Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
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we feel we should be afforded the protection of such a policy. Unless of course we are to have lifeless local communities that are cultural and environmental deserts,’ they wrote. ‘The survival of our community is at stake. We canvass your support in our endeavours against this appeal by Sainsbury’s.’
But prospects didn’t look good for the objectors. Sainsbury’s clearly had a war chest of money to pay for the costs of the appeal and could afford the best planning and legal team that money could buy. The whole affair had become political too. The outcome of such planning appeals is usually determined by the planning inspector. Pimlico objectors had been informed in writing in 1996 that this would be the case. After the general election in 1997, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Secretary of State for Environment and Transport, had rescinded this decision and decided to ‘call in’ the appeal and personally determine its outcome. Questions were asked in the House of Commons by Tim Yeo, the shadow Environment spokesman. He pressed Mr Prescott to explain why he had intervened in this particular appeal, and asserted that four months after doing so Mr Prescott had met Lord Sainsbury, a well-known donor to the Labour Party. Mr Prescott confirmed to him that the subject of ‘mixed-use housing and retail development’ was amongst the topics discussed with the Sainsbury’s chairman. He also confirmed that he had held no similar meetings with objectors to Sainsbury’s Pimlico proposal. Mr Prescott seemed to be rather keen on listening to supermarkets. His department had just approved a scheme to build a huge and controversial out-of-town superstore near Richmond in Surrey. This had been hailed by planners and developers as Labour signalling that it was relaxing the tougher planning regulations imposed by the former Conservative Environment Secretary, John Gummer. In the event, the inquiry inspector found in favour of Sainsbury’s and Mr Prescott agreed. Sainsbury’s got the planning permission it was after.
Within ten days of Sainsbury’s opening, leaflets were dropping through Pimlico residents’ letterboxes. ‘Support your local shopkeepers and stalls,’ they read. Evidently, Pimlico’s independent shopkeepers were already feeling the pinch. Three months after Sainsbury’s opening, one local shopkeeper told me that his retail sales had dropped by 18 per cent and that he was increasingly dependent on restaurant wholesale orders for the viability of his business. The ultimate irony, effectively a two-fingered gesture to community objectors, was that this was no ordinary Sainsbury’s, rather a ‘marketplace’ store, in the mould of Sainsbury’s Market at Bluebird in the King’s Road. It was to be called the ‘Market at Pimlico’. It had ten of what Sainsbury’s calls ‘specialist counters’, including a master butcher, a fishmonger, a charcuterie and a hot carvery with ‘tailor-made’ sandwiches. The message seemed to be crystal clear. Why bother with Tachbrook market or any of the existing 165 local shops when you could drive past the lot of them and shop in Sainsbury’s marketplace? Who needs a thriving independent shopping centre when you can settle for Sainsbury’s counterfeit lookalike?
In the world of British supermarketing, there is a curious gender imbalance. The bulk of shoppers in supermarkets are women. Stores typically operate with a predominantly female workforce under a male manager. As you go up the supermarket tree to the people who make the decisions about what we will eat, the personnel become overwhelmingly male. When you get to chief executive level, you find a handful of fabulously well-remunerated men who are confident that they know more about what the average customer wants than she knows herself. In a sense they do. They can tell us what we want. They know they have a captive audience.
British supermarket chains say that they must be keeping consumers happy or else we would simply push away our trolleys and take our business elsewhere. As one industry commentator put it, ‘They [consumers] have voted with their feet – or rather their car keys – patronising the supermarkets and superstores at the expense of other outlets … The vast gleaming superstores … St Tesco on the roundabout, St Sainsbury at the interchange, open seven days a week, 24 hours a day – are the clearest possible evidence that consumers are getting what they want.’ It is true that in the UK, unlike every other country in Europe, food shopping, for a majority of people, has become synonymous with supermarket shopping. For many people, however, that state of affairs is not a matter of positive choice but the line of least resistance. In a 2001 Radio 4 poll, 71 per cent of listeners who phoned in agreed with the motion that ‘We would all be better off without supermarkets’. In 1999, research carried out by the retail consultancy Verdict revealed that six million shoppers – that’s one in four of all shoppers – were dissatisfied with the supermarket where they bought their groceries. Two million of these shoppers wanted to abandon shopping in superstores entirely. In 2003, a NOP poll conducted on behalf of the New Economics Foundation found that 70 per cent of respondents would prefer to shop locally rather than in an out-of-town supermarket, while 50 per cent thought supermarkets’ size and strength should be controlled to stop them putting local independent retailers out of business.
Even Jamie Oliver, the celebrity face of Sainsbury’s, seems to prefer shopping in any place other than a supermarket. Mr Oliver has said that working with Sainsbury’s has given him the opportunity to ‘influence the food choices of millions of people’. But opening up his personal food shopping address book for Observer Food Monthly, he enthusiastically reeled off a list of his favourite independent fishmongers, butchers, specialist food shops, farmgate suppliers and markets.
Supermarket shopping may not be top of many people’s favourite occupations, but it seems to be the way of the world. Most people don’t see any feasible alternative and the more we shop in supermarkets, the more we forget that such an alternative still might or ever could exist. And when we rely on one supermarket chain for almost all the food we buy, we can easily be manipulated to accept what they want to give us. As a consequence, supermarkets’ power to shape our shopping and eating habits is phenomenal, and they know it. The trick is to get us to think that they are responding to our needs and desires when actually we are responding to theirs. ‘Giving customers 0what they want’ is supermarket-speak for ‘selling what we want to sell’. Supermarkets use a number of strategies to pull off this brainwashing.
The number one supermarket ruse is, having created a problem, to present themselves as the solution to it. In countries with a healthy food culture where the population is generally thinner and healthier, people see food shopping as an indispensable, worthwhile and not necessarily disagreeable part of the process of feeding yourself well. In countries where there are still independent food shops and markets, shopping can still be a pleasurable, stimulating, diverse experience which involves interesting, even friendly interaction with other human beings. Food shopping in UK supermarkets, on the other hand, has become a dreary treadmill where increasingly overweight yet undernourished consumers are invited to stock up with food in the same anonymous, automatic way they fill up their tanks with petrol. It is no coincidence that supermarket shoppers regularly complain about spending large sums of money in their store yet being unable to think of anything to cook that night. Just thinking about supermarket shopping is enough to make most of us feel tired and uninspired. Supermarket shopping trips, for many people, are an exercise in extreme alienation. Nor is it just chance that we seem to be getting fatter yet getting less and less pleasure from feeding ourselves. Supermarket shopping makes us into robots, stopping off at pre-programmed points as we always do. Picking the same old stuff. Buying what supermarkets want us to buy. Terence Blacker, writing in the Independent, described the experience as follows:
Most people, in order to stay sane, close down their aesthetic sense and human curiosity while being fed through the production line of supermarket shopping. They ignore the other dead-eyed zombies shuffling their way down the aisles as if being led by the trolleys in front of them … moving in a tranquillised daze