It’s not the local retailers who are shafting you, it’s Government and big business.
Try not to hand over your cash to Tesco/Asda if you can possibly help it. If you’ve got time, use a market for your veg and if you don’t do it already try to cook from scratch.
We go on pretty cheap holidays, bike touring/camping etc. – lots of fun. Next year we’re doing a 2 week house swap with some people in Germany, so zero accommodation costs for 2 weeks near Munich.
If you want to go a bit further we have a wood burner that burns wood that I scrounge and an allotment (tonight we had celeriac mash + roast jerusalem artichokes + some nice Taste the Difference chippolatas from Sainsburoids that were on offer – so for £2 I fed 4 of us with as much tasty food as we could eat)
Strangely (if you’ve got time to shop frequently) some of the more up market supermarkets do the best deals on stuff that is about to go out of date. Waitrose has been a particularly fruitful stop for buying enough half price meat to fill the freezer for 6 months at a time in the past.
We also do lots of shopping on ebay and also use it to get rid of anything we no longer want/need.
+ we only run one car (which doesn’t seem much of a hardship to me, but seems to be an incomprehensible inconvenience for some people), we don’t have a TV (although obviously we’ve got a computer and we watch stuff on iplayer) and we hardly ever buy music/movies – which turns out to be no hardship whatsoever as there seems to be already far more interesting stuff available for nothing than we have time to watch.
Also when we go on trips we always try to take a flask/sarnies etc. – can easily save you £20 on a day trip with the kids.