How to read a UK supermarket receipt
The codes, the abbreviations, and why the lines rarely add up.
A till receipt is not a document written for you. It is a record written for the retailer's accounts, printed on the cheapest possible stock, with a product name field that is usually about twenty characters wide. Everything confusing about it follows from those three facts.
The names are abbreviated, and there is no standard
Every retailer invents its own abbreviations. The same loaf can print differently at two shops, and the same shop can abbreviate two similar products in ways that collide. There is no published mapping and no requirement that one exists.
This is the reason classifying a shop from its receipt is hard rather than trivial, and it is why the product reads the whole line including price and quantity rather than the name alone.
The asterisks are about VAT, not about food
Most food in the UK is zero-rated for VAT. The exceptions are where it gets strange: confectionery, savoury snacks, soft drinks and ice cream carry VAT, and so does anything that is not food at all. A receipt marks the standard-rated lines, usually with an asterisk or a letter code explained at the foot.
The lines rarely add up, and that is correct
Promotions usually ring up at full price and are deducted further down, so summing the item lines gives a number larger than the total. Loose items print twice, once as a weight and price per kilo and once as the charge. The total at the bottom is the only figure guaranteed to be what you actually paid.
It differs by shop, and mostly because of loyalty pricing
The structure above is common to all of them. What differs is whether a scanned card changed what you were charged, and that turns out to matter more than the codes do. Tesco and Sainsbury's lower the price per item at the till, Morrisons does the same through the More Card, Lidl takes app coupons off after the items have rung up, Asda accrues value to spend later instead, and Aldi has no loyalty layer at all.
The consequence is the same everywhere: the price on the shelf is not reliably the price you paid, the difference is per item rather than per shop, and the receipt is the only record of which lines it applied to.
Why any of this matters
Because the receipt is the only complete record of what you bought that exists. A card transaction is one number, and no amount of open banking recovers the lines inside it. Working out what share of a shop was ultra-processed means reading those lines, which means dealing with all of the above.
It is also what makes comparing one week to the next possible at the level of a product rather than a total, which is a different question from inflation as reported and is answered in personal inflation and your shopping basket.
Worth reading
- How to read a supermarket receipt
Truncated names, asterisks, savings lines and weight entries. A receipt is more legible than it looks once you know what each part is for.
- Personal inflation and your shopping basket
The published figure describes an average basket. Yours is a specific one, bought at a specific shop, and it moves at its own rate.
Common questions
- What does the asterisk on a UK receipt mean?
- It marks a line that carried VAT. Most food is zero-rated, so an asterisk usually means a standard-rated item: confectionery, crisps, soft drinks, or something that is not food.
- Why do the items not add up to the total?
- Promotions are usually applied after the item lines rather than on them, and loose goods print as two lines. The total is the reliable figure.
- Why do receipts fade?
- They are printed with heat rather than ink, on thermal paper. The image is a chemical reaction in the coating and it degrades with heat, light and time.
One photo of a receipt answers this for your own shopping.
Bagged reads every line and reports what share of your food spend was ultra-processed, and which items it was.
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