Lidl class or Tiger mummies... which of London's discount tribes do you belong to?

As another cut-price store flourishes, Nick Curtis profiles the discount tribes
1 April 2014

This weekend a friend ecstatically texted me that Spitfire beer was on offer at £1 a bottle in his local discount supermarket. Earlier that day I’d scored a clip-lock storage box, three coils of binding wire with integral cutters and a set of floor-protecting furniture footpads for a quid apiece in Poundland while Mrs C was shopping for holiday frocks in Peacocks, a chain that — if you are unfamiliar with it — makes your average Primark look like the Wonder Room at Selfridges.

Even if, as George Osborne claims, we can now put the recession behind us, years of financial squeeze have left middle-class Londoners hard-wired to seek out and hunt down a bargain like a starved terrier with the rich musk of a fox in its nostrils. Forget purchasing power: it’s all about poor-chasing power now. Hence the £750 million flotation of Poundland on the stock market, Aldi and Lidl dragging Morrisons and the rest of the big four supermarkets into a discounting price war, and the march of the Danish cheapo design and homewares outlet Tiger onto British high streets.

Being middle-class, though, these shock troops of the shops have turned a simple act of thrift into a competition. Which bargains you bag says more about you than cash-flashing ever can. Here, then, are the discount tribes of 21st century London.

The Lidl classes

The epicureans of the bargain world long ago sussed that German chain Lidl was vastly superior to both its homegrown competitor Aldi and continental also-rans such as Netto, especially at Christmas, when salami and stollen augment the cheaply priced but often high-quality traditional seasonal fare. The Lidl classes ride classy bikes bought from police sales (with a trailer for children, shopping or scrap wood to feed into their Danish living room stoves), wear Cos and can give you closely-argued scientific proof why a Toyota Prius makes sense in the city.

They purchase and circulate box sets in groups to defray the cost of not ordering from tax-shy Amazon. (Full disclosure: I once trekked halfway across London to spend £60 on a leg of Iberico ham, one of precisely three Lidl had secreted in obscure branches precisely to lure ponces like me; I then spent four times as much on a stand for it from Brindisa.)

The Aldi-capped

Got a mate who always orders an omelette in a Chinese restaurant, or who can be counted on to opine to a room full of lesbians that Jodie Foster just couldn’t find the right man? He’s also the guy who gets the discount game dead wrong, a member of the Aldi-capped — so named due to the German chain’s reputation for stocking bizarre items alongside its groceries. Send him out for cheese and he’ll come home with a heart defibrillator and a set of floor mats for a Mondeo. Which, coincidentally, is what he drives.

Tiger Mothers

“What, this old thing,” is the battle cry of the Tiger mummy, who knows that Converse sneakers go perfectly with her Evisu jeans, and that the minimalist clock from the Danish chain will offset her Lalique vase below (that’s not a euphemism).

She and her kids are always immaculately, effortlessly chic, but everything expensive in her home or wardrobe will have been found at a miraculous discount and she will draw attention to the Day-Glo pink garden set from Wilkinson’s (“almost as good as Heal’s”). She works in PR or financial services, mostly from home, tapping away on her Apple MacBook Pro in her original Poang chair (she was the first to buy when Ikea launched in the UK in 1987).

Poundland Posh

Amid the underclass buying multi-packs of fag papers in Poundland and similar fixed-price competitors can be seen two types of bourgeois shopper stocking up on eggs, coffee and bathroom essentials: hipsters who think they are being ironic, and proper country posh folk who think they are stealing a march on the Waitrose-frequenting urban elite, while also saving money to put little Hector through Sherborne (which might toughen him up).

These groups affect to despise one another although they are psychologically indistinguishable once the skinny jeans or red corduroys are removed.

TK Maxxtremists

The marathon runners or extreme fighters of the markdown world, these lunatics can’t savour a bargain unless it is extremely hard won. The perfect day for the male of the species, for instance, would be rooting diligently through the menswear racks in TX Maxx’s City, West End and Kensington stores, before finally seizing a slightly too-small but dirt-cheap Ozwald Boateng white tuxedo from the talons of a similarly sharp-eyed scavenger.

A TK Maxxtremist is identifiable by his thousand-yard stare, his grim slit of a mouth, and by the fact he will probably wear a too-tight white tuxedo in laughably inappropriate situations.

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