That article (Progress’s, not yours) is terrible. I’m not even saying it’s wrong, just that it’s awful. About half of it, as you point out, consists of using stereotypes to sneer at people the author dislikes… then it culimates by calling people who disagree with it “snobs”. Project much?

Worth noting that Progress’ main funder is Lord Sainsbury. I think it is a bit ungrateful for them to spend so much time praising his main competitor…

Have you not read Shopped by Joanna Blythman?

NO-ONE should be supporting supermarkets by shopping at them.

“makes far less money than he used to”

You see, this is probably not true…..even the author acknowledges this…..

“Jim the butcher* might have charged a little more for his goods”

The sad thruth is that Tesco and the like have economies of scale that small retailers, especially in convienience goods can’t hope to match.

Jim shut down because he wasn’t making money. It’s not a nice thought, but it is the way of things….

However, when people laud the so-called independent traders, what they are actually promoting is a “hidden tesco”.

The majority of small shops don’t phone up Heinz, Hovis, Kellogs etc and place orders for a couple of outers of tins, but go to a huge cash ‘n carry warehouse.

Your butcher would have also gone to large meat markets, and similar for every other item of fresh produce. Hardly any actually comes from a local farm as it is just as much hassle for a small shop to deal with a dozen providers, as it is for the farmer to deal with a dozen tiny customers.

So, your high street may have had a dozen brand names on the shops, but underneath that façade is just a hidden Tesco – in the form of the Bookers, the Batelys, the Parfetts etc.

So when someone protests about the Tesco opening up what they are actually demanding is that we shop – indirectly – at a giant cash ‘n carry instead. Which is essentially the same thing.

Well, I’m very much a lefty and use our local Tescos often. I used to pretend I hated them, but what’s the point. It’s great, thanks. Everything under one roof, great selection of foods – 95% of which were never available in the high street, employs a heck of a lot of local people on half-decent wages. I grow my own veg but every field is cultivated round here and the farmers are doing very well thank you very much, all driving much better vehicles than I can manage. I’m fed up with posh lefties who spend more on Apple products than I do on food in a year, lecturing me on where to buy it from.

What a strange original article. Nearly thirty years ago I did some night work in a supermarket and it was great fun – pay was 50% more than daytime, we got second pick (after the management) of all the expired food and the job was so overmannned anyone could have a nap if they felt like it. From what I hear its not like that now, with many places paying just £1 more per hour for night work and its non-stop slavery until you quit and the next sucker is brought in. Tesco hoovers out £1 in every £7 spent in the UK and does its level best to dodge tax on all of it (see many, many back issues of Private Eye), its delivery drivers have a whole six minutes to make each delivery and a couple of people I know in lower management say the pressure on all the staff is now awful. Still there are worse supermarkets – Asda, owned by the loathsome WalMart (see documentary The High Cost Of Low Prices), who has taken over Netto.

Do supermarkets provide massive choice at the lowest cost or are they ugly, dehumanising rat mazes that keep moving staples like bread and milk to lure you past chocolate and beer? Is it coincidence that the rise of the supermarket and that of obesity have occurred simultaneously? I know someone who was a meat packer and the same minced beef goes into different boxes (at different prices) for Tesco and M&S. The huge growth of these companies has transformed Britain from a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of bitter, fat, depressed, fearful till monkeys and left every city the same – identical supermarkets, American fake coffee houses, fast food places. It won’t be much longer till I need a satnav that’ll constantly remind me which city I’m in.

Still, as Alan Coren said of Sainsburys, “at least it keeps the riff-raff out of Waitrose”

I can see good arguments for this on both sides. By no means are Tesco perfect in terms of working conditions. So unless the ‘Left’ are going to actively campaign that all employers should have better T&C imposed from on high (yeah, like the Left will do anything of the sort) then Tesco and ASDA are as good employers as anyone.

In my book, anyone who hammers the greedy farmers cannot be all bad. What the ‘Left’ need to do is look at the bigger picture. Given that everyone accepts that Capitalism is not going away and that most of us would be dismayed if it did, then what is the alternative to the big supermarkets is there?

Oooh the irony, it stings: http://www.tesco.com/books/product.aspx?R=9780007158041&in_merch=1&in_merch_title=You+may+also+like&in_merch_name=

I do wish “Margaret Thatcher had never existed”.

Jim, none of the farmers I know are greedy, they’re not much better off than me and they work bloody hard.

I read that the new chariman of Tesco is Sir Richard Broadbent, the tosser behind the Customs bonded warehouse fiasco a few years ago and more recently of Barclays. Good enough reason for me to avoid them.

Come on Flying Rodent, you telling me that one brand of baked beans is enough? Give me a break, I like to choose from at least 12 different packages before I eat watered ketchup pods!

I’ve never bought the anti-Tesco stuff, and really dislike it when I see political activists (from all parties) campaigning against a Tesco or similar. My adoptive town has a Tesco, a Sainsbury and a thriving Commercial Street (no High Sts in this part of Yorkshire, at least not with shops). The local independents that’re there are actually Good Shops with a high level of service, reasonable prices and good products.

I don’t bemoan the loss of the crappy old stores that weren’t serving the customer well. I don’t eat meat, but those in the family that do like both the local butchers as well as Tesco, depending on what they’re looking to buy.

They’re a reasonable employer, bring in jobs and work with the local community. If local shops worry about them, it must be because their customers prefer the service they offer. Cheap food of acceptable quality is bloody useful, especially on our current household income, thanks very much.

I just find the whole anti-Tesco/supermarket thing one massive amount of snobbery.

Middle class types who think they are superior to the “masses” because they choose to shop at farmers markets instead of Tesco et all.

“Tesco PLC’s UK grocery market share rose in to 30.9% in the 12 wks of Y 2011 to June 12, according to Kantar World Panel Tuesday. Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer by sales, saw its market share rise from 30.8% for the same period last year.”
http://www.livetradingnews.com/tesco-market-share-rises-to-30-9-45277.htm

In mainstream, orthodox competition policy, a market share of 25% is usually considered sufficient for a supplier to be able to exercise market dominance. Try the government’s response in 2008 to the report of the Competition Commission on: The supply of groceries in the UK:

First, a significant number of local markets for grocery retailing are highly concentrated, and barriers to entry allow highly concentrated local markets to persist. Consumers suffer as a result of grocery retailers providing a poorer retail offer at stores in those areas and through higher prices.

Second, grocery retailers with buyer power can pass on excessive risk and unexpected costs to their suppliers. The CC believes that consumers suffer harm as a result of reduced investment and innovation in the supply chain.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/files/file47089.pdf

It’s all Aneurin Bevan’s fault.

Instead of forming a National Health Service he should have founded a National Food Service- all sustenance provided by the state, free at the point of delivery.

What could be more Fabian than that- no British citizen could ever have starved again. No money grabbing supermarkets leeching off the workers, and because we’d all be queueing up for our egalitarian ration of cabbage and potatoes, no obesity.

Instead he went with the NHS and look what happened. We ended up paying middle class know nothings £100k a year to dole out pain killers and anti-depressants whilst the capitalists make a profit from our need to eat.

What a tosser!!!!!

The supermarket concept was a child of the Great Recession. They worked and continue to thrive because they give people especially those on modest incomes what they want. The consumer rejected the high street because that is where they were being ripped-off and the consumer knew it. Forty years ago the average family spent just over 20% of their income on food and nonalcoholic drink. They now spend around 10%. So the average family now has more income to spend on other things i.e. redistribution delivered by the supermarkets. Now internet shopping is delivering creative destruction on the high street to those who can’t provide something that people want at a price that they are prepared to pay.

Speaking about total headline profits is utterly meaningless. They are big companies so the headline figure will be big. What matters is profit margin and the UK supermarkets make a profit margin of just over 3%. The local fishmonger will be operating at 5 to 6 times that profit margin. Therefore, small high street retailers make a higher profit margin than the supermarkets. The supermarkets do not put retailers on the high street out of business, it is their former customers who put them out of a self-evident failed business.

Spend £100 in Tesco and strangely enough the £100 does not stay with Tesco.

Just over £80 goes to employees, suppliers, landlords and local government.

About two-thirds of the remaining £20 goes to the fattest cat of them all in 11 Downing Street as corporation tax and VAT.

They retain about £5 for capital investment.

The shareholders who actually provide the capital to bring the whole thing together to bring you your dinner get £1.60 in dividends from that £100. The same providers of risk capital who are supporting 300,000 jobs in this country. So they and there is no other ‘ they ‘ as that is where Tesco’s profits go get roughly the price of a decent loaf of bread for their investment. I don’t suppose they are looking for much otherwise they would not invest in supermarkets. Although, a simple thanks would be nice.

Moreover, we are not even counting the tax from employees’ wages and suppliers’ profits that goes to the fat cat.

Jim mate I lived on a farm most of my life and sadly hammering the farmer is what’s putting up the price of food, a whole lamb for £25 quid, but you can buy a chicken for £1 of course it’s cost more to get the lamb ready for market and believe it or not the chicken feed cost more. Milk is still to low for farmers hence a farmer a week is going bust in my area, but me thinks your talking about the land owning gentry not farmers.

I have farming blood in my veins and I can tell you most of the farmers around me are earning in some placed less then your getting on benefits or min wage.

@16: “Instead of forming a National Health Service he should have founded a National Food Service- all sustenance provided by the state, free at the point of delivery.”

Instead, we got the Agriculture Act of 1947 brought in by Tom Williams -”the farmers’ friend” – minister for agriculture in Attlee’s Labour government 1945-51:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_Act_1947

That basic structure of supporting subsidies for agriculture created by the 1947 Act was retained until Britain joined the European Common Market in 1973.

The question depends on what you think most helps the less well-off maybe.

Cheaper food. making ‘middle class’ luxuries affordable and raising living standards. I remember one study showing at the height of the crash Tesco lowered prices on ‘essential’ food items in response to people feeling the pinch.

Vs.

Forcing people into expensive ‘local’ farmers markets. Supporting corner shops which exploit young staff and sometimes pay less than minimum wage. Not to mention worshiping dead Russian revolutionaries and the vanguard – which is bound to help the poor.

16. pagar

” It’s all Aneurin Bevan’s fault.

Instead of forming a National Health Service he should have founded a National Food Service- all sustenance provided by the state, free at the point of delivery. ”

They would probably have given the food away to the Soviet Union like our technology.

” In 1946 Soviet jet engine designers approached Stalin with a request to buy jet designs from Western sources to overcome design difficulties. Stalin is said to have replied: “What fool will sell us his secrets?” However, he gave his assent to the proposal, and Soviet scientists and designers traveled to the United Kingdom to meet Cripps and request the engines. To Stalin’s amazement, Cripps and the Labour government were perfectly willing to provide technical information on the Rolls-Royce Nene centrifugal-flow jet engine designed by RAF officer Frank Whittle, along with discussions of a licence to manufacture Nene engines. The Nene engine was promptly reverse-engineered and produced in modified form as the Soviet Klimov VK-1 jet engine, later incorporated into the MiG-15 which flew in time to deploy in combat against UN forces in North Korea in 1950, causing the loss of several B-29 bombers and cancellation of their daylight bombing missions over North Korea. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Cripps

“What fool will sell us his secrets?” Just ask the British mugs.

“Just ask the British mugs.”

At the time of the sale of the Nene jet engine, Britain desperately needed foreign exchange. Besides centrifugal-flow jet engines were shortly superceded by the superior coaxial flow engines. The Soviets bought an out-moded engine but the credit for the aeronautical design, avionics and handling of the Mig15 rightly belongs to Soviet designers. Recall too that George Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for his fable: Animal Farm, because it was deemed insulting to our Soviet Allies.

Try this on who saved VolksWagen after WW2:

Before the war, Volkswagen was one of the centrepieces of Hitler’s economic programs. However, hostilities broke out before the newly constructed plant at KdF Stadt could begin full production. Only a handful of civilian Beetles were built. A few more were built during the war.

On April 10, 1945, the American Army occupied KdF Stadt. Which was renamed Wolfsburg on May 25, after a local castle, and the factory was turned over to the British. As was the practice with many former Axis plants, they put it to work repairing military vehicles. From May until June, along with the other work, factory labourers assembled 1,785 Volkswagens from components mothballed since the plant was converted to wartime production. The cars were assigned to the occupation forces and the German Post Office. Since the factory was not considered to have been in civilian production before the War, it was assumed the plant eventually would be dismantled and the tools distributed to the allies and formerly occupied countries as war reparations under the Morgenthau Plan.
In August, the British Army sent Major Ivan Hirst to Wolfsburg. While the Beetle owes its birth to Ferdinand Porsche and Adolf Hitler, it owes its life to Ivan Hirst.
http://ivanhirst.com/british-major-who-saved-volkswagen

Forcing people into expensive ‘local’ farmers markets.

Yes, I can’t help but notice that the post is about working for Tesco et al and whether it’s wise to put quite so many eggs in one basket.

After all, people who hold massive amounts of human and capital leverage on the economy aren’t historically that keen on, say, democracy, because it has a habit of trying to please lots of people, rather than a small number of people. Not that they have anything to worry about from the present lot or their predecessors, mind.

The supermarkets do not put retailers on the high street out of business, it is their former customers who put them out of a self-evident failed business.

This is one way of looking at it. If I’d owned or been employed by a small business that collapsed between 1979 and 2011 because I was forced into direct competition with a massive herd of bajillion-dollar multinational retail brontosaurs, I might have some hard questions to ask.

I might ask why all those election manifestos were filled with lies about helping out small business and entrepreneurs, for instance, when the practice was telling them to piss off and die if they couldn’t compete with the bulk-buying behemoths. Still, I suppose all those newly-unemployed voters could marvel at the wonders of the market while they were scanning the paper for far shittier jobs after getting paid off.

There’s the experience of the Americans to consider, after all – it was they who first got the big-box retail experience, and the practical effect has been the intentional creation of a working class who have to shop cheap at Walmart because the only jobs around are shitty, low-paying jobs like the ones you get at Walmart.

I mean, here you have a nation founded on the Jeffersonian idea that every man should control his own labour and means of production, so that he’d be beholden to no man – free, in other words. The Walmart experience looks a lot more Chinese, maybe, or if not outright Soviet.

Could that happen here? Is it happening already? Who knows, but Asda aren’t doing to badly these days. Still, never mind. Somebody posh somewhere thinks the plebs should eat organic rhubarb, or something.

Robert @ 18

I am not having a got at every farmer, just the ultra greedy ones who are leeching of the rest of us. I would have no problem with us making up the incomes of the poor, we do that already, but it is surely beyond the pale to expect us to shell out for Tory parasites?

Lord Benyon has managed to scrounge £2 million in handouts, not bad for a man in a political Party with a policy of capping benefits at £26,000, eh?

I recon that is an overpayment of £1,974,000

Robert @ 18

I am not having a got at every farmer, just the ultra greedy ones who are leeching of the rest of us. I would have no problem with us making up the incomes of the poor, we do that already, but it is surely beyond the pale to expect us to shell out for Tories?

Lord Benyon has managed to scrounge £2 million in handouts, not bad for a man in a political Party with a policy of capping benefits at £26,000, eh?

I recon that is an overpayment of £1,974,000

Flying Rodent @ 23

I’d owned or been employed by a small business that collapsed between 1979 and 2011 because I was forced into direct competition with a massive herd of bajillion-dollar multinational retail brontosaurs, I might have some hard questions to ask.

That happens every day, though, doesn’t it? Everybody has to compete with everybody else and people go under all the time. We have seen profitable companies lose out to cheap imports and the ‘losers’ can go and fuck themselves. Everywhere you look around there are closed factories that used to make stuff, but where closed down thanks to cheap labour imported goods.

I bet the butcher Jim will have a TV, computer and a car, shoes etc. Every one bough via the free market and with nothing but cost in mind. I bet that a local factory once used to build those things and when they went under he never even gave a second’s thought. I bet it never occured to him that his customers where also employed making the things that he bought from the cheapest source possible. So now these people will have taken pay cuts would rather buy mince from the supermarket and all of a sudden, poor old Butcher Jim has no-one to sell meat to? Hmm, funny that. Butcher Jim was quite happy turning up at PC World for his shinny new PC and now he thinks people are shunning the high street.

What goes around, comes around.

” This is one way of looking at it. If I’d owned or been employed by a small business that collapsed between 1979 and 2011 because I was forced into direct competition with a massive herd of bajillion-dollar multinational retail brontosaurs, I might have some hard questions to ask. ”

You are assuming or implying that the small business should somehow be exempt from competition as the world owes them a living. The key thing is not to compete, but avoid competition with others who are better at than you. Retailers who specialise or provide some sort of additional service are perfectly capable of thriving. Price is not the only consideration for consumers.

Woolworths collapsed and everyone said how sad they were because they had fond memories of the shop. Yet, the fond memories did not stretch to actually going to the shop. Their concept was easy to copy and that is what other retailers did and out-competed them. However, if you do something that is not easily replicated and it might just be customer relations, then others can’t just copy.

HMV are in serious trouble and will be lucky to survive because internet shopping is killing their business model. What they sell can easily be bought online. Who other than innovation is to blame for that. They have no more right to exist than anyone else. Ultimately, it is the consumer that decides who survives. Sounds like democracy to me.

The UK high street is being transformed and most of the current empty shops will probably never come back. The retailers who are failing are the marginal ones who were already in trouble and only needed a few per cent drop in sales to finish them off. Rents will fall and local authorities will raise less business rates. So, they will need to think creatively how to use the empty space because most of the high streets will never be full again as we can’t force people to shop where they do not want to shop.

@26: “You are assuming or implying that the small business should somehow be exempt from competition as the world owes them a living. The key thing is not to compete, but avoid competition with others who are better at than you. Retailers who specialise or provide some sort of additional service are perfectly capable of thriving. Price is not the only consideration for consumers.”

Exactly. And as for FR’s Jim the butcher, I suspect he was simply not very good at business. Faced with supermarket competition, a local business must accept that it cannot win on price but that it can win on quality, value-added and service. Which is exactly what my local butcher has done by not only providing excellent meat products but also stocking a select range of wine, pies, tea and coffee. Though he’s up against, Tesco (x2), Sainsburys, Waitrose and now Asda, he’s thrived for the last decade…

@26: “So, they will need to think creatively how to use the empty space because most of the high streets will never be full again as we can’t force people to shop where they do not want to shop.”

The point that the Competition Commission was making – see link @15 to the government’s response in 2008 to the report of the Competition Commission on the UK grocery market – is that ownership of the supermarket chains is now too concentrated so that in many localities shoppers only have (increasingly) limited choice between competing chains with probably less in prospect because many of the feasible sites for new stores are already in the ownership of the dominant chain(s).

Recall also that in this context, Tesco’s share of the UK grocery market is already about equal to the combined market shares of Sainsbury’s and Asda. The Commission proposed that in future local market concentration could be a valid consideration when local authorities process planning applications for new stores. Arguably, part of the current vacancy problem on high streets is because shop rents are too high as this is manifestly not a market where prices readily adjust to the balance between supply and demand.

Seems like a fair analysis, Richard. And yet, I wonder who the big fish are going to feed on, once it’s just them and the plankton left in the pond.

What goes around, comes around.

…as for FR’s Jim the butcher, I suspect he was simply not very good at business.

This kind of thing would be lots more fun if a leading statesman tried to sell it to the nation, I think, rather than restricting it to blog threads. The super-wealthy, slicing and dicing your society into a self-selecting minority of Awesome Entrepreneurial Ubermenchen and a great mass of feckless losers who utterly deserve to be eaten by the them, forever!

And, to return to the points I was making in the post, these are very people that the planet’s John Rentouls would like to invite to help out with schools, hospitals and the criminal justice system, that we might all bask in their benevolence. Nice.

It’s not the food they supply that’s at issue. It’s their squeezing of the supply chain and tactics against local authorities who dare quibble with them that grates the most. That and their monopolisation of so many town centres and public spaces.
The unhealthiest thing is as Bob B alludes to, their market dominance, and the unprecedented power and impact that gives them over so many people’s lives, but little by way of direct accountability: so influential have they become,they effectively can tell the Govt what to do and not vice versa.
Oh, and Rentoul is still self-describing as Left-wing? Another stain on the Independent’s record for accurate and wholly honest writing…

Tescos and the other multinationals ability to sell you food and other products at below the production cost is reliant on their exploitation of the people producing these items, be they British farmers or even more criminally producers in the so-called developing world .
Gary Youinge’s recent piece on Haiti,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/03/haitians-singing-president-democratic-legitimacy?INTCMP=SRCH
that touched on the fate of garment makers there who are providing your retail outlets with their cut price designer goods is just one example of how wrong this is.
I am really tired of hearing self-styled left of centre/liberal commentators sing the praises of these rapacious multinationals.
Human rights and equality are international and universal or they are nothing and I’m not sorry if that means you pay more for your consumer habits.

The Daily Mail wouldn’t lie about something like this:

‘Greedy’ Tesco orders councils to remove recycling bins from car parks so supermarket can cash in with its own
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390086/Greedy-Tesco-ordering-councils-remove-recycling-bins-car-parks-supermarket-cash-in.html

Fact is, they dominate because those supposedly representing us, in both local and national government, are in the pockets of the corporate monsters. The council have a big chunk of brownfield wasteland, Tesco, Asda or whoever, they have the cash. It’s a choice made by local government to sell to these giants, rather than looking at other potential buyers. How often do people say things like,”there’s nothing around here, nothing for the kids to do, no alternative to going into the town centres, with the piss-heads, junkies, idiots looking for a punch-up?” And yet, rarely do local councils decide in favour of leisure and entertainment, if one of the big name stores is also after the same piece of land. It would be better if more venues were built that provided something for the local community and surrounding areas, instead of yet another monolith to the free market motto,’big is better, greed is good’. I do have issues with them over the way they operate, squeezing suppliers, human rights issues abroad and so on, but the main thing that pisses me off is the sheer number of identikit clones. We need more buildings that are sympathetic, not just to the character of the more picturesque places, but to the general mood of the communities, particularly in the more urban, rougher looking towns. If you keep building synthetic, soulless, uninspiring warehouses, you may create jobs in the area, but you also create a sense of duplication and monotony, which results in either, people leaving before they get sucked in and trapped, or they just feel trapped and become apathetic, never considering what else they might do, or where they might go. Convenience and value for money are certainly a part of modern life, but do we really want to see the same thing everywhere? Life’s hard enough, why make it worse by increasing the dullness factor?

flyingrodent,

There’s the experience of the Americans to consider, after all – it was they who first got the big-box retail experience, and the practical effect has been the intentional creation of a working class who have to shop cheap at Walmart because the only jobs around are shitty, low-paying jobs like the ones you get at Walmart.

Doesn’t your argument work the other way ’round, though? If say there are expensive butchers and no supermarkets, matey boy will be spending loads on food.

Isn’t this really be about whether or not there has been an improvement in discretionary incomes and whatnot?

Tescos and the other multinationals ability to sell you food and other products at below the production cost is reliant on their exploitation of the people producing these items, be they British farmers or even more criminally producers in the so-called developing world.

My guess is that producers in the ‘developing world’ are more disadvantaged by ‘developed world’ tariffs and subsidies and other barriers to trade than they are by multinationals – and that those same producers would would love to have an opportunity to compete on a level playing field with EU and US producers and sell to multinationals.

It isn’t a level playing field though.

Small retailers on the high street are often dependant upon other external factors to determine whether they have customers. If car parking is too high, the town centre is untidy, and the streets are full of drunk people intimidating shoppers, then the best customer service and products are not going to help you. The success of supermarkets is partly down to the fact they offer free parking, security guards and the fact fellow shoppers won’t be drunk or looking like they want to mug you.

Generally those independent retailers that have survived have been those that have been able to compete on a level playing field. i.e. those who are surrounded by other good shops, in locations that offer a pleasant shopping space, and where parking is cheap or free (sometimes supermarkets help the local high street when they offer free parking in close proximity to a high street). Every good retailer knows the key to success is location, and that’s why they tend to cluster in places where the overall shopping experience is a positive one.

Which means that if local authorities want a thriving high street, they need to focus more on tackling anti-social behaviour, making the streets nice places to be (i.e have green space, places to sit down, sheltered places for when it rains, non-retail attractions such as a museum or library, ensure the high street isn’t clogged with traffic, there is good adequate parking provided for free). All of which are things middle class towns find easier to achieve than large urban local authorities due to the way local authorities are funded and also the fact they have fewer social problems in the first place.

It really isn’t just about supermarkets being better run businesses, they benefit a lot more from external factors than their overpaid execs would have you believe.

This is as much about t

Doesn’t your argument work the other way ’round, though? If say there are expensive butchers and no supermarkets, matey boy will be spending loads on food.

In the sense that one used to involve a retailer charging a justifiable price and paying his/her employees a reasonable wage, because he/she can’t exert the same market control as Walmart…

…While the other is a system of charging supercheap prices by squeezing suppliers and paying shitpence, in co-ordination with a series of other knock-down price/terrible wage-paying employers, in an America-wide economy that doesn’t even pretend to care that it can never provide full employment, thus creating a dependent class of customers/employees who can never afford to shop anywhere that isn’t Walmart or its competitors?

Maybe, I don’t know. I think the difference is that the former used to be called “business”, while the latter looks a lot like a conspiracy against the public, constructed entirely for the benefit and enrichment of a super-wealthy clan of about twelve people.

I mean, I use Walmart as the example because thankfully, Tesco doesn’t operate like that. Yet.

I’ve worked in a small shop – when the minimum wage came in I got a £1.50 pay rise. When the Social Chapter was brought in, I got paid holidays for the first time in my life. I’ve known plenty of other people who’ve worked in small shops too – none of them had many good words to say about their employers either.

I also know people who work in supermarkets. Sure, they’d like a bigger pay packet (who wouldn’t?) but their pay and conditions are better than any I’ve had.

I also remember when I was a kid how the local small shops operated a cartel, and refused to sell small amounts of food to poor people or pensioners (it was too much trouble to bother weighing it out). No wonder that when the first supermarket opened in the area (Sainsburys) we all flocked there.

I get really angry when the middle class trendy lefties go on about how we all want to pay more money for food. As one previous commenter has pointed out, these people spend more on Apple products than my wife and I spend on food in a year. Without Tesco, Lidl, Asda and Morrisons we’d be even more skint than we are now.

I’d also like to point out that when tossers like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall go on about how we should all pay 15 quid for a chicken, people like us used to keep our own chickens and would have been members of a local pig club where neighbours clubbed together to buy a pig and fed it swill from household scraps. This is how working class people like us made ends meet. With the current laws making swill feeding of pigs illegal, and restrictions on my estate on chicken keeping, these sort of money saving measures are now untenable. Yes we grow a considerable amount of our vegetables (half decent garden and two greenhouses), but many of the newer houses don’t have enough garden to swing a cat in.

Many people in my area keep lurchers – say no more, and there are plenty of shotguns and rifles (properly licenced of course) about. Doubtless though the trendies would like to restrict these even further than they already are.

Meanwhile they carry on waffling on about organic olives, chorizo and lamb chops from the farmers’ market at prices that would mean we’d need a bank loan to eat.

when the minimum wage came in I got a £1.50 pay rise.

When I worked in a newsagent in 1994, I got £1.52 per hour. My friend who worked at Tesco round the corner got a princely 30p an hour more than that. I started making the minimum wage in 1999, bar work – a customer on the night shift at the same Tesco pulled in 20p more an hour. I’d take the latter over the former any day, without hesitation, since I was skint a lot then, but let’s not pretend that the difference is night and day. It isn’t – they’re both shit wages.

…middle class trendy lefties… these people spend more on Apple products than my wife and I spend on food in a year… tossers like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall… Doubtless though the trendies would like to restrict (guns and domestic farming) even further than they already are… Meanwhile they carry on waffling on about organic olives, chorizo and lamb chops.

As soon as these iPod-toting, gun-theiving, pig-stealing, chorizo-waving, television-appearing trendies show up pal, I’ll be delighted to tell them all about how the wealthiest businesses in the UK freed you from the clutches of an exploitative cartel. Otherwise, there’s just me, and I don’t look or sound much like Jamie Oliver.

What `lefty` does the whole olive/Fearningly Whittingwhatsit axis? These aren’t ‘lefties` they are liberals at best but probably centre rightists like Hugh, a good old Etonian packaged up by TV to sell advertising.

There are problems with Tescos ability to control its suppliers, forcing them to lower prices or starve (its called the race to the bottom), but as far as i recall it is the Co-Op which pays the worst deal to milk farmers for example.

What any real lefty, and i cant see many here, would be bothered about is the ownership of Tescos. Like all out major business Tescos is just a subsidiary of banking. Financial institutions own the majority of its shares just like they do BP, Sainsburys, yada yada…

Tescos should continue to operate, but it is too big to be allowed to be in private hands. It should be nationalised, its executives should pay back a truth and reconciliation tax to the British people, say 90pc of pay while at the company. And if they don’t they should be jailed.

The above is happening in our town now – we fight but they seem to have the upper hand all the time. My husband checked and in around 10 local cases where there was widespread outcry against them Tesco still prevailed – are there brown envelopes being circulated?

My problem is that they had a small store in the middle of town in a residential area with some land attached – they now want to open 18 hours a day, selling liquor, and 24 hours in December – we have problems here with drunks as it is – but we feel we are fighting a losing battle.

@ Red Snapper

“I’d also like to point out that when tossers like Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall go on about how we should all pay 15 quid for a chicken, people like us used to keep our own chickens and would have been members of a local pig club where neighbours clubbed together to buy a pig and fed it swill from household scraps. This is how working class people like us made ends meet. With the current laws making swill feeding of pigs illegal, and restrictions on my estate on chicken keeping, these sort of money saving measures are now untenable.”

A note on this: the reason people advocate the use of free-range chicken is not that they think it would be just swell if we all paid more for our food, but that they don’t think getting cheaper chicken justifies torturing the animals for their entire existence. All things being equal, I’d obviously put the wellbeing of humans first, but it’s not like chicken is an essential foodstuff. We already have laws banning people from kicking their dogs or cats, so it’s not clear why we’re still allowed to treat chickens much worse on an industrial scale.

I’m strict about eating free-range chicken. I’m also not exactly rich, so this means I eat chicken less often than I would like and make do with cheaper meats or vegetarian food the rest of the time. As for your difficulties keeping chickens: I sympathise, and perhaps the law should be changed, but that’s no reason to label people “tossers” just because they’re against animals being tortured.

We should not really be blaming Tesco/ASDA/Walmart for the fact that there are too many good jobs being replaced by shitty jobs. That has nothing to do with these companies, you need to focus on the Government and or the people closing decent factories. I can fully understand why a local authority will happily allow Tesco to open up a store when a manufacturing plant ships out to the Far East, for example. In those cases turn your ire upon the company who outsource, not the local authority who are at least attempting to fill the vacuum.

If we are complaining about the terms and conditions that they offer workers, then you need to look at the Government who allow massive companies to treat their workers so unfairly.

As for treating the Third World producers so badly, well you need to look at the tariffs and protectionism that we invoke.

As for farmers complaining about the cost of supplying to the big four? Meh, happens everyday in the real World. Everyone else has to compete with everyone else, so why do farmers deserve better? No-one gets a subsidy to the extent a farmer gets, but memory manufacturers get it in the stones about ten years ago and no one demanded special treatment for them.

I think you can like the supermarket system – which indeed has many merits – without liking the *market share* of a particular player. Certainly that should be a strong factor when a particular supermarket asks to open a new site.

There are also some practices – like site blocking – which could be addressed to free up the market. (I advocate a tax on unused property, but then again I always do!)

Coolfonz: “Tescos should continue to operate, but it is too big to be allowed to be in private hands. It should be nationalised, its executives should pay back a truth and reconciliation tax to the British people, say 90pc of pay while at the company. And if they don’t they should be jailed.”

God bless the internet

@OP, Flying Rodent: “I’ve always thought that cursing out Tesco or TK Maxx is usually a political error myself…”

Do you mean political conversations, FR? In that case, cursing out the big boys will win support from farmers, market competitors and small manufacturers. But cursing out will alienate most ordinary people. I’m one of the olive and chorizo munching professional classes, but I still like to pay a sensible price for commodity goods.

You are entitled to hate the idea, but doesn’t this conundrum tie in with Blue Labour concepts of identity and mutual support? We want our High (or Commercial) Street to be busy, lots of interesting shops and interesting shoppers. Which may be true in some places. But reality is that many small shops don’t and can’t work (as a private individual, the founder may not have the resources for market research or even a decent location). Lots of shoppers are uninterested by the opportunities around them.

If you change minds (and/or shops), you may improve opportunities for small shopkeepers, which in turn is good for small producers. It takes a couple of minutes to check the prices at the local trader, to decide whether you shop elsewhere. Tesco or Woolworths (they didn’t, really?) won’t go bust if you buy a reel of cotton or local tomatoes on the street.

Big stores are here to stay (their practices will be challenged by increased energy/distribution costs, but they’ll work it out). Small shops — not necessarily deli/boutique enterprises — are more fragile. What would happen if Tesco moved into the street corner newsagent business?

There is a consencus that independent shops and organic food are for the well off only. I do most of my food shopping at a local farm shop where the majority of products are grown locally and more than half are organic yet I don’t spend any more than I did at Tesco’s. The quality is incomparable, the food at this shop being properly fresh and selected for taste rather than appearance and transportability as at supermarkets. There is also the complex issue of cost to society as a whole. The ultra cheap food on offer at supermarkets has come from intensive “farming” which does huge and often irreversible damage to the environment, the cost of which is not picked up by the producers or consumers but by taxpayers and future generations. If you can afford to go on holidays, buy a car, go to the pub etc., then you can afford to boycott the large supermarket chains. You might also improve your health and meet more human beings whilst you are at it.

Wibble Wibble: Well, it’s not likely to happen I admit, but the private sector failed in 2007/08. Tescos is a subsidiary of financial institutions – i should know this as i work in one, you could have a quick look at a Reuters/Bloomberg terminal to check out who they are – its failure would be a disaster. Short term at least. Changing its ownership from private to state wouldn’t be difficult. Let markets work where they work best, at street level. Don’t let single private institutions have so much power.
As for senior executives, they are making money off the back of British people so let them contribute in return.
Just reasonable left wing thought…

@48. Mark James: “The ultra cheap food on offer at supermarkets has come from intensive “farming” which does huge and often irreversible damage to the environment, the cost of which is not picked up by the producers or consumers but by taxpayers and future generations.”

It is possibly true that the cost of farm pollution run-off to water ways is not being collected/charged by water companies. However, the costs are so immense that it is implausible that water companies do not act; maybe they can’t spot those costs, or that the dealing is out of view. But you can draw a glass of water from the tap and drink it without hesitation.

‘@49.

Tesco employees own 2.5% of the shares. Retail investors around 9.5%. Institutions the rest i.e. pension funds and insurance companies predominately. Banks owing Tesco is an absurd statement. Banks are proxy buyers for their customers even if they appear as the buyer. If a HBOS customer asks them to buy Tesco shares then HBOS will appear on the share register. However, it is the customer who owns the shares.

Your nationalisation of supermarkets and presumably the food distribution network is interesting. Although, probably best to go the whole way and nationalise food production while we are at it. How long do you reckon would it take before we were all starving. Two years or do you think the state would manage to get to three years?

@50. Charlieman
“It is possibly true that the cost of farm pollution run-off to water ways is not being collected/charged by water companies. However, the costs are so immense that it is implausible that water companies do not act; maybe they can’t spot those costs, or that the dealing is out of view. But you can draw a glass of water from the tap and drink it without hesitation.”

I work in the water industry. The cost of this is already passed on to the customer.

If farmers knocked this off and people stopped putting fats, oils and greases down their sinks then we could knock around £100 off the average bill.

Where the hell are people shopping where their local Sainsburys/Tesco is less expensive than their local independent retailers?

I shop at local independents, not just because I’m a horrible leftie supporting local small business and the local economy, but because I couldn’t afford to eat fresh fruit and veg if I bought it from Tesco.

“Two years or do you think the state would manage to get to three years?”

Well, HBOS, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB seem to be doing rather better than they were before the state got involved.

So it might be worth a try, no?

[Cue long-winded version of "ah, but that's different"...]

@Charlieman: Do you mean political conversations, FR?

Yes. Being skint all the time is bloody horrible, and skint people aren’t likely to care about the wider economic costs of being able to buy food at cheaper prices. Thus, battering the big box retailers isn’t going to be popular with the man/woman in the street, not because they have any particular loyalty to any single company, but because BBRs make their lives a little easier in the short term. The ability to provide enough food at an affordable rate is a basic requirement for any decent society, and isn’t to be sniffed at.

reality is that many small shops don’t and can’t work…

Largely because they’ve been deliberately placed in direct competition with planet-crushing retail collosi, with whom hardly anyone can compete. You can view that as a miracle of the free market or as a result of successive governments’ fellatial embrace of the super-retailers at the expense of small business, but it’s not a cost-free event and it didn’t just happen out of nowhere via the miracle of capital.

Think planning laws, competition and monopoly laws, taxation etc. It was a long-term scheme aimed at capturing a massive, captive customer base, intentionally targeted at hoovering up everyone else’s business and implemented with varying degrees of official connivance or acquiesence.

The upside is cheaper food for the customer – hooray! The downside is that we’ve handed vast, democracy-defying power to massive retail brontosauruses and intentionally taken power away from everybody else. As Jamie K. points out below, you can’t boycott supermarkets any more, because some percentage of almost everything you buy is going straight to the supermarkets eventually. What we now have is gargantuan, Soviet-style organisations taking a guaranteed cut of the wages of most men and women in the country. How does that affect democracy if, say, we democratically decide to raise taxation or something?

http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2008/02/gosplan-that-wo.html

Also note that it seems to be down to me, a half-thinking lefty internet bullshitter, to point out that local business is good for local areas in keeping wealth in the area, rather than sucking it up into great central funds for distribution far away. Back in the day, it used to be Tories who would defend the interests of local small business – now, Tories and Labour don’t simply regard it as the absolute right of mega-corporations to gut your towns and turn them into cash cows for shareholders. As the linked John Rentoul piece shows, the political mainstream regards any objection to that plan is some kind of ludicrous, Communist lunacy.

Strange days, indeed.

@ 53 Ben2

“Where the hell are people shopping where their local Sainsburys/Tesco is less expensive than their local independent retailers?”

Um, most places? Don’t get me wrong, basics like fruit and veg are generally cheaper (and often better) at your local greengrocers, and a family cornershop might give you a better price on brand names. But between special offers and discount brands, your overall shop is going to be cheaper at Tesco (maybe not at Sainsbury’s).

The orange juice in my fridge cost about 50p a liter. The cola on top of my fridge cost about 50p for TWO liters. The tins of peeled plum tomatos in my cupboard were about 30p each. All of them taste just as good as the brand-name equivalents, which would have cost me around three times as much.

I’ve never found an independent with prices that good. Plus a supermarket is a lot less time-expensive, because everything’s in one place. And there’s a bigger selection on offer. And I get ClubCard vouchers…

@ 54. Neil

Well it is pretty easy to point out that the state took an equity share in those organisations and are not running them on a hands-on basis. We could actually look at the last time the state was proactive in food production and distribution. The period during and after WW11 known for food shortages and rationing.

Flying Rodent makes some good points but his argument about ” guaranteed cut of the wages of most men and women in the country ” would carry more weight if there was a period in the past when our food producers and retailers were giving us food for free. That does not describe the past and the opposite was the case when they took a larger cut of wages.

I’ve no skin in this game and hardly ever visit supermarkets. However, the issue tends to expose the intrinsic conservatism of some lefties. It is all there in the idealising of the past and the small. Farmer Brown and Grantham grocers become heroic figures rather than the rent-seekers that they really were. The only thing that is not allowed to be small is the state. Moreover, I just see the same continuum of the same implicit badgering of those on low-incomes that has gone on for two centuries. They shag too much- they drink too much- they smoke too much- they consume too many drugs- they eat the wrong food and now they shop at the unapproved shops. Obviously people are incapable of thinking for themselves as they are just mindless drones who can’t resist the allure of corporate advertising. They need to be controlled and regulated by the people who know what is best for them. The anti-supermarket lobby tends to consist of the same gaggle of middle class puritans who want to regulate every other aspect of behaviour so controlling where people shop I suppose is consistent.

I would take them more serious if in their idealising of domestic agriculture, they called for the elimination of our number one largest agricultural/commodity import. However, hell will freeze over before they do that as they tend to be consumers of our number one import. I am speaking of course about wine.

Flying Rodent makes some good points but his argument about ” guaranteed cut of the wages of most men and women in the country ” would carry more weight if there was a period in the past when our food producers and retailers were giving us food for free.

I don’t see any reason to choose between “Total state control of everything” or “Total corporate control”, really. We’ve had neither in recent years and I don’t think either is desirable. Nonetheless, I really think that my argument carries lots of weight because there’s a historical analogue for the scenario I’m describing, and it’s the East India Company. Nowhere near that yet, of course, but it’s there as precedent.

However, the issue tends to expose the intrinsic conservatism of some lefties. It is all there in the idealising of the past and the small. Farmer Brown and Grantham grocers become heroic figures rather than the rent-seekers that they really were. The only thing that is not allowed to be small is the state.

I was thinking less “Let’s lionise the Arkwrights of yesteryear” than I am “Let’s not massively empower the Murdochs of tomorrow without thinking very hard about what we’re doing first”.

implicit badgering of those on low-incomes… They need to be controlled and regulated by the people who know what is best for them… middle class puritans who want to regulate every other aspect of behaviour so controlling where people shop I suppose is consistent.

Notice how easily and quickly the rhetoric of liberty from the awful, oppressive, middle class, olive-sucking pasta-rolling blah blah Commies is deployed… Very coincidentally to defend the interests of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful company? So did I! And all of it dependent upon “implicit” badgering, too.

I am speaking of course about wine.

I’m more of a cooking lager or whisky and water man, myself.

I wasn’t really inferring that you were one of the joyless Puritans, Flying Rodent. Unfortunately, you are just misguidedly doing their bidding. Their spiritual ancestors were the Puritans and ‘ social reformers ‘ and the descendants are the type of people who exercise their zealotry through badgering those on low-incomes on smoking, drinking, what they should eat and where they should shop. I am pretty sure you break all their rules so you do not count as a zealot. A country run by Tesco as opposed to a country run by the type of people who think it is their place to tell the public how many portions of fruit and veg to eat a day is not such a difficult choice. At least Tesco will make some people happy with their cheap booze. I am sure someone will come up with a wheeze to put a minimum price on that. Oh wait.

@57. Richard W: “They shag too much- they drink too much- they smoke too much- they consume too many drugs- they eat the wrong food and now they shop at the unapproved shops.”

You forgot to mention that they wear the wrong clothes, the clothes that identify them as chavs to be demonised.

By circuitous routes, campaigns against Tesco or McDonalds feed contempt for the underclass. If campaigners construct arguments based on telling people what to do/how to live their lives, they deserve to lose. If they create arguments about different ways of doing things, they have a chance of winning and a chance to contribute socially. Cough, real Big Society.

@55. flyingrodent quoting me: “reality is that many small shops don’t and can’t work…”

Statistics show that most small enterprises fail very quickly. Without competition from a big chain, they’d fail anyway. It’s not because the owners are lazy or stupid; it’s down to luck and opportunity and capital to carry on when there aren’t many customers. I agree, however, that a big chain operating in your market creates a massive loss of opportunity.

…you are just misguidedly doing their bidding.

It’s true, the totalitarian left have crushed my will like a fragile little eggshell. Now, I don’t even speak without express permission from the Politburo, or something.

@FR

I agree with most of your points. What can be done about it though?

What can be done about it though?

I’m not the surgeon, I just make the diagnosis. Things being the way they are, probably nothing unless Tesco get caught doing something nasty to the families of some murder victims or Afghanistan war casualties.