It’s the early 2000s, Westlife are in the charts, Pop Idol is on the TV and a weekly shop at your local supermarket won’t break the bank.
A newly uncovered 24-year-old receipt from Morrisons has gone viral on social media – with Gen Z viewers stunned at the prices.
The bill, from a New Year’s Eve 2001 shop in the supermarket chain’s Ripon branch, cost just £34.57 and included staple items such as olive oil, cat food and toothpaste – all of which have seen a marked increase in prices since then.
To uncover just how stark the price differences are, the Daily Mail travelled to the Ealing, west London, branch of Morrisons to compare how much the same shop would cost today.
While some substitutions had to be made, overall the trolley of everyday items was exactly the same.
But the cost had more than doubled from £34.57 in 2001 to a whopping £76.40 in 2025 – an increase of 121 per cent. In the same timeframe, average wages increased by just 60 per cent.
And supermarket bills have risen by more than the rate of inflation: this price rise is above the Bank of England’s inflation calculator which estimated the 2001 bill would cost £66 in 2025.
But while the price of some items have soared, the cost of others have barely changed in the nearly quarter of a century since the first shop.
Baking potatoes, for example, have only risen by 3p from £1.13 in 2001 to £1.16 in 2003 – while an avocado increased from 59p to 88p.
And the cost of a single lime has in fact decreased in price by 1p – from 25p in 2001 to 24p in 2025.
The minute price changes in these products is unsurprising as the cost of fresh produce are the most likely to remain stable long term due to a number of factors.
These include the large domestic production of fresh fruit and vegetables in the UK and the competition between the stores which is an incentive to keep prices low.
On the other hand, many items saw a notable increase in their price. Mature cheddar rose by £2.20 from £1.05 to £3.25.
Toothpaste also jumped in pricefrom 59p to £3.50, although in the 2001 receipt this was a Morrisons own-brand toothpaste which was not available at this store.
While IAMS cat food rose from £2.15 in 2001 to £5.35 24 years later.
But the product that saw the most noticeable price rise was olive oil which rose from £1.85 24 years ago to £4.85 – a 162 per cent hike.
The significant jump in the cost of olive oil is due to a number of reasons such as a global downturn in production which has made the cooking staple a more valuable commodity.
And there are plenty of other differences to supermarket shopping in 24 years.
Back in 2001, consumers could use as many plastic bags as they would like, free of charge. That has not been the case in Britain now for 10 years since a charge for single-use plastic bags was introduced in October 2015.
For the shop in 2025, the bags for life cost 60p each – about the same price as a tin of Ambrosia custard 24 years ago.
How shoppers pay for their trolleys was also very different in 2001. The receipt from back then said that whoever bought the shop was ‘served by Diane’ but in 2025 checkouts have nearly been entirely phased out and replaced with self-checkouts.
While self-checkouts were invented in Florida in 1984, their popularity only started to grow in the late 2000s and now the total of self-scan tills in Britain has soared to about 80,000.
There are also other caveats to why the cost has changed since 2001. For example, back then the average wage in Britain was £19,722 compared to £31,602.
With inflation figures released this week revealing that the rate has remained unchanged for the past three months, it seems unlikely that food prices will stop rising any time soon.
