The cost of living crisis continues to hit Brits hard, but one shopper saved £17.22 on their Asda weekly shop by using a simple trick recommended by Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert website
While food inflation — the rate at which food prices rise — has recently begun to ease, the cost of living remains a pressing concern. Brits have been battered by several once-in-a-generation economic events in recent years that have driven up their living costs, including the Covid-19 pandemic, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, and the US-Iran War.
Nevertheless, there are a number of tricks that many claim can help shoppers save a few pounds on their weekly grocery bill. One of these involves crouching down.
While squatting and crouching are perfectly good exercises for the gym, they could also prove beneficial in a supermarket aisle.
What is the crouching trick in supermarkets?
Back in 2017, consumer experts at Martin Lewis‘s Money Saving Expert website put forward the theory that supermarkets deliberately position their pricier products at eye level, making customers more likely to pick them up.
Meanwhile, the more affordable own-brand alternatives are placed lower down the shelves, requiring shoppers to crouch in order to spot them
They put the theory to the test across three different supermarkets and concluded: “We found supermarkets place own brand items down on the bottom shelf, often positioned in the bottom left hand corner of the display.”
But does this still ring true today?
I headed to my local Asda to investigate.
Testing the crouching hack in Asda
To get a fair picture, I selected 10 everyday items and compared the prices of branded products against Asda’s own-brand equivalents, while also noting their shelf positions. The items in question were instant coffee, Greek yoghurt, linguine pasta, pasta sauce, mayonnaise, ketchup, marmalade, flour, almond milk, bread; the prices for which can be found below.
Of the 10 items, I had to crouch down to locate four of the branded alternatives. The Asda Greek yoghurt was positioned closer to the floor compared to the Fage equivalent.
The same was true for the Asda pasta sauce versus the Dolmio equivalent, the Asda ketchup versus Heinz’s own product and Asda’s almond milk versus the same drink from Alpro.
There were certain items I had to crouch for on both counts. This included both Asda and Hellmann’s mayonnaises, Asda and Golden Shred’s marmalades, as well as Asda and Be-Ro’s plain flours and Asda’s own-brand coffee alongside the Nescafé equivalent.
In the case of the mayonnaise and marmalade, both were situated on the lowest shelf.
Meanwhile, for the pasta and bread I didn’t need to crouch for either. In the case of the bread, it was flanked by rival branded loaves with only one positioned above it.
As for the pasta, the Asda own-brand items were placed one level up to the left of the Napolina branded linguine.
How much did I save?
While I may not have needed to crouch for every item, the amount saved was remarkable by following Martin Lewis’ principle of opting for own-brand products. Adding everything together, my own-brand shop totalled just £11.26 compared to the £28 I would have spent had I chosen the branded alternatives.
That’s a saving of £17.22. The complete line-up was as follows:
- Nescafe Instant Coffee (£6) vs Asda Instant Coffee (£2.28)
- Fage Greek Yoghurt (£3.65) vs Asda Greek Yoghurt (£1.70)
- Napolina Linguine (£1.57) vs Asda linguine (80p)
- Dolmio pasta sauce (£2.59) vs Asda pasta sauce (69p)
- Hellman’s mayonnaise (£3.25) vs Asda mayonnaise (93p)
- Heinz ketchup (£4.70) vs Asda ketchup (£1.35)
- Golden Shred marmalade (£1.90) vs Asda marmalade (85p)
- Be-Ro flour (£1.97) vs Asda flour (70p)
- Alpro almond milk (£1.62) vs Asda almond milk (£1.41)
- Kingsmill bread (£1.25) vs Asda white bread (55p)
