The plight of the Big Four supermarkets, the financial scandal encircling Tesco, and the rise of the discounters are mentioned in the media on a daily basis of late.
The Office for National Statistics has issued a timely analysis on changes in the food retail sector over the last decade.
The money people spent in supermarkets grew rapidly from 2005, including throughout the Great Recession.
This stopped around 18 months ago in May 2013. From then on, spending in supermarkets has been flat.
However, the number of items bought since 2006 has been roughly the same.
This means that people have been buying the same amount of goods, but paying consistently higher prices for those goods over the last eight years.
In fact, prices in the food sector have gone up more rapidly than for other non-food retail items, especially in 2007 and 2008 when the prices of wheat and other commodities were galloping.
But in 2014, food store prices dropped. The ONS says this could be due to the supermarket price wars. Another factor could be the falling cost of food production, resulting from falling wheat prices.
In the words of the ONS: "It is clear that the change in pattern in supermarket spending reflects a clear change in pricing environment; demand has been essentially flat for significantly longer than spending."
An average family of four will spend at least £225 a month on food, the Office for National Statistics reported.
Another change in shopping habits, analysed by Planet Retail, is that consumers now shop more frequently but for a smaller number of items.
One such scenario is people shopping both at a discounter and then seeking out branded items at a traditional supermarket.
People may also be growing weary of ‘special offers’, especially those which have been shown to be a swizz, preferring instead straight-forward low prices.
