Lidl

Have you bought all your Christmas presents yet? Or did you start buying them once a month over the year, like Denise van Outen’s pal Zoe in Channel 4’s Secrets of the Middle Aisle? And if so, have you wrapped them all? Or are you making your own wrapping paper using old washing-up sponges, brown paper and a glue gun, as demonstrated by Stacey Solomon in her BBC One Crafty Christmas show? And how about next year? Have you started saving for Christmas 2023 yet, as advised by the Park Christmas Savings advert (“the early bird gets the worm after all!”)? As I’ve been balled up in front of the TV this winter – one eye on the smart meter, one hand stirring honey into a perpetual Lemsip – I’ve noticed a pattern in pre-Christmas programming and advertising. The message this year is how to budget to make sure you have a special festive season – all smart spending, superhuman planning and time-consuming creativity. It’s not a new message. In Easter Aldi ran an advert with the tagline “Don’t change your lifestyle; change your supermarket!” It's a perfect summation of the trend. You don’t have to compromise the magic of Christmas, we’re being told, just be savvier with your spending choices. “There’s a narrative that it can still be perfect, and all you have to do is figure it out,” observed Grace Lordan, director of the inclusion initiative at the London School of Economics. On the surface it sounds harmless. Amid the cost-of-living crisis, overt messages about indulging and splurging on luxury ranges wouldn’t go down as well with consumers or viewers. It has captured the online zeitgeist: “skintfluencers” like “Right Guys Reviews” on TikTok and other platforms tour stores to find genuine bargains and give followers tips on the savviest purchases. The big problem, however, is that budgeting in itself is a luxury. Those who are comfortably off are better placed to save money. This comes down to a phenomenon known as “time poverty”. Research shows that people on lower incomes are more time-poor, and therefore less able to buy gifts well in advance, shop around for deals and plan in general. “For the longest time, we’ve known that middle-class families are the ones to gain the most from deals that are run in shops, and it’s not people at the bottom of the distribution,” said Lordan, who has studied time poverty. Indeed, upmarket stores like Waitrose are losing out to the discounters Aldi and Lidl, according to data shared with the New Statesman by Kantar, a retail data firm. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r