A “Greggs sausage roll index” has been set up to gauge how the cost of living crisis is affecting different parts of the UK.
The index measures how long people in each town or city have to work to afford a sausage roll from the Newcastle -based bakery chain. It found that people in Lichfield, Staffordshire, had to work the longest at four minutes and 54 seconds, almost two minutes more than people in London, who earned their £1.05 savoury snack quickest at two minutes and 58 seconds.
Personal finance website InvestingReviews.co.uk commissioned economist John Hawksworth to study 100 cities and towns around the UK, using official data to expose regional inequalities in earning power. Despite being slightly tongue-in-cheek, it said “sausage roll-onomics” could be used as a tool to compare living standards across the country.
Read more: our writer visits all 31 Greggs in Newcastle in a single day
The fastest earned sausage rolls were mostly in the South East, with London followed by Oxford, Slough, Guildford and Derby. The other end of the index was more geographically spread, with Lichfield followed by Middlesbrough, Nuneaton, Truro and Hereford (all on four minutes and 48 seconds for one sausage roll).
Greggs’ home city, Newcastle, is the quickest place in the North East to earn a sausage roll at three minutes and 46 seconds, putting it 30th in the national list. Everywhere else in the North East was ranked in the bottom half of the national table with Sunderland and Gateshead coming in at 88th and 89th (both just over four-and-a-half minutes).
The Sausage Roll Index has been inspired by the Big Mac Index, which has been published by The Economist since 1986 as a way of comparing the purchasing power of different nations based on the amount of work needed to afford a McDonalds burger.
Mr Hawksworth, former chief economist at accountancy giant PwC, said: “In part the analysis is a bit of fun with the sausage roll standing in for the Big Mac as a standardised product to compare purchasing power across different places. But it does also make the serious point that there are very large variations in income levels across our towns and cities.
“These local earnings gaps are driven by variations in productivity across places that reflect deep-seated disparities in education, opportunity and infrastructure across the country. Narrowing these income gaps remains one of the most important economic challenges facing this and future governments.”
InvestingReviews.co.uk CEO Simon Jones said: “Amid all the Government’s talk of levelling up, a great divide still exists across Great Britain today with Greggs customers in some parts typically having to work 65% longer than Londoners just to be able to afford a sausage roll.”
The index was based on local median hourly pay estimates provided by the Office of National Statistics, with adjustments made for the latest figures on pay growth. It does not include the price of sausage rolls in petrol forecourt and travel hub Greggs concessions, which are sometimes more expensive and so deemed “outlier sausage rolls”.
Greggs warned earlier this year that its prices might have to rise as it faced higher costs for materials and staff in its stores.
