Voices: Spare me the outrage over a £9 jar of coffee – you’ve no one to blame but yourself
Who is paying £9.25 for a big tub of instant coffee and why are they the worst person you know?
The supermarket aisles of Morrissons were agog this week after a customer spotted a shelf hawking a 190g jar of Douwe Egberts coffee jar going for the eye-watering price of £9.25 — a rise of three quid, the customer complained, in just a matter of weeks. It is a full £3.25 cheaper in Asda compared to the Morrisons price. First you feel the pinch, then, in time, you feel nothing at all.
To channel the swashbuckling spirit of Liz Truss, the pro-growth superbrain who surely shoulders much of the blame for this runaway inflation train, still rapidly disappearing off a very deep cliff, that is a disgrace. It stinks like a slice of Epoisse de Bourgogne. And don’t get me started on the scary price of dairy.
Doyennes of the wider caffeine circles will note that this is not just any coffee. It is in fact “no ordinary jar, no ordinary coffee”, per the jaunty branding of the Dutch company, a heady blend of “260 years of coffee craft and knowledge”. So there you have it — not a rip off.
The words of Marie Antoinette echo down the centuries as unwashed proles across these rainy isles complain that they can’t get their caffeine fix without striking their loo roll quotient from their weekly shopping list: “let them drink tea”.
Morrisons, to their immense credit, seem at a total loss in more ways than one, blaming “an unprecedented period of inflation” and adding that “we are working hard to keep prices down and competitive for our customers while maintaining high standards and availability in all our stores”.
These aren’t the sort of headlines you want dogging you in tough times. Its profits have already fallen 15 per cent year on year as zippy competitors like Aldi cut in.
Perhaps the fault lies with the supplier. When I picked up the phone to ask the good bean counters at Douwe Egberts what, precisely, was up, they were all on holiday — “it’s Hemelvaartsdag!”, I was told — so that’s that. The pain in grains falls mainly on the plain old consumer. Happy Hemelvaartsdag, one and all.
This is not nothing. It hurts. You wince every time you reach the supermarket checkout, online or offline. Perhaps in 20 years, when Rishi Sunak’s mandatory mathematics drive to make every trueborn Brit an algebra whizz has born fruit, the average shopper will simply take a breath, do a bit of back of napkin maths, correctly guess the number of grains in a jar and do the kind of mental arithmetic that makes such price rises easier to swallow.
If you carry the one, subtract that pi, and pull on an extra jumper instead of turning the heating on, you too can afford a sheep’s liver to feed the family on Sunday lunch. But only if you sell yours first.
And look, perhaps it is not in the national interest to stir up a storm in a coffee mug — to say nothing of the spiralling national interest rates hikes that are also part of this perfect maelstrom. Who among us can face down economic headwinds?
Perhaps there is a "reluctance to accept that, yes, we're all worse off", as the Bank of England’s top economist Huw Pill told us last month. He has since apologised for his choice of words, but why? We are all Pill heads now.
So, in the spirit of good old British boosterism, get creative. There are many ways to jolt yourself awake. Have you tried, say, jumping in a bed of stinging nettles (bracing!), licking a hedgehog (bristly!), going for a swim in one of this great nation’s pristine waterways (the odour stiffens the soul!) or banging your head against your desk repeatedly?
I’d suggest sticking a finger in a plug socket, but who can afford the electricity bill. Or, better yet, don’t shake yourself awake at all. Doze on, gentle voter. Heaven forfend that you wake up and smell the coffee.
