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Comment by doix | Hacker News Reader

The UK is insane. I left in 2020 and came back to visit recently, things are over 50% more expensive. I used to buy 20 chicken nuggets for £4, it was £6.50 or something. Pints are £7+ instead of £4.

I stayed with a friend and he kept his flat at 15c because heating beyond that was too expensive. I used to keep it at 18 and didn't even consider the costs (once I stopped being a student).

I appreciate that the 22% more expensive is on average, but the things that I care about have gotten significantly more expensive. It really killed any desire I have of ever moving back there.

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I visited the UK last in 2022, I stayed in Bristol. I visited the nearest pub to my hotel many times, it was a Wetherspoons. I know that spoons doesn't have the best reputation but it was clean, lively but not packed.

'Abbot' ale was on special at £1.50 a pint and when the special price ran out, other beers were starting at £2.50

I'd like to know where specifically you were drinking. A Central London hotel bar? Because £7 a pint is ludicrous and not at all representative of normality.

> 'Abbot' ale was on special at £1.50 a pint and when the special price ran out, other beers were starting at £2.50

I would consider that to be very cheap, even when I lived in Bristol (before cost-of-living crisis). I don't recall pints being that cheap at Wetherspoons either. Even most beers at Tesco are more expensive than that. £1.50 is roughly the same price as Tesco[1] (£1.375 for a 500ml can).

[1]: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=abbot%20a...

It was a 'last barrel' price, I think a deal before the keg expires etc. When that finished we could still get Abbott only it was £3. I did say it was a special deal.

Wetherspoons have an app where you can order online (never used it before and had the pleasure of discovering how dreadful it is for the first time), but they don't publish any prices online other than that.

After multiple attempts to get the app to work, I gave up, and found this: https://pantryandlarder.com/spoons-map/

Turns out you can still get Abbott for even less than that. Looks like there's quite a lot of variation in Bristol but the Robert Fitzharding seems to be cheapest, selling a pint of Abbott for £2.34, the city centre pubs seem to be selling for £3.42ish, and the less central pubs seem to be around £2.77.

It's not at all beyond the realms of possibility that you might still see a special offer of around £1.50 for a pint. Nice!

This is Edinburgh where I used to live at the same pub we used to go to after work for years. Same owners and everything, it's not a fancy pub by any means, but it does have good craft beer and whats on tap is constantly changing.

I mean, even back in 2020 4-5 quid for a pint wasn't cheap, but the beer was good and always changing. I'm sure you can still find a £2-3 pin _somewhere_ in Edinburgh, but that's not where we used to drink.

And yet, food in the UK is still markedly cheaper than in most countries -- and especially so when compared to the USA. My wife and I make about as much here as we did in the US, and despite higher taxes, we're actually doing very similarly, financially, because of much lower cost of goods on average.

well, the catch is "we make about as much here as we did in the US". Usually, you'd make 40% less of what you did in the US when you move to the UK.

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