AFP, Nottingham :
While shoppers at Nottingham’s Christmas market complain about high prices, nearby volunteers hand out food parcels and retailers seek to dispel Brexit gloom with Black Friday sales.
The price of everything “is shooting through the roof and wages are pretty much staying the same, so every month you cut back on a little bit more”, council housing worker Amy Cupit told AFP, as she helped distribute tins in a church, home to one of the 15 food banks in the central English city.
The 33-year-old has taken on a second part-time job to help pay for Christmas, but fears she may one day be on the receiving end of the food bank.
Britain is gripped by a cost-of-living crisis sparked in part by the nosedive in the value of the pound after the country voted for Brexit in June 2016, pushing up the price of imported foodstuffs.
With inflation at a five-year high, Brexit has effectively chopped nearly a week’s worth of wages off the average family’s annual pay packet, according to research group, The UK in a Changing Europe.
The squeeze in purchasing power has made many shoppers cautious in cities such as Nottingham, where official statistics show that people earn around eight percent less per week than the national average.
Annual British retail sales fell for the first time in four years in October, on poorly performing food stores, the latest data show.
Moreover consumer confidence, tracked by pollsters YouGov and researchers the Centre for Economics and Business Research, has slumped to the lowest level since just after the Brexit referendum.
With wages rising more slowly than prices for the past six months, many shoppers have turned to budget options such as Lidl, a German cut-price retailer growing faster than any other supermarket in Britain.
The poorest have been forced to resort to food banks.
Nottingham’s network of food banks, Hope, said it has already had to give out 500 more food parcels than last year.
