“If I can spend £2 for dinner instead of £10 of course I will,” Tomas Ribeiro tells the FT on his lunch break. “Even though we can obviously afford [to buy food], everyone to some degree is becoming more cost-conscious.”
Ribeiro, 28, is a long way from the breadline, with a salary of more than £60,000 in his job as a London-based financial planner at Budweiser. But he is among those across the UK income spectrum who are embracing a new wave of recycling apps and services, attracted by the ethos behind these companies as well as the substantial savings they can deliver at a time of strained budgets.
Websites and apps such as Olio for food sharing or fashion marketplace Depop have sprung up in recent years to cater to a growing desire for community-based sharing. Ribeiro is a fan of Too Good To Go, an app that sells fresh food from local cafés or restaurants for a fraction of the usual price, just before closing hours.
“Supermarkets are crazy expensive and Too Good To Go is a good option because everyone loves local stuff and minimal effort,” he says.
He started using the app only this year after friends recommended it. The rising cost of living has led to a surge in activity on the site: the number of food bags sold grew sixfold between January and July this year, according to Too Good To Go.
Having just moved in with his girlfriend, Ribeiro used Gumtree, a local marketplace website, to buy a sofa for £30. Depop is his preferred site for basketball shirts and trainers. He estimates he has saved about £700 by using similar apps over the past year.
Solomon Wilkinson, 34, discovered Too Good To Go as a student. Now a freelance digital producer at London-based marketing company Jellyfish, he uses it to shop at his local Planet Organic. He says it means he can buy “a really good bag of food and vegetables for £3 to £4” from a store he regards as “normally very expensive”.
He earns about £80,000 a year, but does not feel insulated from the economic climate. “Even if my finances are not directly affected by the cost of living crisis, so far the general mood of belt-tightening has seeped into my conscience,” he says. “Being freelance, I know a downturn in the economy might mean less work for me so I need to be sensible about how I spend my money.”
UK inflation hit a 40-year high of 10.1 per cent in September, driven by food prices rises of more than 14 per cent. As mortgage rates and energy bills have soared, so have the attractions of savings-based apps.
Selina Flavius, a financial coach and host of the Black Girl Finance podcast, can see the attraction for young professionals but says the savings are a drop in the ocean when her clients worry about being able to get on the property ladder or pay the mortgage. “[These apps] are at best a sticking plaster . . . People can’t save their way out of this current crisis.”
Others point to the effort required to post clothes or other goods for sale or recycling. “I’ll no longer list anything unless it’s worth more than £10,” says one app aficionado.
Olio: an app allowing people to pick up unwanted household items or groceries from neighbours, free of charge. Users leave bags hidden outside their homes for others to collect.
Too Good To Go: a marketplace where cafés and food shops list fresh food they would otherwise throw away at heavily discounted prices. Buyers don’t know what’s inside the bag but pay as little as 10 per cent of the normal price.
Depop: a peer-to-peer shopping platform for second-hand fashion
Fat Llama: an app to hire and lend household tools and equipment from fellow users below market rates
Gumtree: an online marketplace for second-hand items, known for its informal style and low prices
Food price rises have nonetheless helped fuel a surge in the use of some sharing apps. Olio, a waste and money-saving app, has seen its listings grow fivefold since 2020. Valentina Zito, 32, a sales executive at Yahoo, started using it two years ago to pick up free food and household items listed by her neighbours in Hoxton, east London. She also posts her uneaten groceries on Olio for others to eat, saving them from going to waste. “I think supermarket prices are high even for [earners above the median wage].”
Tools and electrical appliances can be borrowed (for a fee) via apps such as Fat Llama. The service is a favourite of Pete Abboud, 31, a data analyst at Bloomberg earning upwards of £50,000, who hires light and sound equipment from fellow users when he throws a party. “These bits of equipment are very expensive and they take up a lot of space, which I don’t really have.” Abboud has recently started using Fat Llama to list his own items, which allows him to offset their cost completely.
David Greenfield, vice-president at the Circular Economy Institute, a training agency, points to the Library of Things — where tools and household items are available for community members to use for free — as a good example of the kind of systems that can reduce consumption. “We don’t need 200 drills across 200 households,” he says.
He believes the financial climate will push people to services that operate on a non-monetary basis. “There are platforms that offer opportunities to get things for free, and in a financial crisis they should be your first port of call.”
Do you use these apps, or any similar platforms? If so, do they help you save money? Let us know your experiences and impressions in the comments below.