According to YouGov, only three in ten Britons would describe themselves as comfortable financially. A survey also found that six in ten Brits have had to change the way they usually spend, and expect to have to make more cuts to their typical spending, amidst the continued cost of living crisis.
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00:00Are we being ripped off? It's the sort of question we ask ourselves every time the bill
00:07comes in. We sort of fixed incomes, our wages may be up by a couple of percent when we're
00:13getting five, ten, fifty and sometimes twenty percent for utilities. That's a big, big chunk
00:20of wages. People who provide these services and goods, their costs are going up and they
00:26say if they don't put their costs up then they go out of business. We see this on the
00:32high streets, walk down and you see the shop units which are vacant. Now there's a very
00:36good reason for that, quite clear that their costs have gone up far more than they can
00:40actually cope with and that we're willing to pay. We do live in a very competitive environment
00:46and we're always looking for the bargain and when it comes to retailing, people increase
00:52their buy online as opposed to going to their local stores. It's a small number of monopolistic
00:57players who control everything and of course once that happens then competition does tend
01:02to take a bit of a hit. Well indeed, when we enter a recessionary period it's due to
01:08the fact that we're not spending. Remember GDP, gross domestic product, we hear a lot
01:13about growth in the economy. It's measured by spending, it's the collective actions of
01:20everyone that's in the economy, spending money on wages and all the things that we have done.
01:24And of course if people start to cut back for whatever reason, and of course it's mainly
01:28because their wages are not keeping up with the price increases, then quite clearly there
01:34is an overall hit to the economy because of course even gas, electricity and telephones
01:39and most of the other utilities, we can find some sort of choice which may be cheaper although
01:45not necessarily when it comes to water. Of course there is no choice of most people that
01:49they feel that the fat cats as they see them, they've done well out of the system and the
01:55poor consumers, maybe they are feeling they're getting ripped off.