House insurance renewal premium

I probably chose the wrong month. I was not so worried about detail. If I was todays 44p loaf would have been 8.7p in 1980. The point being that food (fresh food, VAT exempt) is not a big part of the RPI now. I chose the index without mortgage interest. The headline rate.

In real terms food is very cheap. Sadly now though too few people will pay a premium for the good stuff to get it into the RPI.

Simon

You say todays 44p loaf, but I suspect that isnt a good example.A 'standard' loaf of bread is more like 80p, 44p is a 'loss leader loaf' which didnt exist 25 years ago (IIRC).

Are you getting 'standard' confused with 'luxury'? :-)

A loss leader loaf is likely to be much less than 44p. I think I've seen supermarket own-brand no-frills bagged sliced raw toast for less than 20p.

Lidls with their 12p loaves. Many of their prices seem to be locked into the 1980s. Belgium chocolate particularly and their premium ice creams. They rely on a uniform across the board fixed percentage mark-up and don't seem to have got the hang of the fine English supermarket tradition of variable mark-up percentages for perceived luxury goods. This results in 200 gram packs of good quality camembert selling for a miserable 89p each.

Depends where you shop I suppose, at Waitrose in the Suuth of England, 44p is definitely rock-bottom :-)

But I think the same principle applies, that there are either loss leaders or very low priced deals on bread which werent available at all 25 years ago.

"Tumbleweed" wrote

Which is just one reason why the change in price of bread hasn't followed the RPI!

I wonder what the original point of this sub-thread was? :-)

Are there any statistics available on how many people baked their own bread then and now? I'd expect it to have declined except for a slight recent rise corresponding to the fashionableness of bread making machines.

How much did flour cost 25 years ago? There's a huge price range for that today, just as there is for bread.

Yep, from 11p* to 1 or more for a bag (1.5 kg)