The yellow sticker hunters: supermarket reductions in the age of covid-19
If you are often skint, and can’t afford, say, asparagus, but can afford to hang around nonchalantly while a supermarket assistant makes food cheaper — then you probably understand the lure of the yellow sticker. For a single shopper in possession of limited cash must be in want of a reduction.
The yellow stickers are the coveted prey of a certain type of person, somebody who stalks supermarket aisles at the same time every day, following the poor assistant with the gun. Anyone with a steady income and a busy schedule might never realise this species of shopper exists. But I shop and eat for one, have little disposable income, and often shop daily, so I’ve become hyper-aware of these sticker-hunting shoppers. Often, I am one of them.
In my local big supermarket, a group of sticker-hunters show up most weekday evenings around six, and always on a Sunday lunchtime. A tall moustached man does the crossword leaning on his trolley while he waits, up to an hour, for the items he wants to be reduced. A lady with glasses carefully traverses every aisle, while another might consider a career in wrestling, for no mortal stands a chance between her and a reduced pizza.
I assume there are sticker-hunting regulars at other supermarkets too, little communities filtered out by financial or neighbourly need. Prolonged Tory austerity means that for many, this is the only affordable way to shop, the last option before subsisting entirely on value sliced bread and biscuits, or turning to a foodbank. Others are concerned about food wastage in a society ravaged not only by economic hardship but environmental decline. An internet community of ‘reduction raiders’ thrives around battling food wastage, sharing tips and OLIO finds on Instagram, and blogging their meals, pennies attached to every ingredient. And for other shoppers, purchasing reduced goods merely simplifies a decision about dinner.
Whatever the reason, a strange sad euphoria arises from buying something for less than its retail value, as if you’re somehow beating the system. Sad that it can take a yellow sticker to raise a day from bad to better. Sad that life must contain such dogged routine: a concentrated effort to save a few pounds on food that’s rarely as good as, say, late-night fries in a foreign city, a hungover curry, the laksa joint you find by accident and think about for weeks after. Eating experiences some will never afford, or even know about, get replaced with reduced bargains, factory-assembled couscous or bashed-up naan that tastes fine if you stick it in the oven.
I imagine an element of community to these shoppers partly to romanticise my way out of the reality. In my local supermarket at least, the sticker hunters have come to know each other socially. It’s a vaguely positive aspect of an economic hardship nobody should have to face. And sometimes they operate as a team, sweeping up all the reduced items and distributing them among themselves, mini pork pies or trimmed green beans or whatever random unpopular product has reached shelf-life. Once, the moustached man offered me a portion of his hoard. I politely declined, and said ‘thanks anyway’ with a knowing smile. We both know the bargain-hunting obsession that arises from the stress and boredom of limited funds.
It was while slicing up a loaf of sourdough I’d found for 35p, about a month into full lockdown, that I had the idea to write this. I was slicing the bread to freeze, for in the time of covid-19 a freezer full of bread is a boon. I shop infrequently now because the supermarket is not a tempting destination. Since being confined to our homes, we try to make them feel like comforting nests rather than cells, but the supermarket remains a jarring reminder of how bleak and scary everything has swiftly become.
Though I don’t visit daily, I know reductions are still there for the taking — if not more plentifully so, perhaps because of the supermarket’s staggered footfall. And on my weekly ventures, I see the sticker hunters. They chat two metres apart now, but they continue to shop the way they always have, trolley crossword and all. Not even a deadly virus stops their pursuit of a good reduction, I think. And then I consider that maybe they have no choice, maybe they have to risk their health to shop the only way they can afford to: visiting a supermarket every day to claim the bargains.
If you were feeling the pinch before covid-19, your financial woes have only been exacerbated. This makes savvy shopping even more of a necessity. And though supermarkets are rejigged to be as safe as possible, they are still locums of disease. I worry about the health of my local sticker hunters, exposing themselves every day, just as I worried about them during the panic-buying apocalypse in late March.
During the panic-buying peak, everybody fought over normal food, let alone reduced items, which didn’t exist anyway — most products were whipped into baskets long before the sticker-gun got close. For the first time in years I had to buy everything at standard price, and it was a stark reminder of how much less I’d eat if goods were never reduced. Cheap products like oats and beans weren’t available either, thanks to their nuclear-bunker qualities. And though I’m regularly a bit skint thanks to the uneven nature of the gig economy, I face nothing like what others do. I couldn’t imagine how some people were getting by.
Food is not particularly cheap in the UK. Sure, you can buy a packet of bourbons for 22p, but to maintain a healthy balanced diet, the kind that might strengthen your immunity against covid-19, requires time, or money, or both. Budget supermarkets are a lifesaver, but inner-city neighbourhoods tend to accommodate pricier convenience stores instead. In my north London area, more than 250 families rely on the local foodbank. My neighbourhood group chats and apps buzz with requests for food donations and distribution help. This was a problem before the pandemic, but the situation has significantly worsened, and will only continue to do so as recession bites and all power remains in the hammy fists of our incompetent right-wing government.
For me, shopping became less fun during lockdown, for the obvious reasons but also because I missed the small joy of a good bargain. For people whose financial struggles are tenfold, though, shopping became nightmarish: not only for the apocalyptic atmosphere, the risk of contracting a virus that might kill you, the stress of social distancing and masks and gloves and disinfecting your basket and trolley and self-checkout area, and queueing for ages outside, queuing again at the tills, and maybe you only picked up a basket but it got so heavy your arm is falling off so you resort to kicking it along the floor as the till queue crawls along — not only all that, but now all the cheap dried goods you rely on are no longer there either, and the reduced shelves are totally empty, so your trolley is much sparser, but so is your wallet.
Many months into lockdown, our problems have grown beyond the supermarket. Shelves may be replenished, but far more worrying than the possibility of running out of toilet roll is economic recession — and what it will mean for the sticker hunters, the shoppers for whom every supermarket trip is a gamble, on both their bank balance and their health.
