Finance Friday | Quality

I read this morning that Ikea the Swedish store here in the UK is one of the most popular stores. It certainly seems that way on Bank Holidays when they clog up the road system by having a sale. I wanted some photo frames a few years ago and Ikea had some for £12, but there were some virtually the same in Poundland. I can spot quality and I can also spot overpriced imported crap. I might frame my watercolour; pictured above. It’s better than a lot of the street art that I saw on TV this week. Talk about the emperor’s new clothes, they need to keep those pictures away from small children…

I went to Lidl yesterday and a lot of the things like diced pork that I’ve had before, they didn’t have and many things weren’t priced up or the shelves hadn’t been stocked up. Customers were complaining of long queues at the checkout. There wasn’t long queues at Aldi last week, but they are short staffed too with the assistant manger manning a checkout. They need to keep shelves stocked too, lots of them were empty.

One of my favourite stores is Matalan for tee shirts and clothes, some of them are a little bit too trendy for me. I like stone washed jeans, but not sand blasted and bleached to destruction jeans. The Asda superstore can be OK for clothes too, I had shoes from there and they have been really good for £25.

Food has gone up in price again over the past month and it was the wettest April on record apparently. It seems warmer today here in the heart of England,  but there are icy winds blowing down from the north. Many families can save a few quid through the summer as they spend less on heating and so it’s a good time to try to pay down any debts before the winter arrives. Payday loan companies are doing well in the recession and so try not to fall victim to those evil predators.

Barbecues might be trendy now, but can you afford to treat all your friends and family just now? It is a time to be frugal, not to show off or keep up with the Joneses. Wherever you shop, there are usually bargains to be had. You have to be able to recognise quality though. Asda and Matalan do tend to have quality clothes at low prices. You’ll find quality in Tesco, but it’s quite hard to find a bargain; except maybe just before they close. The bargains on food in both Asda and Tesco tend to be on multi packs which discriminates against single people and many pensioners. That’s OK though, it’s not like they discriminate on the grounds of sexuality or race is it?

It’s Frugal Friday and so as usual, I’ll cook eggs, chips and peas for dinner. I had 10 eggs for 85p from Lidl yesterday and a couple of those with oven chips and peas should work out to less than 45p for a meal. I can’t complain at that. I haven’t decided on lunch yet, it would be great to have a whole day of frugal meals, but that does take a little planning. I bought four pieces of cod for £2.75 yesterday and so I could have fish for lunch. I can’t remember why people have fish on Friday, but it is a tradition.

I posted the first in a series of blogs called ‘How to be an expert winemaker’ on A Zillion Ideas today. If you like the odd bottle that could save you some money. I checked out the price of a decent Chardonnay yesterday and it seemed really expensive. You can make a wine just as good for less than £2.00 a bottle. The stuff I saw was around £8 a bottle and that was on offer and so it’s quite a saving. If you usually drink cheap plonk, you can make that for around a £1.00 a bottle.  Make a start by popping over to my other blog and reading part one.

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