{"id":297,"date":"2007-06-15T05:38:33","date_gmt":"2007-06-15T01:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=297"},"modified":"2007-06-15T05:57:14","modified_gmt":"2007-06-15T01:57:14","slug":"thank-goodness-for-supermarkets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/297\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank Goodness for Supermarkets"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been meaning to write a post on this subject for a while now, but I was prompted to do so today after I read some of the other blogs named by The Times<\/em> on their 50 Best Business Blogs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One of the blogs named under the Retail<\/em> section of the list is Tescopoly<\/a>, which is:<\/p>\n

An alliance of organisations concerned with the negative impact of supermarket power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is little doubt that many people will feel a negative impact of Tesco’s astonishing success: competitors, for example.\u00a0 But I am in serious doubt as to whether the consuming public, more commonly known as ‘customers’, share this view.\u00a0 Judging by Tesco’s sales figures, probably not, and Tescopoly implicitly acknowledge this with the statement:<\/p>\n

Growing evidence indicates that Tesco’s success is partly based on trading practices that are having serious consequences for suppliers, farmers and workers worldwide, local shops and the environment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

which makes no reference to customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But this post is not about whether or not Tesco’s success at giving customers what they want comes at the expense, unacceptable or otherwise, of local shops, farmers, suppliers, etc.\u00a0 It is\u00a0about living in a place without a decent supermarket, and on this point I have quite some experience.I grew up in a small town in South West Wales called Pembroke.\u00a0 I was born in 1977, so most of my memories\u00a0of\u00a0my being a\u00a0child in\u00a0Pembroke took place in the 1980s.\u00a0 Initially, there was one supermarket in town, a Fine Fare, which consisted of\u00a0four aisles and\u00a0three grubby checkouts.\u00a0 This was later taken over by Gateway, and later a Kwik-Save opened in the town.\u00a0 There was a Co-Op in Pembroke Dock a couple of miles away, but that was about it by way of supermarkets in the immediate vicinity, and the selection and quality of items they sold was poor to say the least.\u00a0 Most shopping was done in the traditional way by means of trailing from one small shop to the next scattered along a\u00a0quarter-mile high street, most of which opened at 9:00am, closed at 5:00pm, had an hour for lunch, took Tuesday afternoons and Sundays off, and stocked only half the items you\u00a0came in for.\u00a0 For my mother, bringing up four young kids (or, in her opinion, four\u00a0uncontrollable brats), this was pretty tough going.\u00a0 And here’s why I know this.<\/p>\n

My mother was about as far removed from a\u00a0modern-day consumer\u00a0as is possible to be.\u00a0 We lived in an isolated farmhouse a mile outside Pembroke, with no mains water and heating powered by a coal boiler.\u00a0 We had no television, as my mother did not approve of them, and the most recent music in the entire house was Mozart’s Don Giovanni<\/em> until my oldest brother grew old enough to\u00a0bring home bootleg\u00a0Bruce Springsteen tapes.\u00a0 My mother used to grow her own vegetables and summer fruits in our garden – swedes, aubergines,\u00a0courgettes, spinach, broad beans, runner beans, peas, parsnips, new potatos, lettuce, beetroot, parsley, chives, mint, lemon balm, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants – and use a greenhouse to produce tomatoes and cucumbers.\u00a0 In addition, we used to get sent into the fields with instructions to come back with as many blackberries in our collanders and as little cow-crap on our shoes as possible.<\/p>\n

Those items which were purchased were kept to a mimimum, and in the case of eggs were always free-range from a local farm.\u00a0 Rarely did she buy ready-blended sauces, flavourings, or complete meals (for starters, they weren’t available).\u00a0 My mother used to cook all this in\u00a0meals which started from first principles, i.e. almost all ingredients started as nature intended them to be, with minimal processing and free from all added salt, sugar, preservatives, etc.\u00a0 Meals were of the traditional British variety – cottage pie, braised beef, stew, lamb casserole, poor-man’s-goose, boiled bacon, liver, steak and kidney pie – and I didn’t eat a pizza, a Chinese takeaway, or a bag of chips until I was about twelve or thirteen years old.\u00a0 Liquids were restricted to orange juice, milk, tea, water, and the occasional glass of bitter lemon squash.\u00a0 Fizzy drinks were\u00a0treated like\u00a0a pig in a mosque.<\/p>\n

My mother used to bake her own bread and rolls, which under certain circumstances could be classified as offensive weapons, and has enabled me to eat Russian black bread and consider it to be as light and fluffy as Mitey Wite.\u00a0 Not content with growing and cooking all this for us, she was extremely active in the Womens’ Institute in selling most of her produce almost right up until her death in 1995.\u00a0 Certainly, as early as I can remember (which is about 1981), she was involved in the W.I., and for a few years she used to\u00a0sell her bread out of a local health-food shop.\u00a0\u00a0When the “organic” food started appearing\u00a0on the scene in the early 1990s, my mother embraced it wholeheartedly and insisted that anything we could possibly consume organic was so.<\/p>\n

(At this point, I leave readers to pause for a moment in sympathy to consider what kind of clothing we were put into, given my mother’s rather puritanical and “earthy” approach to food and lifestyle: during P.E. lessons, my oldest brother found himself surrounded by people wearing nylon football socks and Arsenal shirts, with he wearing stripey woollen socks knitted by a great-Aunt and a strange sports jumper which, being green,\u00a0consigned him to playing in goal for the rest of his junior schooldays.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, my point is that if anybody on this planet were to reject the idea of junk food, low-quality supermarket goods, and the demise of small, local shops, it would be my mother.\u00a0 And I’m sure that she would reject 95% of what the supermarkets currently sell and complain that certain specialist wholefood shops had gone out of business as result of a major supermarket opening in the area.\u00a0 But I remember my mother getting extremely frustrated about not being able to buy quality items in Pembroke or Pembroke Dock, and making the effort to go to the small Tesco in Haverfordwest, some 40 minutes away at the time.\u00a0 Then a Tesco opened in Carmarthern, an hour away, and my W.I.-leader grow-your-own-food health-food-fanatic mother used to drive there once a week to buy stuff she simply could not get locally.\u00a0 About the same time a decent Sainsbury’s opened in Swansea, and we used to take a family trip there once every couple of months and we kids would\u00a0run around like we were in some sort of palace, or like the Polish students who I picked vegetables with in the mid-90s\u00a0did when they went into a proper supermarket for the first time.<\/p>\n

Of course, my mother didn’t buy the stuff she could grow at home from the supermarkets.\u00a0 Knowing her, she probably commented loudly on the inferior quality of the produce on offer to any unsuspecting customer who happened to be standing nearby.\u00a0 But\u00a0she knew that feeding Weetabix, orange juice, rice, cheese,\u00a0vegetable oil, Rivitas, macaroni,\u00a0and\u00a0Marmite to\u00a0a family of six is\u00a0rather\u00a0difficult when\u00a0there is no decent supermarket in the town, and especially if the local shops are unreliable in their opening hours, quality of goods, and stocked items.\u00a0 Add to that the need to buy such items as washing powder, hoover bags, shoe polish, and other such groceries – none of which could be bought from a single place in Pembroke, never mind the same place as the food was bought – and the journey to find a decent supermarket, even in a second-hand 1.2L Mark-I Golf, was worth it.<\/p>\n

In summary, the presence of a decent supermarket in Pembroke in the 1980s would have made my mother’s life an awful lot easier, and I’m sure she’d not have been alone.\u00a0 Local shops, faced with no competition and\u00a0maintaining outdated business practices, simply\u00a0cannot provide a decent level of service to a community:\u00a0that\u00a0someone like my mother\u00a0was forced to drive an\u00a0hour to go to a supermarket in order to get what she wanted is ample proof of this.\u00a0\u00a0It should have come as no surprise\u00a0that the supermarkets have been able to move swiftly into rural areas and sweep aside the local competition\u00a0with customers flowing\u00a0through their doors by the thousand.<\/p>\n

Okay, fast forward\u00a015 years and I\u00a0found myself living in south Manchester, the first time I’d lived\u00a0anywhere other than a rural village in my life.\u00a0 Finding myself\u00a0regularly shopping in the large 24-hour Tesco in Parrs Wood, I could not believe that this is somehow less healthy, more expensive, or worse for the general public than having to trawl along a high street at a time convenient only for the shopkeepers.\u00a0 Just before I left Manchester in 2003 and a huge new Tesco Extra opened in Sale, I could barely imagine that my parents\u00a0once had\u00a0to make a special 4-hour round trip to Swansea in order to buy an iron.\u00a0 An iron!!\u00a0 I could now buy one of a dozen different brands off a supermarket shelf, at prices better than Curry’s, just a few aisles down from the cornflakes and yoghurts.\u00a0 Who on earth could complain about this?\u00a0\u00a0For me, remembering growing up in Pembroke, it was great.<\/p>\n

Now fast forward 4 years, and I’m living in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 Have a guess what?\u00a0 There is no decent supermarket here.\u00a0 Granted, it is apparently much better than it was a few years ago when there was no supermarket here at all, but it is still the worst place I have ever lived for purchasing food, groceries, and consumer goods.\u00a0 Fresh meat and vegetables are available, but there is not much by way of quantity (just 2 leeks were on sale each day during winter), less by way of quality, and your choice is\u00a0limited to one variety of each item.\u00a0 It’s also expensive.\u00a0 A miserable-looking lettuce will cost you a quid.\u00a0 A five-inch cucumber a dollar.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 Ready-made sauces are generally unavailable so if you want to make a curry, as I did one evening, you’d better prepare yourself for a few hours of peeling tomatoes, sauteing them with onion, adding spices and chilli, and mixing it together on a stove trying to make it taste more like curry sauce than boiled tomatoes.\u00a0 When that’s ready, you move onto the meat and veg.\u00a0 Personally, although I like the challenge of cooking (solely because I have the time), I preferred at least having the option of buying a jar of ready-made Chicken Madras sauce and simply adding it to the fresh meat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If a supermarket here stocks Heinz Baked Beans (at $2 per tin), it becomes a talking point in the bars and at work.\u00a0 If you don’t hurry, you’ll miss them, and when they will have any more in is anyone’s guess.\u00a0 I haven’t seen any in stock since about February.\u00a0 We briefly had some Heinz pasta sauce, but that has been missing from the shelves for at least a month, and last week they started selling ready-made fajita wraps but – alas – no salsa sauce, or any kind of sauce, and by the time I got to the supermarket all the meat had gone as well.\u00a0\u00a0Feeding yourself\u00a0here is not a major problem, but this is because I have time, money, and the (self-taught-through-dire-necessity) ability to cook.\u00a0 If I was missing one of these, I’d be in trouble.<\/p>\n

Furthermore,\u00a0as in Pembroke\u00a025 years ago,\u00a0supermarkets here don’t sell a great range of items.\u00a0 If you\u00a0find yourself\u00a0in need of a lightbulb, or a coat-hanger, or a dustpan and brush, or bin liners, or an electrical plug, or a washing-up\u00a0bowl, forget trying to\u00a0pick one up in the supermarket as you buy your milk and\u00a0teabags.\u00a0\u00a0To get the items I’ve listed above in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk would require\u00a0one to go to\u00a0at least 3 different shops, one or more of which would probably\u00a0not stock what you wanted.\u00a0 Oh, and all of them take cash only.\u00a0 Yet you could find all these items in a Tesco with your eyes shut.<\/p>\n

My exprience in\u00a0Pembroke and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk\u00a0makes me wonder about the people who run the blog Tescopoly.\u00a0 Specifically, I wonder if they’ve ever lived in a place without a decent supermarket.\u00a0 Given most of them live in the developed west, I very much doubt it.\u00a0 I am sure it is quite possible that there are some excellent local shops about which outperform the supermarkets\u00a0in quality if not price.\u00a0 But\u00a0these shops represent the few businesses which were savvy enough to raise their game in the face of fierce competition and\u00a0differentiate their product and market it accordingly.\u00a0 However, these shops are likely to be like this because<\/em>\u00a0of the presence of a supermarket, not\u00a0despite it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some people cite their local butcher as selling superior quality meat than the local supermarket, and it is undoubtedly true.\u00a0 After all, the butcher is selling to a handful of select customers who are willing to pay a premium for his products.\u00a0 But these butchers are\u00a0often cited as being in a suburb of a major city or a large town, the majority of whose residents will shop at supermarkets.\u00a0 Were the supermarket to close and everyone have to shop at little local butcher shops, does anybody honestly think the quality would stay the same, and the butcher wouldn’t abandon his loyal customers by flogging lower quality meat to the masses?\u00a0 If anybody doubts this, I invite them to see the quality of meat and service on offer in a local butcher shop in a place where people have no choice but to shop there.\u00a0 The result is, or at least it is here, freezers full of dark, unidentified meat butchered with a chainsaw.<\/p>\n

My guess is that the opponents of major supermarkets who can genuinely count themselves as consumers (as opposed to anti-capitalists, green activists, and small business owners with a special-interest\u00a0axe to grind) are an elite who have time on their hands and the money to spare\u00a0to shop in select outlets catering\u00a0mainly for,\u00a0well,\u00a0people with time on their hands and money to spare.\u00a0 (Even then, leaving foodstuffs out of the picture, I’d be curious to know where they shop for their washing powder and baby food).\u00a0 But for the vast majority, even if they do not necessarily buy all, or even most, of their food from the supermarkets, their entry into the locality has been a Godsend.\u00a0 If\u00a0natural allies like my\u00a0mother used to\u00a0pray\u00a0for a Tesco to open in Pembroke Dock,\u00a0then opponents of such a move\u00a0must be\u00a0pretty few in number.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been meaning to write a post on this subject for a while now, but I was prompted to do so today after I read some of the other blogs named by The Times on their 50 Best Business Blogs. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,46,42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}