Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
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that supermarkets find it extremely difficult to ‘go green’ because environmental damage is part of the fabric of their business, thanks to transport-related carbon emissions, excessive packaging and their endless expansion plans. So they are happy to go along with ideas or demands that are generally progressive, such as stocking more organic food or installing solar panels, but only as long as it is in their commercial interest to do so. The crunch comes when doing the right thing – the ethical thing – would actually cost them money or interfere with their modus operandi. Then they are not so keen. The bottom line is that they are stock market-driven corporations whose overarching goal is to keep their shareholders happy. And the sad fact is that, in partnership with the food industry, they have debased our whole appreciation of food. It is no coincidence that the UK, the country with the worst food culture in Europe, the one with the most palpable obesity problem, is also the country most wedded to supermarket shopping.
When you read this book I hope you too will come to see that ‘Big Food’ and ‘Big Retail’ are really two sides of the same coin. Big global food manufacturers need big supermarket chains to get their products on to the shelves and our big supermarkets need big food processors to churn out items such as chicken kievs glued together with additives to make their profits. It’s an unholy alliance where supermarkets are effectively gatekeepers for a system of food production that is about putting profit before quality, the environment or public health.
Next time you are in a supermarket, take a look at what products are on prominent special offer on those lucrative shelf ends. You can bet your bottom dollar that the vast majority will be stacked high with everything the nation would be better off not eating. The business logic, of course, is faultless. Supermarkets make more money out of selling value-added processed junk than they do good food. There’s a limit to how much they can charge for a potato, even well-scrubbed ‘heirloom’ varieties. But process a nondescript white spud into a pre-cooked, microwavable baked potato or ‘child-friendly’ potato shapes and the sky is the limit.
While consumers think that the supermarkets are there to serve us, they actually operate to a totally different agenda. Supermarkets sell us what it suits them to sell. They decide what makes them money and then they figure out ways of marketing it to us so that we want to buy it. Their stocks-in-trade are products sourced nationally or globally at their behest from an increasingly small number of large, but nevertheless captive, suppliers. In that process they are reshaping our food chain for the worse. The buying terms and prices that they impose on farmers reward and encourage intensive farming and militate against smaller, more quality-conscious producers. The supermarket system does not reward flavour or biodiversity, just volume and standardisation. You will doubtless have heard murmurings about how supermarkets treat their suppliers. Let me tell you that it is even worse than you might suspect. Nowadays supermarkets and suppliers have a feudal relationship with each other: they are lord and vassal.
The irony of the great supermarket revolution is that the concept they sold us, choice, has actually become a vehicle for denying us that. What ‘choice’ do we really have when all we have to choose between is a Tesco or an Asda, a Sainsbury’s or a Morrisons? You may have noticed, at least at a subliminal level, how one chain’s sandwich is pretty much like another’s, how supermarket chicken tikkas all share that haunting industrial gloopiness. Large supermarkets typically stock some 32,000 lines, but a bit like a subscription to endless American or Italian TV channels, it’s a quantitative, not qualitative choice. And this supermarket monotony becomes all the more oppressive as the supermarkets recolonise with smaller-format stores the high streets they killed off in the first place.
But as more centres turn into anonymous, identikit trolley towns dominated by the suffocating presence of big supermarket chains, we consumers do have a choice. We can lie down and let the supermarkets take total control of what ends up on our plates. We can stand by, dismayed but passive, as they drive all but the largest farmers and food suppliers out of business by sourcing products from parts of the globe where they can buy for even less. Or we can change our food shopping habits and use them to vote for a different sort of food economy, one that supports small, local and diverse, not large, global and monotonous. I hope that when you read this book, you’ll ask yourself which sort of food world you want to live in. We can’t have both.
In June 2003, when a new Sainsbury’s Local, complete with cash machine, sliding doors and eight gleaming tills, opened opposite them, the owners of Belmont Mini Market in Chalk Farm were worried. A new shiny supermarket right across the street is every small shopkeeper’s nightmare. History shows that when a supermarket opens, local shopkeepers can moan and complain all they like, but it’s just a matter of time until all but the most exceptional amongst them lose just enough business to the newcomer to make their own enterprises unviable. But the Belmont Mini Market refused to lie down and be ignored. It had been open seven days a week, from seven in the morning until eleven at night, for the last eighteen years. Locals valued the service it provided, and in particular the pleasantness of the hard-working Sri Lankan owners. Belmont Mini Market joined forces with an especially appreciative customer, a creative communication agency, to make local people think twice before bypassing them for Sainsbury’s. With the agency’s help, the owners sent letters to local residents and printed fly-posters and stickers with photos of the Mini Market’s staff that read, ‘Sainsbury has got electric sliding door but please do not be forgetting us.’ They even posted a man with a placard outside Sainsbury’s to emphasise the point. Three months after the opening of Sainsbury’s, one of the owners, Mariathas Suthakaran, told me that although sales of some lines such as bread and milk were slightly down, customers were still coming into his store.
Chalk Farm’s residents and workers may not easily forget the endearing staff at the Belmont Mini Market, but statistics show that the UK collectively has forgotten thousands of other shopkeepers. The figures vary depending on the source and its classification of shops, but the overall picture is remarkably consistent, showing a steady decline in small shops as the supermarkets have progressively taken control of the nation’s shopping basket. The nation of shopkeepers has become a nation of supermarkets.
In 1950, supermarkets had only 20 per cent of the grocery market while small shops and traditional Co-ops had 80 per cent between them. By 1990, this situation had been more or less reversed, with supermarkets eating up almost 80 per cent of the grocery market. In 1998, when the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) undertook what is considered to be the most comprehensive governmental assessment of the implications of food store developments, it confirmed a phenomenon that most consumers had already observed first hand. ‘Our research has shown that large foodstores can and have had an adverse impact on market towns and district centres … The level and consequences of impact will vary depending on the particular local circumstances … Smaller centres which are dependent to a large extent on convenience retailing to underpin their function are most vulnerable to the effects of larger foodstore development in edge-of-centre and out-of-centre locations,’ it concluded.
This study underlined just how dramatic the supermarket effect could be. When Tesco had opened a store on the edge of Cirencester in Wiltshire, the market share of town-centre food shops declined by 38 per cent. For convenience shops the study found that the damage was even more acute. In Fakenham in Norfolk, for example, it found that the opening of an out-of-town supermarket had caused a 64 per cent decline in market share for the convenience shops in the town centre. At Warminster in Hampshire, the decline was even more marked – 75 per cent. The trend has continued since the study. When Tesco opened a new 37,000-square-foot store in Hove in 2003, for instance, the effect on neighbouring retailers was almost instant. Within a week, small shopkeepers’ sales had tumbled. The local greengrocer said that he had hoped that Tesco would bring extra footfall into the area, but sales were down 25–30 per cent. It was the same story at the post office. ‘They [sales] are about 25 per cent down. Hopefully it’s only