Recession Bites - new food shopping habits

Tonight’s edition of the Money Programme looks worth watching, or recording – on at 22.00 on BBC2 (unless Wimbledon overruns by two and a half hours again, presumably!).

‘Recession bites into our eating habits’ looks at the changes in supermarket and food spending over the last year, as food prices have risen by 8% and consumers seems to be cutting back on luxuries and shifting to inferior goods – a good illustration of income elasticity of demand, and the effects of falling consumer confidence.

While spending on food and household goods is an essential that cannot be avoided, there have been some significant shifts in the pattern of goods we choose to buy with an increased emphasis on the ‘basics’ lines in the supermarkets, fewer sales of organic products, and a shift away from independent local shops such as butchers, bakers and fishmongers to supermarkets instead. The Money Programme sets out to find out whether local shops really are more expensive – finding that perhaps they are not – but how are small independent local retailers to challenge this perception?

Could there be a business project for some students here?

This article on the Money Programme website also questions whether the shift away from organic goods is due to lack of consumer demand causing supermarkets to take them off the shelves, or driven by the supermarkets themselves, deciding that they would push basic economy products and clearing a lot of shelf space from organic and premium products – a claim made by Andrew Barker, Chief Executive of Duchy Originals.

It also gives some statistics showing a small shift in the market shares of Tesco’s and the other major supermarkets – only a small shift away from Tesco at the moment at 0.1% less than last year – but with Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons all gaining market share, this is probably enough to send Tesco’s board of directors to work hard on their strategy.