Convenience for the poor?

It is just fat pikeys that shop in Greggs. Surely? I mean, it must only be they who demand an opening time of 0700 on weekdays, freshly-baked multi-grain loaves, Empire biscuits, and roasted chicken sandwiches complete with delicate slivers of red onion. Must be. There is no other answer, clearly.

Think for a moment, how often you buy lunch. We have all done it – either a result of poor planning the night before, greed, or because colleagues were going out to buy and it was just easier to go with the ‘it’ crowd. In case you thought you were getting off lightly by being the last one to decide and appear as the most reasonable-sounding, I am afraid that reason can easily be boiled down to simple laziness.

If you are thinking that you might do this more often that you can remember, you might like to consider the following:

– Sandwiches now cost about £2-3 per pack on average. I want to eat two of these, and I am not alone; – A drink. Another £1; – A chocolate bar or cupcake, something sweet, £1-2, because, it is not a meal without something for dessert now is it?; – The coffee you had on the way in, £2. Did you think you had got away with that one? Nice try: it costs money too.

That makes a monetary total in the region of no less than £7. That is even if we take one off the list for the sake of a conservative estimate, and because not everyone has two sandwiches and morning coffee from Moonquids-Caligula-Kingdom-coffee-cottage in the same day. £7 is not that much though. If it is once a week, that makes £210 per year. On an Undergrad term-table that is. If you are a postgraduate who eats out like this 3-4 times a week, this is an annual bill of £1,400. The average bursary of an Imperial College postgraduate is now approaching £12.7k/annum.

This does go much further than sandwiches I am afraid. Would you spend £5 on a packet of coffee that would make only 8 cups worth? Of course not. That works out to 63p/cup. Not so expensive compared to the £2 one from Asteroidfrancs-Augustus-principality-whatever-coffee, though.

You may be wondering exactly why Gregg’s is relevant though. Based on the opening paragraph neither I, nor they, have the idea that their clientele is a single-market for shoppers, of whatever waist measurement, on a budget. However, I am not going to wax lyrical about their wares in a Marks and Spencer ‘food porn’ advert sort of way. What I will say is that freshly-baked baked goods, sandwiches that are 10% cheaper than Sainsbury’s and a range that allows some ‘proper’ shopping on the side, gives this lot a corner of the market that they are not really being challenged on. At least, not nationally. Local competition to Imperial would include the Sandwich shop on Gloucester Road, which probably has the widest range of fresh made-to-measure budget sandwiches I have ever seen in one place. So one way or another it can be done on the cheap, but the total is still the fat side of £5 per day.

Undoubtedly none of this costing business looks good. I can feel it too. I suppose what I should do now is extol the virtues of eating some of last night’s leftovers for lunch every day. The rough cost of cooking-a-bit-more-for-tomorrow’s-lunch is probably no more than £5/week, so it sounds as though it will work financially. But how often have you seen a colleague or friend or whoever eating their lunch out of one of those zipped cool-case things with a plastic fork, in what is surely an utterly joyless manner? Too often. This is something of a paradox, then. Do let me know if you solve it. Answers on a postcard, please.