A loyal Tesco shopper has said he 'wont be going back' after he went to Marks and Spencer (M&S) with just £16 in his pocket. The shopper who had preconceived notions about M&S was gobsmacked when he reached the checkout.
M&S has recently impressed shoppers with prices lower than budget rival Aldi on some products. In a taste test, we discovered that the quality of M&S is largely more superior than many of its supermarket rivals.
More recently, M&S has followed in the footsteps of ASDA and Tesco and has upped its own-brand offering. M&S' own-brand food allows shoppers to buy their groceries on a budget.
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Now branded as the 'Remarksable Value' range, shoppers online have been heaping praise on how cheap the once upmarket shop is offering a whole plethora of essentials, some even shunning old reliables like Sainsbury's and switching to M&S for their weekly shop. Dan, a reporter from our sister site MyLondon, decided to ditch his usual weekly shop at Tesco in exchange for a trip to M&S - with just £16. Prices were accurate at the time of the original article's writing.
Here's what he said:
Having caught wind of this I felt I had to go and check the range out for myself so I headed down to my local food hall in Finsbury Park to see what all the fuss was about. I decided I'd get the items I needed for a pair of simple recipes, incorporating as many of the value ingredients as I could to make the most of the range. The recipes were a beef and bean chilli with jacket potatoes and a simple slaw, and sausage and broccoli spaghetti.
Upon walking into the shop I headed for the bread section where I picked up some large white rolls for 95p, I've seen the exact same ones in Tesco before for the exact same price so this was a promising start. Soon the bargains started appearing left, right, and centre, with spaghetti for under a pound, eggs for £1 exactly, and eight pork sausages for just £1.50! Beef mince for £1.80 was another steal and as I secured all my veg for the week for just over £6 I started to wonder whether I'd walked into Aldi or Lidl by mistake.
Gradually though, I became very aware of my surroundings as some more expensive outliers began entering my basket, red kidney beans for 75p felt particularly egregious and £2.75 for 350g of cheddar is pretty hard to take, the 'value' option in the cheese range a £4 block of 550g.
The total shop ended up coming to £16.19 overall and should sort my lunches and dinners until at least the end of the weekend. Whilst there were a few regrettably expensive items, I do feel like the value was approaching what you get at an Aldi or Lidl, and certainly better than your local Tesco.
What I would warn though is that despite the genuinely great value on the items in the 'Remarksable Value' range, there just wasn't enough variety in that range to make doing an entire shop at M&S a viably cheap option unless you're sticking closely to the basics. That said, I was impressed, and it left me certain of one thing - I wouldn't be returning to Tesco for a while.
A Tesco spokesperson told Manchester Evening News its current prices for the items featured are as follows:
- Large white rolls - 80p
- Spaghetti - 23p
- Eggs - £1.15
- 8 pork sausages - £1.20
- Beef mince - £1.79
- Kidney beans - 33p
- Cheddar- £2.65
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