Most economists think the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will cut interest rates by 0.25 percentage points to 4% on Thursday.
Interest rates have been steadily cut over the past year from a peak of 5.25%.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Britain is hooked on car finance
It's unnerving to think how close Britain came to financial disaster last Friday, ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on – of all things – car financing. In October, the Court of Appeal found that motor finance firms could be liable for hidden commission payments to car dealers. If the Supreme Court had agreed, the biggest lenders, including Lloyds Banking Group, Santander, Barclays and Close Brothers, would have been on the hook for some £44 billion, with Lloyds already putting aside £1.15 billion for compensation payments and Close Brothers selling off its asset management arm this year. In an unprecedented intervention, Rachel Reeves urged the court to avoid handing out a windfall, and the Treasury was nervously briefing that the government could pass retroactive legislation to protect lenders. In the event, the Supreme Court ruling – delayed until markets closed to avoid stock volatility – found that the motor finance lenders were only liable for some commission payments, reducing the potential bill to between £9 billion and £18 billion – eye-watering, but not catastrophic. The stock price of Close Brothers, the most exposed lender, rose 23 per cent on Monday. Still, it doesn't exactly bode well that one of the world's largest economies can almost be brought down by too many people buying Audis on credit. Since 2008, economists have been on the lookout for the cause of the next financial crash. As it turns out, it could have been parked in your driveway. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that something strange is going on with the UK car market. I've been obsessed for a while now by the sheer number of Land Rovers, Audis and BWMs on the roads. In the small town where I live (average salary £40,000), it sometimes feels as though almost every other car is a new Range Rover (RRP £100,000). The owners of these huge SUVs have normal jobs and one assumes normal incomes. How is anyone affording this? The answer is normally a Personal Contract Purchase (PCP), a type of loan which has become increasingly popular. With a PCP there is a lower monthly fee than with other payment options – because you're not paying for the car itself, just the depreciation of its value, plus interest. At the end of the contract, you can decide to pay a 'balloon payment' to buy the car you've been driving, walk away with nothing, or as I suspect most people do, upgrade to a newer, nicer car on PCP for a higher monthly fee. Which is fine if you can afford the payments, but one wonders how many people end up driving round in a new Merc with an ever-decreasing disposable income. The data certainly seems to suggest that people are borrowing increasing amounts for nicer cars. In 2017, the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority were sounding the alarm when yearly car loans reached a record £31.6 billion. In the year to this May, it rose to just under £40 billion, outpacing car sales, according to Finance and Leasing Association figures. The typical loan for a new car was £28,400 – a smidge under the average worker's yearly earnings after taxes. Those of us who smugly avoid financing deals like to tell ourselves that all this is unsustainable, but then Brits have been loading up on personal debt for years without any major problems for the economy. What the car finance ruling really seems to show is not that people are borrowing too much (although they probably are), but that the era of sky-high personal debt may not be able to survive the Martin Lewis-ification of society. It may be a little unfair to single out Lewis here. For many, he's simply the friendly face of parsimony, with his MoneySavingExpert site helping us save some pennies. But he's also probably done more than anyone else to create a compensation culture in Britain. Consumers are determined to wring every pound out of the businesses and government departments they deal with – and now know how to make it happen. In the past, if a car finance company owed you money, you'd be on your own. Now, thanks to the likes of Lewis, you can jump aboard the compensation gravy train with millions of others. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if we were dealing with small amounts of money. But the size of UK household debt – £2 trillion – means that when lenders inevitably behave badly, a single court ruling can lead to compensation payouts of tens, even hundreds, of billions. Which means that every credit card or car loan has the potential to become the next subprime mortgage scandal.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Was the car finance judgment fair?
I must modestly doubt that the Supreme Court justices took account of my 12 July column in their ruling on the issue of hidden car finance commissions. But the effect, limiting compensation claims to the more egregious cases of overcharging, is to do exactly what I hoped: namely to head off 'a tsunami of claims that could cripple lenders and provoke a mini banking crisis'. Chancellor Rachel Reeves evidently hoped so too; given that up to 90 per cent of new UK car sales are financed by loans offered through car dealerships, a collapse of that market would have put another ding in an already battered economy. The total claims bill is now estimated by the Financial Conduct Authority at between £9 billion and £18 billion – vs a possible £44 billion if the court had ruled in favour of all claimants. The relief to lenders was evident in Lloyds' decision not to add to the £1.15 billion already set aside for compensation, while shares in Close Brothers, a smaller specialist in the field, shot up by a quarter. The losers are the ambulance-chasing 'claims advisers' who were looking forward to another bonanza akin to the payment protection insurance scandal which cost banks £50 billion. But we should also ask: was the judgment fair? In particular, what of the unsophisticated car buyer who thought the dealer had a duty to offer the best finance deal, rather than to seek richer rewards for himself? On this point, the justices were magisterial. 'Each party… (customer, dealer and lender) was engaged at arm's length from the other participants in the pursuit of separate objectives. Neither the parties themselves nor any onlooker could reasonably think that any participant was doing anything other than considering their own interest.' In short and as always, caveat emptor. Who'da thought? Here's a potpourri of items at the intersection of market swings, consumer whims and 'black swans' – the latter phrase, coined by the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, meaning unforeseen events with extreme consequences, of which Donald Trump's global tariff attack is surely one. Who would have imagined, for example, that Swiss watchmakers – whose recession-proof sector has long been a staple source of advertising revenues that underpin publications like this one – could be thrown into crisis by a 39 per cent tariff on Swiss exports to the US? Likewise, did anyone predict that the share price of the Danish pharma group Novo Nordisk would fall by two-thirds this year as its bestselling slimming drugs Wegovy and Ozempic were overtaken by the even more in-demand Mounjaro – whose maker Eli Lilly is the share tipsters' new favourite? Next, let's look at food fads. Sliced bread is in retreat in the face of 'carb-conscious health trends as well as baguettes and sourdough', says the Financial Times, reporting rumours of a defensive alliance between the owners of Hovis and Kingsmill. But ice cream is the dish of the day and not just because we're in high summer: Unilever is about to spin out its Magnum arm, the world's largest producer, while Goldman Sachs makes a multi-billion investment in the second-largest, Froneri. And Dishoom, the brasserie chain founded by two cousins in 2010 that has London curry-lovers queuing round the block, has attracted investment from a fund linked to the luxury goods giant LVMH, which values it at a chilli-hot £300 million. But here's a downbeat, rain-stopped-play kind of postscript: who'd have thought concrete could ever go out of fashion? Despite Angela Rayner's rhetoric, the level of housebuilding and infrastructure works in the UK is so quiet that sales of this most basic building material have fallen to their lowest level since 1963. A rather random holiday-season round-up, you may be thinking: what's my point? In fact I've spent most of this week reading a huge pile of entries for The Spectator's Economic Innovator awards to high-growth smaller companies – and marvelling, as ever, at the resilience and optimism they embody. Whatever happens next in this mad, mad world, be thankful for the boldness of entrepreneurs. Animal spirits Whenever I eat at La Récréation in Les Arques – which I apologise for mentioning again, but it really is worth the detour – I think of From Here, You Can't See Paris (2002), Michael Sanders's charming account of a year spent working in the restaurant and observing the seasonal rhythms of south-west France. From my own summer idyll nearby, I really can't see Paris, never mind London or Washington, but I can at least offer some parables and parallels of economic life. The first point of comparison is simply that the manifold uncertainties illustrated by my previous item leave businesses everywhere struggling to meet forecasts and deliver chosen strategies.'C'est la douche froide,' begins Le Figaro's results round-up from the CAC 40 list of leading French companies, collectively reporting a 30 per cent drop in first-half profits attributed to Trump's tariffs and geopolitical turmoil as well as limp EU growth. But at least French inflation, at barely 1 per cent – Andrew Bailey and Rachel Reeves please note – is a fraction of ours (3.6 per cent in June), thanks to low energy costs and the strong euro I observed last week. And at the micro level, in the Dordogne village of St Pompon where I've shared a house for 25 years, the Sud Ouest newspaper reports the opening of a new butchers shop by an enterprising young couple, Elodie and Max, as 'un nouveau chapitre de dynamisme pour cette petite commune'. We've also got a new pub-cum-karaoke joint, Oscar's – and on the drawing board, my own quixotic scheme to create a mini arts centre in a converted barn. I wrote last month about the 'animal spirits' that drive revival against the odds: I'd say they're alive and kicking in this lost corner of la France profonde.
The Sun
3 hours ago
- The Sun
Keir Starmer paves way for tax hikes this autumn putting damper on interest rate cut
SIR Keir Starmer has paved the way for tax hikes this autumn — putting a damper on today's expected interest rate cut. The Prime Minister failed to explicitly rule out increases to income tax or National Insurance in the Budget to plug a multi-billion-pound black hole. His refusal to reaffirm manifesto commitments comes as experts warn an eye-watering £50billion is needed just to maintain Chancellor Rachel Reeves ' £9.9billion financial buffer. Speaking on a visit to Milton Keynes, Sir Keir said: 'In the autumn, we'll get the full forecast and obviously set out our Budget. 'The focus will be on living standards, so that we will build on what we've done in the first year of this government. 'We've stabilised the economy. "That means interest rates have been cut now four times. "For anybody on a mortgage, that makes a huge difference on a monthly basis to how much they pay.' No10 tried to play down the comments, saying the Government remains committed to its manifesto by not raising taxes on working people. But the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has said the Chancellor is likely to be forced into raising taxes and cutting spending just to meet the massive shortfall. Despite the economic gloom, homeowners are set to receive a boost from the Bank of England today. Experts predict bank chiefs will cut i nterest rates by 0.25 per cent, even though inflation is stubbornly high and growth weak. Raising taxes will kill off growth, Reeves warned as she pledges to rip up business red tape 1 TOWN HALL CASH ALERT ONE in four English town halls will lose money under Labour's shake-up to council funding, experts warn. Areas like inner London face risking cash to go to services, while the East Midlands and Yorkshire are set for the biggest cash windfalls. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, said changes will 'sting' for councils set to lose out. Labour's changes, still being consulted on, are due to come into effect next year.
