Supermarket shopping: so much quicker and more efficient – not to mention cheaper – than dotting along the high street from butcher to greengrocer to baker. Or so we’re led to believe. Yet there I was, the other week, in the cereal aisle, taking ages to reset my Tesco loyalty card password, which I had forgotten, and squinting at the screen like an owl in sunlight, since I’d also forgotten my spectacles.

I could have waited until I got home, of course, but then I would have lost out on the rewards of being a member of what is surely one of the biggest clubs in the UK. And while on many shopping expeditions the savings are negligible, had I been buying an electric toothbrush, say, I’d have paid double the price.

Given how sporadically and reluctantly I shop, it’s no thanks to me that Tesco has posted exceptionally healthy annual results in the past week. In the year to 24 February 2024, its sales rose by 4.4% and its pre-tax profit shot up from £882m to £2.3bn. Now accounting for a 27.3% share of the grocery market, Tesco is immodestly claiming it is “winning the supermarket wars”.

War is an apt word for the ferocious level of competition between grocery retail giants, their skirmishes and full-scale battles played out under our noses. We can’t hear the big guns blasting, yet there’s an undercurrent of tension as they vie for our custom, parading their cut-price credentials at every opportunity, fearful lest we be lured away.

Perhaps that’s why my modus operandi on the weekly shop feels less of an agreeable browsing expedition........

© Herald Scotland