Wednesday 24 January 2007

Average household spending

The National Statistics office last week published the 2005/06 Family Spending report. It is a very interesting document that tells a lot about us, our habits, with what we are prepare to spend large sums of money and with what we ware not. For example, the average family in the UK spends £443 a week. We spend most in transport, £62 a week whilst we spend £45 a week in food (remember that his figures are per household). If you have a look to the detailed document you will see that we spend more in take-aways (£3.80) than in fresh fruit and vegetables (£3.40) which tells a lot about our eating habits.

I wonder how much we spend on crisps. Last summer, when I was waiting to take a plane back from a touristic resort in Spain, I went to buy some crisps to the bar. The waiter, quite bewildered, told me he had finished them. He said he used to work in a bar at a section of the airport where planes mainly flew to Germany and that there, a box of crisps (whatever that is) lasted for a month. This had been his first day in that section of the airport where planes mainly flew to the UK. When he arrived that morning there were 30 boxes of crisps in the bar and he had already finished them by 2pm!!. We definitely eat more crisps than the Germans do.

1 Comments:

Blogger passerby said...

I worked as a porter in a school kitchen one summer a few years back, and i noticed that for packed lunches, there was always a packet of crisps, like it was an essential part of every meal. Some day trips had lunch and supper (was a boarding school) packed lunches, each one with its own packet of crisps.

Also in supermarkets, its small packets that are in most supply, yupicly 6 packets within another packet, and sometimes 2 of those multi packets within another packet. So much packaging.
If you want to buy a bug packet of crisps, its typicly the 'posh' variety, which are typicly a rip off. Don't expect to find large packs of regular crisps though, they do exist, but are rare for some reason. Its ike economies of scale don't exist in the world of British crisps.

I'm not sure whether this is down to how British pople eat crips (each a small bag, and little sharing), or just the companies/supermarkets trying to milk the most cash out of us. But it sure is different from how crisps are sold elsewhere.

27 January 2007 at 15:21  

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