Food Prices in Ireland - is there competition ?

It is just a general observation.

Ah ok! I have become an unknowing member of the Yes campaign so I wondered if I had also become a member of the Left. It has been a rather eventful evening day in terms of me be volunteered by others into various parts of the spectrum .

Squire wrote:

It never ceases to amaze me that those of the left would welcome large supermarkets on the basis that they are cheaper without giving due consideration as to how they are cheaper, the abuse of their dominance in the market, how they have unfair trading advantages over others, how they abuse their suppliers and how they influence political parties.

Is there a guaranteed way to tell what products are fair though ? Bar growing stuff in your back garden it's not, I'd say. Who knows? Someone could even be working for a right little bollix in Aldi or Lidl or Walmart.

Is there stuff any of you would definitely avoid buying on ethical/ecological grounds ?

johnfás

Could be worse, at least the Yes lot have idealism in abundance and the Left, or most of them, are driven by a desire for a fairer society. I have been regarded as belonging in the third Reich, which causes mixed feelings as I spent 7 years of my childhood with an elderly relative who fled Germany in the thirties as she was a socialist and a year or so with another who post the war decided Latin America was the sort of place to disappear.

Audi

I don't do a lot of shopping, and don't go near large food stores. I just buy what I need in local shops for all there is of it. It is a question of free time and equally not needing to be too concerned about how much an orange costs. I want the local grocer, baker or butcher to survive. It looks like hard work and long hours running a small local shop and they are good people. I don't want to see them replaced by Tesco Local.

Squire wrote:

Audi

I don't do a lot of shopping, and don't go near large food stores. I just buy what I need in local shops for all there is of it. It is a question of free time and equally not needing to be too concerned about how much an orange costs. I want the local grocer, baker or butcher to survive. It looks like hard work and long hours running a small local shop and they are good people. I don't want to see them replaced by Tesco Local.

I think the local butcher is surviving. I shop everywhere myself but I notice a lot of my friends in their mid-thirties go to the butcher's shop now too as their parents and mine would have done - my mother would have seen Tesco meat as not really real or something. A Portugese lad I was speaking to recently who is also in his mid-thirties was ranting about the freshness of Tesco veg and how the small corner shop was a lot better. He's a builder but that doesn't stop him having taste.

So what Fairtrade restaurants do you go to Squire

Nude is apparently fair trade, people used to rant about it as a place to get lunch, but I find it terribly mediocre. How can you rant about eating lasagne out of a cardboard box?