A loyal Tesco customer has said he 'won't be going back' after taking a trip to Marks and Spencer (M&S) with just £16 in his pocket.
M&S has not got the reputation for being 'budget friendly', with some thinking it is a 'little bit posh', but one shopper was gobsmacked when he got to the checkout.
This comes as supermarkets are growing their own-brand range as the cost of living crisis continues, offering customers more affordable products during the big shop. Asda replaced their Smart Price brand with the yellow labeled Just Essentials range, and even Waitrose released an 'Essential' range. Now, most recently, M&S has recently followed in the footsteps and have put their ''Remarksable Value' brand on the shelves.
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Taking to social media, shoppers have been praising on how cheap the once upmarket shop is offering a whole range of essentials, and to try it out, 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 in his pocket.
He explained that after spotting the excitement from other shoppers, he wanted to try the range out for himself. He decided to get the items he 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.
First item that went into the basked were some large white rolls for 95p, and after spotting the exact ones in Tesco for the exact same price, this was a promising start. Soon the bargains started appearing left, right, and centre, with spaghetti for under a pound, eggs for just £1, and eight pork sausages for just £1.50. Beef mince for £1.80 was another bargain and Dan secured all his veg for the week for just over £6.
Dan added: "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."
Once at the checkout, Dan's shopping came to £16.19 and had everything he needed for lunches and dinners for the week. Although he admits there were some 'regrettably' expensive items, he said that the value was approaching what you get at Aldi or Lidl, and 'certainly better than your local Tesco'.
However, Dan added that he didn't think there was enough variety in the range. He said: "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."
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