SOS - Save Our Sainos
At the weekend, I took the irrecoverable step of applying for a Tesco credit card. This after a period of time during which I have been dragged reluctantly away from the comfortable bosom of Sainsburys to the pert bottom of Tescos.
I grew up on Sainos' and, give or take the odd few months when I didn't live near one, I have always shopped there. It sort of had a reputation for being slightly more expensive, but I always argued that the vegetables in Asda are crap, so you get what you pay for. Besides, people who shop in Asda smell and are usually fat and poor*.
But a Tesco Extra store opened near us, the largest in Snottingham, and we paid it an exploratory visit. Another will open even nearer to us before the end of the year. B was sold immediately, because they stocked tinned hearts of palm, which is a comfort food to her, and Sainsbury's don't do them. And while Tesco has always had a bad rep for its meat, it does bread better than Sainsburys.
In fact, the Sainsburys bread, more than anything else, has caused me to lose faith with them over the past few years. It's not cooked properly, and it tends to be full of air pockets, due to lack of kneading. It's endemic, because I've noticed the problem in more than one shop.
The last bastion of Sainsburyness is that their best tea, Gold Label, has no peer in the Tesco range. I know my tea, and I'm never too impressed with the single-leaf types. Just Assam on its own is not good enough, and Saino's Gold Label offers the right mix of Assam and Ceylon type teas. We're talking leaf tea here, before you ask. I won't have teabags in the house.
But the final nail in the coffin came a couple of weekends ago, when I took Didi to Sainsburys because we were on our own, and left to my own devices, I'm like a homing pigeon.
The last month or so, I've been planning each week's meals more than usual, because of doing the point counting, so I've been buying a fairly standard set of stuff, give or take the odd thing. So always a couple of thick sirloin steaks, a variety of fresh fruit and veg, and so on. In Tescos this has been costing between 80 and 90 quid a week. In Sainsbury's, one hundred and twenty seven english pounds.
Which is like saying, for every 3 visits to Tesco, you get one free, in comparison with what you spend in Sainsburys.
That's the edge. So the Sainsburys credit card is going in the bin with the Nectar card, and its Tesco points for us from now on. I can't say I'm happy about it, because loyalty is important to me, and I don't like the way Tesco is laid out. But £40 is a lot of money to be saving each week. It's like a fairly decent guitar every six months.
*The equivalent to Asda in France, I would say, is E Leclerc - where the customers really smell. Tesco probably has its equivalent in Geant/Casino - just because of the different scales between the hige superstores and the small local shops, which Tesco are into in a big way at the moment. Then you have Cora and Auchan, which are our favourites - but a bad Alsatian Bank Holiday experience in the Cora car park has left me scarred for life and probably gives Auchan the edge.
I grew up on Sainos' and, give or take the odd few months when I didn't live near one, I have always shopped there. It sort of had a reputation for being slightly more expensive, but I always argued that the vegetables in Asda are crap, so you get what you pay for. Besides, people who shop in Asda smell and are usually fat and poor*.
But a Tesco Extra store opened near us, the largest in Snottingham, and we paid it an exploratory visit. Another will open even nearer to us before the end of the year. B was sold immediately, because they stocked tinned hearts of palm, which is a comfort food to her, and Sainsbury's don't do them. And while Tesco has always had a bad rep for its meat, it does bread better than Sainsburys.
In fact, the Sainsburys bread, more than anything else, has caused me to lose faith with them over the past few years. It's not cooked properly, and it tends to be full of air pockets, due to lack of kneading. It's endemic, because I've noticed the problem in more than one shop.
The last bastion of Sainsburyness is that their best tea, Gold Label, has no peer in the Tesco range. I know my tea, and I'm never too impressed with the single-leaf types. Just Assam on its own is not good enough, and Saino's Gold Label offers the right mix of Assam and Ceylon type teas. We're talking leaf tea here, before you ask. I won't have teabags in the house.
But the final nail in the coffin came a couple of weekends ago, when I took Didi to Sainsburys because we were on our own, and left to my own devices, I'm like a homing pigeon.
The last month or so, I've been planning each week's meals more than usual, because of doing the point counting, so I've been buying a fairly standard set of stuff, give or take the odd thing. So always a couple of thick sirloin steaks, a variety of fresh fruit and veg, and so on. In Tescos this has been costing between 80 and 90 quid a week. In Sainsbury's, one hundred and twenty seven english pounds.
Which is like saying, for every 3 visits to Tesco, you get one free, in comparison with what you spend in Sainsburys.
That's the edge. So the Sainsburys credit card is going in the bin with the Nectar card, and its Tesco points for us from now on. I can't say I'm happy about it, because loyalty is important to me, and I don't like the way Tesco is laid out. But £40 is a lot of money to be saving each week. It's like a fairly decent guitar every six months.
*The equivalent to Asda in France, I would say, is E Leclerc - where the customers really smell. Tesco probably has its equivalent in Geant/Casino - just because of the different scales between the hige superstores and the small local shops, which Tesco are into in a big way at the moment. Then you have Cora and Auchan, which are our favourites - but a bad Alsatian Bank Holiday experience in the Cora car park has left me scarred for life and probably gives Auchan the edge.
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
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