Thrifty Thursday: austere shopping

Aldi

The Aldi super six this week are Romaine lettuce (2), sugar snaps (150g), baby plum tomatoes (300g), peaches (4/5), galia melon and cherries (200g). They are all 69p each. Those offers last until next Wednesday 16th July.

Meat

There are also super-six meat offers including a beef roasting joint.

Special Buys

Today’s special buys includes a lot of cooking equipment. The tea towels and the rechargeable batteries would be useful for me. I’ll watch out for the drain cleaning gel and the extra wide kitchen foil too.

The Sunday special buys includes a cordless hammer drill for just 19.99. There are pet related things too.

It’s the Black Country Festival this month and we have our carnival on Saturday so I’m even busier than usual. I’ll be there taking photos this weekend. I shopped around for the camera equipment and saved hundreds of pounds. The telephoto lens was over £400 and I got it for around £150.

The weather here is improving and so many people are planning barbecues this weekend. Aldi are promoting the drinks and you can save money by making your own cocktails and sangria for the barbecue. Cheap red wine with fruit and lemonade makes a good low alcohol sangria for a few pounds.

We also need summer clothes now and there are some on sale price at the major supermarkets like Asda and Tesco. Primark seems to becoming more popular and Matalan is always popular here.

The economy

We have to keep shopping around because the economy isn’t getting better despite the reassuring noises from the government and Bank of England. The stock market has been lower all this year, but now investors are losing confidence in central banks. Many shares have been trashed this week as traders panic. The financial pundits say it’s profit taking, despite there being little in the way of profits this year. Panic selling would be a more accurate description. Monetarist policies have boosted the value of the pound and made exporting difficult and so manufacturing output has dropped. That is something even someone with a basic knowledge of economics can understand. The government is bribing people with tax cuts and changes to ISA’s; but the pre-election bribes fool no one. This dog eat dog economic policy is not nice and benefits no one. Now the middle class professionals, the teachers in our schools, the lecturers in our colleges and the nurses in our hospitals are realising that they are worse off too, under the privatising Tories.

I was reminded this week that in some Asian countries people have a more collective approach to work, rather than a competitive approach. Maybe this is why China has ten times the economic growth that western nations have.

Do you have an opinion? Have you spotted a bargain this week? Please share your thoughts in the comments box. You can also follow me on Twitter.

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