Jayne Dowle: Customers pay the bill in stress for supermarket price war gimmicks

I suspected as much last Thursday. It had been a long day. It was 9pm before I managed to get my trolley through the door. At first I thought it was exhaustion playing tricks with my head.

I must have stood in front of the milk for about five minutes. Could this be correct? You don’t get much more basic than milk. But it actually appeared to be more expensive than it was the week before, when I could get three big cartons for £3.

If David Cameron thinks we are a nation of crazy irresponsible spendthrifts, racking up thousands on our credit cards with never a care for tomorrow, he should consider this.

An apparently-sane, apparently-intelligent, grown-up mother-of-two stood in front of the milk in a supermarket for five minutes trying to times £1.25 in her head.

At 9pm on a Thursday night though, even I’m not in the mood for an argument. I stood resentfully at the till watching the total shopping bill mount up to an eye-watering £132, and let it pass.

But I was still muttering about the injustice when a few days later when I read in trade magazine The Grocer that a basket of 33 staple items from the supermarket giant now costs £58.37 – up by £1.34 since its headline-grabbing price-cutting campaign began.

Well, I’m not sure how things like Nivea Visage Wipes and Pepperami get onto anybody’s list of staple items, or where my £132 basic weekly food bill comes into all this, but the point remains.

The promise made by Tesco’s chief executive to “charge as little as we can, rather than as much as we can get away with” wasn’t worth the press release it was written on.

We’ll never trust him again. And others will be asking questions too. Tesco has just announced its worst UK sales performance for 20 years. There is “subdued demand” from shoppers. I’m not surprised.

We’re totally frustrated by the whole experience. And loyalty goes out of the window when wages stagnate and prices rise.

For all the “Big Price Drop” hype, if Thursday night is anything to go by, supermarket shopping, never one of the most pleasurable experiences of my life, has just become even more stressful.

All those garish and confusing banners. All those two-for-ones on things like broccoli – most of it is still in the fridge, by the way. All those “special offers” that look so tempting, but you know you don’t want really.

I did resist the half-price tins of chocolates, which would have been a good investment for Christmas, because by December I will have forgotten where I have hidden them. All those “deals” that you have to check and double-check in case someone has put the item back in the wrong place and you get to the till and find out that the posh breakfast cereal you’re treating yourself to costs twice as much as you thought it did.

Who has time for all this? Who still has the will to live, never mind work out the intricacies of the great Clubcard points scandal – fewer points for the same shopping? After last Thursday night, I really wouldn’t mind if I never have to go to a supermarket again. But unfortunately we have to eat. I am, however, slightly cheered by the irony.

According to The Grocer, it is now even cheaper to shop at Asda and Sainsbury’s than it was before Tesco kicked off its price war. I can hardly contain my excitement at putting this theory to the test.

Hold me back while I find my shopping bags – purchased, note to the Prime Minister, to save money on carriers.

Really, if I could get away with it, I’d buy everything at the pound shop. At least you know where you are with the prices, and you don’t have to do hard sums in your head when you’re tired.

I’m hoping then, that a Poundworld Express enters my world soon. The discount store is planning to captialise on its success by opening a string of convenience stores stocking its most popular items.

The first one is coming to Wakefield – where the very first Poundworld launched way back in 1974 – later this month.

The news is that it plans to expand its food and groceries range. I hope it does. And I hope by doing so it teaches Tesco a lesson it dearly needs to learn.

We shoppers don’t want fancy gimmicks. We don’t want vouchers for cheap pizza or the chance to buy a sat-nav system or set of pans at a knock-down price if we spend a certain amount on basic subsistence groceries. We just want a shop we can rely on, a shop that’s easy to shop in, and a shop that puts us, the customer first, and not its global expansion.

Put all that at the top of your shopping list Mr Tesco, and we might just be persuaded to trust you again.