Supermarket price war hots up as Morrisons cuts prices of 400 essentials

Supermarkets of all sizes are cutting prices in the battle for market share.

Morrisons has announced it is cutting the price of 400 essential items with immediate effect, with the promise of continuing to “hold down the price” over the Autumn.

These aren’t small cuts either, with an average of 23% being trimmed off the price of the items from 7th September.

David Potts, chief executive at the supermarket, said that the price cuts were a response to the “tough year” that people are enduring, particularly with the UK now in recession.

He added: “These are not short term promotions, these are price cuts that are here to stay.”

Here is just a selection of the products seeing their prices slashed:

The supermarket price war

It’s no secret that we are slap bang in the middle of a supermarket price war.

Morrisons itself cut the prices of 800 items last year in a bid to compete, but recent months have seen a swathe of price changes as stores attempt to deal with both our reduced budgets as a result of Covid-19 and the challenge of the deep discounters like Aldi and Lidl.

Tesco, for example, has clearly set its sights on tackling the customers deserting it for Aldi, with the launch of its Aldi Price Match back in March, with industry rumours of a further escalation of the discounted deals.

Asda meanwhile is bringing back its old ‘pocket tap’ adverts to highlight the fact it’s spending £100m lowering prices in store, while there’s even a price war going up higher up the food chain with M&S lowering prices as it competes with Waitrose.

Of course, just because everyone is lowering prices, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your shop is getting any cheaper, if the products that make up your basket are unaffected.

That’s why it’s still so important to shop around, a task which has sadly got rather more complicated since the closure of MySupermarket. 

However, we still round up the best supermarket deals every week right here on loveMONEY which should help.

Get more from your mushrooms

While price cuts are a simple sell when it comes to attracting customers, some supermarkets are going a different route by boosting the rewards on offer to regular shoppers.

Sainsbury’s for example has just launched a fruit and veg challenge, which rewards customers with bonus Nectar points.

You sign up through the Nectar app or website, and are given a personalised target based on the number of fruit and veg portions you normally buy.

Once you hit that target you earn points, and then move up to the next level, with further Nectar points on offer.

So it may be that you earn 100 points when you purchase 50 portions, 200 when you buy 75 portions or 300 points when you buy 100 portions.

So by going for some healthy food, you get more back in the form of points for your reward scheme.

Check out our rundown of the nation’s best supermarket loyalty schemes to see just how much they could save you on your weekly big shop.