Primark cuts prices on basics to compete with Shein and Temu

Walk into a Primark on any weekday afternoon and you'll hear the same complaint from shoppers browsing the rails: the prices have crept up. A 19-year-old student named Eshal Malik said as much while fingering through jewellery with a friend, noting that things definitely feel more expensive than they used to. But on Monday, Primark announced it was doing something unusual for a retailer built on the promise of rock-bottom prices—it was cutting them. Hundreds of items, from jeans to jumpers to socks, would cost less. For a company that has built its entire identity around being the cheapest option on the high street, the move signals something deeper: the ground beneath Primark's business model has shifted.

Retail analyst Natalie Berg called the announcement surprising, the kind of headline you'd expect from a department store like M&S or Next, not from a discount fashion chain. "You don't want to join a race to the bottom," she said. "But when Shein is selling dresses for £3, you've got to respond, right?" The pressure is real. Primark, which operates more than 190 stores across the UK, has been watching its like-for-like sales decline—a metric that matters enormously to investors. The timing is significant: parent company Associated British Foods plans to spin Primark off onto the London stock market next year, and a business that can't hold its own against Chinese online retailers is a harder sell to shareholders.

The competition has evolved dramatically in recent years. Shein and Temu, the Chinese online marketplaces that have captured younger shoppers' attention, operate on a fundamentally different model than Primark. They have no physical stores to maintain, most of their packages slip through import duty exemptions (though that ends in October 2028), and their supply chains are lean enough that they rarely end up with unsold stock. The result is prices that have become the new baseline for what clothes should cost. According to Mintel research from July 2025, nearly a third of women aged 16 to 34 who buy clothes online had shopped at Shein in the previous year. Tasneem Jafar, a 32-year-old from Salford who has been a Primark customer since she was 16, now orders from Temu roughly every six weeks. For Eshal, the student, the gap is impossible to ignore—she can buy going-out tops on Shein for less than £10.

The cost-of-living crisis has made shoppers even more ruthless about where they spend. About a third of clothing shoppers say they've bought clothes less frequently in the past year, according to Mintel. People are thinking differently about value now, calculating cost per wear, hunting for bargains at charity shops and secondhand sites like Vinted. Isobel Guffick, a 30-year-old from Staffordshire, has shifted her shopping habits entirely. She buys basics from Sainsbury's Tu range instead of Primark, visits charity shops every week for the thrill of the hunt, and picks up secondhand pieces wherever she can find them. Primark's response—cutting prices on core items while also promising improvements to quality, fit, and style—looks like a supermarket strategy: use cheap staples like milk and bread to draw people in, then let them fill their baskets with other things. The price cuts don't apply to everything Primark sells, which is the point. Analyst Bridget McCusker described it as a marketing exercise designed to lure shoppers through the door.

For a business with margins as tight as Primark's, cutting prices is a calculated risk. The company says about 85% of its products already cost £10 or less, and a spokesperson told BBC News that its "business model and focus on buying at scale and keeping costs low helps us to offer the prices we do, but we don't compromise on quality or ethics to do that." The real benefit may be in inventory management. Analyst Russ Mould from AJ Bell suggested that lower prices on key items could help Primark move stock more efficiently, reducing the need for deeper discounts later. In a retail environment this competitive, staying relevant means delivering on the promise of value. Berg put it plainly: "When it comes to staying relevant to customers today, you have to offer value for money. Especially if you are meant to be the value fashion retailer in the UK, you have to deliver on that promise." Primark is betting that a few pounds off a pair of jeans is enough to remind shoppers why they came in the first place.