Retail Royalty Challenge with Money Supermarket

Money Supermarket.  You know them, the price comparison people that DON'T have a really annoying advert.  Well, they've set a challenge to bloggers.  On signing up, and picking a charity, they sent me £30 and challenged me to get shopping.

It was a difficult decision to pick a charity to support.  After all there's so many.  I work for a charity myself, it would be so easy to find ways to spend that money on our services, but they get my time, and the sweat of my brow on a daily basis, I couldn't do that!  People might get the wrong idea!  So I thought a bit wider, and about some of the charities that support the work we do.  That's when it came to me, and I paid a visit to the Merthyr Cynon Foodbank, part of the Trussell Trust.

The work they do amazes me.  This is the 21st Century, we're a developed nation, filled with internet, mobile phones, satellite tv, cars, double glazing, and the kind of comforts people in the developing world aspire to, comforts that only a couple of generations ago wouldn't even have been dreamt of.  And yet every night, here in the UK people are going to bed hungry, parents are going without food to make sure their children are fed, people are relying on local foodbanks in order to get a decent meal.  In the 18 months since the Merthyr Cynon Foodbank opened their doors, they've fed over 3,500 people.  Over 1200 children.  And that's just in one small area of South Wales.  There's over 350 foodbanks in the UK, and they fed over 350,000 people last year.

The foodbank provides 3 days worth of emergency food, non-perishable & nutritious food to get people through a crisis - losing a job, benefit delays, banking problems.  And they're amazing people too.  Whenever you visit our local foodbank centre, they greet you at the door with a smile and a free cuppa, a chat, advice, a friendly welcoming place to go when the world seems a bit greyer than usual.  They're a ray of sunshine.

As I said, I paid the foodbank a visit, and asked them for their wishlist, which items were they most in need of?  They hold collections at the local supermarkets & through churches, but obviously what they receive through that can be a bit hit & miss, so I wanted to make sure I spent my £30 on the items they needed the most.  I was asked for variety packs of breakfast cereal (so they can split them up for single people, rather than giving huge boxes), 500g bags of sugar, and tinned fruit.

So, armed with my shopping list, I hit the internet, and browsed mysupermarket.co.uk to see who had the best deals, and marched around the local discounter stores to see if they could beat them.  I found my best bargains, and popped out to fill my car.  And fill it I did!  What you can see in the picture below is: 12 variety packs of breakfast cereal, each containing 8 boxes, 16 500 gram bags of sugar, and 11 tins of mandarin oranges.

My haul!

I got some rather odd looks in the supermarket when I filled my trolley up with this little lot, let me tell you!  But it came to a grand total of £30.08.  I subbed them the 8p, it's the least I can do.

I was amazed how much I could get for my £30.  I really didn't think I'd get a trolley load.  It sounds like an insignificant sum, I know I spend way more than that a week on our shopping, but I managed to buy so much food, that will make a real difference to people in crisis.  Someone will be able to go to bed tonight having eaten well, be able to get up in the morning & have a decent breakfast, and that could make all the difference.

Many thanks to Money Supermarket for giving me the opportunity to support their work.

This is my entry to the Retail Royalty Challenge, from Money Supermarket.