Ok, I admit it. I am a food snob. My favourite film is Julie & Julia (2009), in which a put-upon, do-it-all young woman obsesses over Julia Child, who introduced suburban America to French cooking. I have consigned beans on toast to the days when the sertraline just doesn’t hit right, and opted last Christmas to make homemade gravy.
This is not to say, though, that I am too good for a bargain. Though I still have reservations about milk from Lidl – I swear it tastes different – and the eggs from Aldi look to me dull and pale, I can put aside these quibbles as I admit to the allure of a £1 bag of courgettes. All this to say: Oxford’s city centre needs a discount supermarket.
In the period 2022-2024, approximately 90% of the UK admissions to Oxford were from England, whose students receive, at most, £10,544 per year. Most of us do not receive that much. Immediately, we can subtract however many thousand your college charges for rent, and then we are likely left with a meagre sum which barely supports a life of simple pleasures. That is, if we are forced to shop at either Tesco or Sainsbury’s in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.
Aldi, Lidl, or ASDA would make a fine addition to Oxford’s supermarkets. It would be nice to walk out of a shop and not feel spiritually drained because good, worthwhile food costs so much; to not have to think, “well, the overdraft is doing its job”. It would be nice to live up to the expectation of students and be a little more cavalier in our spending, able to splash out now and again. But our budgets are limited and the greatest cost, apart from rent, is food. The options for the median Oxford student are as so: shop and eat well, and commit oneself to a life of moderation, never leaving Oxford during term-time and going out at most once a week, or allow oneself to be hedonistic whilst subsisting on a diet of pot noodle and porridge, backed up with the odd multivitamin. I do not think this fair; university is an escape from the humdrum of home life, the start of adult responsibility (and correspondingly, irresponsibility). We should be permitted a little more fun.
Now, I appreciate that the targets for my ire really should be the government for letting down students from England, as well as the University for pretty consistently leaving those who Theresa May classed as the “Jams” (Just About Managing, i.e. lower-middle class) with the limited support their parents can afford, and very little in the way of scholarships or bursaries. But these are long-term issues which, given cuts to funding for universities and Rachel Reeves’ insistence that difficult decisions are ahead, nobody is really in the mood to deal with. Instead, a discount supermarket could be up and running within the year, if they realised what a cushy profit they could make from the city’s vast student population.
Why not, though? Why are our nearest Aldis just at the ring road? Consider who, apart from us, uses the city: the odd resident of the city, who in 2024 had a median salary of £41.2k and therefore may opt instead for Tesco or Sainsbury’s; and tourists. Tourists are coming on holiday, to buy the overpriced, gaudy tourist tat. They do not need to buy food with a mind to cooking. Restaurants will do that for them. Oxford is not built to sustain those who gulp when they open their banking app. It’s built for those with a bit more cash to splash.
What a difference it could make! Instead of relying on cheap loaves of bread which taste like cardboard, we could enjoy the delights of a somewhat high-quality loaf, baked in-store, for less than £3. Getting all the ingredients for a recipe from The Guardian need not lead you to questioning whether you can substitute chilli powder for fresh chilli. For once, we could really indulge. We could snack without interrogating the cost per kilogram of a nice bar of chocolate as a reward for an essay well done (or even just completed). We would not need to go to a formal to delight in something approaching haute cuisine. People think Oxford is the high life, and with a discount supermarket, it could be.
