Businesses will have to charge more, but shouldn’t they still offer some value?

The cost of living crisis is hitting us all, writes Caroline Bullock, so if we’re going to pay £83 for lunch at a coffee shop, shouldn’t we at least get something back?

The rising costs of energy, food, labour and insurance were always going to bite (Getty/iStock)

The cost of living crisis inevitably draws focus to the extreme: those facing the stark choices between eating and heating, or forfeiting their own evening meal to ensure their kids have food.

I recall a recent sorry snapshot playing out in an isolated Scottish village, where residents struggled to heat their homes, their lives consumed by the latest reading on the pay-as-you-go gas meters. One woman, her breath visible in the icy air of her front room, spent her evening adding layers of clothing at set intervals, delaying the warmest to the end to try to eke out the benefit until, to her relief, it was time to go to bed.

Some 400 miles away in a tea room in the West Sussex market town of Arundel, well-heeled pensioners and young families were mooching around antique shops and choosing where to have lunch. On the surface, at least, the living squeeze may be less keenly felt, yet this is a wide-reaching issue, and even here the effects were filtering through in more oblique ways, with some service providers potentially sleepwalking into a crisis of their own.