Shopping is expensive. As the Fortuneo online bank reminds us on its information site, food is one of the essential expenses for households; that is to say, it is not possible (or, at the very least, particularly complicated) to crop it to save money. On average, in 2017, French men and women spent between 236 and 506 euros per month on food alone, depending on their social status, their profession and the composition of their household. Since then, inflation has been there. Prices have risen dramatically, month after month. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the world food price index rose by 27% between November 2020 and 2021 alone.

Faced with rising prices, informed more than once by Planet, a certain number of French men and women have decided to turn to hard discount brands. The magazine Femme Actuelle also lingered on the “hard discount” effect, mentioned in the program Capital, on M6. Some customers sometimes spend up to 40% of their monthly salary in such stores… This is explained, according to the manager of Noz store openings, by the policy applied.

“At home, we don’t come to buy a bottle of wine, we don’t come to buy a book, we come to discover our products. We can come back to buy perhaps a product and leave with something else. It’s our concept and our customers love it because it is […]: I rummage around, I don’t know what I’m going to find and I leave with lots of things”, explains Pascale da Costa, in front of the cameras and the microphones from Julien Courbet’s team.

However, in times of inflation, such signs could prove to be irrelevant. Explanations.

Several of the hard discount brands are among the favorites of French women and men. This is the case of Lidl, for example, but also of Aldi. However, reports Europe 1, going there to do your shopping in times of inflation appears… Contraindicated. At least, since we hope to make some savings! This can be explained quite easily: hard discounters do not have the same leeway to absorb inflation. Quite often, this results in higher price increases…

This lack of room for maneuver is not incredibly surprising, continue our colleagues. After handing their microphones to Thomas Graffagnino, retail expert at Sia Partners, they can say that this is the result of a simple factor: prices are already compressed to the maximum.

“So when you have inflation on a product, the capacity of this discounter to absorb it in its costs and not pass it on to the consumer is reduced,” explains the specialist.