Why Standing in the Tesco Express on Holloway Road at 8pm Tells You More About the British Economy Than the MPC Statement Does

Reading: Bohiney | The London Prat

HOLLOWAY, LONDON — I went to the Tesco Express on Holloway Road at eight oclock on Wednesday evening, the day after the Bank of England announced the latest rate rise, and what I saw in the bread aisle told me more about the British economy than the entire MPC statement did. By Lowri Griffiths.

The Bread Aisle

The bread aisle was almost entirely picked clean. Not the artisan loaves — those were still there, smug as anything at £3.80 each. The basic Hovis 800g loaves, the value white sliced, the supermarket-own brown: all gone. The shopper next to me, mid-fifties, working clothes, picked up the last cheap pita pack and shrugged at me with the kind of expression that does not, on every available reading, require translation.

What This Means

I had spent the morning reading the BBC business coverage and a Treasury briefing about the cooling of demand framework. The framework treats the bread aisle as an abstract aggregate. The bread aisle is not abstract. The bread aisle is the lived consequence of food and energy inflation that the rate rise will not, in any direct sense, address.

The shopper next to me knew this. The MPC, on every available indicator, did not. I went home with the artisan sourdough because I am, by virtue of working in journalism, marginally less affected by the rate rise than my Holloway Road neighbours. This is, in operational terms, the entire problem.

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SOURCE: https://prat.uk/bank-of-england-raises-rates-again-to-punish-anyone-who-enjoyed-a-sandwich/