Do you doubt we are lurching into recession? If you still need convincing, then forget tumbling shares, the gloomy property market or even failing banks: just take a look at a chicken.
Such is the impact of financial tightening, it seems Sainsbury's has begun to attach electronic anti-theft tags to frozen chickens at some stores.
Yellow labels with a stark "security protected" warning have begun appearing on chickens at some of the chain's outlets in East Sussex. If not deactivated, the tags set off an alarm when they are removed from the store.
According to the story, picked up from a local news agency by a series of papers today, the special protection is afforded not only to the near-£10 organic birds but also to the bargain £3.60 chickens.
One customer at a Sainsbury's near Eastbourne, Matthew Burbage, said he bought chickens every week, and the tags were new.
I asked a member of staff why it was, and they said people had been pinching them. Why else would they go to the effort of tagging them? It's well known that people haven't got much money to spend at the moment and the posh organic chickens certainly don't come cheap.
According to one employee at the shop, the thefts are not only for personal consumption:
Times are hard and people can sell on a chicken easily.
Really? I'm regularly offered smuggled cigarettes or bootleg DVDs, but never, as yet, has a man in a pub offered me a frozen chicken kept furtively beneath his coat. Perhaps I'm going to the wrong places.
Will this postwar, austerity Britain mood catch on? What next? Nylon stockings sold under the counter? Meat rationing?
