Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets

Shopped

THE SHOCKING POWER OF BRITISH SUPERMARKETS

Joanna Blythman

Dedication

For Lynda and Nick

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Supermarket starters

SUPERMARKET SPACE

1 Forgotten people

2 Trolley towns

3 Small basket

4 Working the system

5 Sugar daddies

6 Pimlico v. Sainsbury’s

SUPERMARKET FOOD

7 Giving us what we want

8 Feeding bad food culture

9 Why it all tastes the same

10 Fresh is worst

11 Permanent global summertime

12 Lost at sea

13 Bright red meat

14 Our weekly bread

15 Gastro-gap

SUPERMARKET WORKERS

16 My big welcome

17 Life on the checkout

SUPERMARKET SUPPLIERS

18 Climate of fear

19 Extracting the best deal

20 Pay to play

21 Green beans from Kenya

22 Get it in writing

23 You’ve been category managed

24 Business as usual

SUPERMARKET WORLD

25 Pruning horticulture

26 Market grab

27 A perfect world

28 Variety is not the spice of life

29 First stop Europe

30 Next stop the world

SUPERMARKET CULTURE

31 The new community

32 That’s supermarket price

33 Take our word for it

34 Safety in numbers

35 Meet the locals

36 Race to the bottom

SUPERMARKET FUTURE

37 Retail domination

38 Big day out

39 Tesco world

Supermarket solutions

Supermarket responses

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Supermarket starters

Leafing through this book you might get the impression that it is written by a longstanding opponent and critic of supermarkets. It might surprise you to know that actually there was a time when I pushed my trolley around the supermarket just like the next person. In common with most food shoppers, I believed that supermarkets offered a welcome addition to traditional shopping outlets – butchers, fishmongers, grocers and so on – expanding the all-round food shopping choice. I thought, naively, that supermarkets were an ‘as well as’ not ‘instead of’ feature of the retail scene.

Then in 1992 I moved to Strasbourg in France. There I shopped like a typical French person. I used small shops and food markets routinely, making a trip out of town about once a month to stock up at the hypermarket on boring items such as cat food and dishwasher salt. Naturally, when I was there, I cherry-picked any attractive special offers. But I soon learnt that to a French person – or any other European for that matter – the British idea of buying everything you need in a once-a-week supermarket shopping blitz was alien, bizarre even. The French are quite clear that although supermarkets are handy for standard items, the best food is on sale elsewhere.

Returning to the UK in 1995, I found that I was bridling at the prospect of readjusting to the prevailing supermarket-shopping pattern. Indeed, I saw it with new eyes. Several useful independent local shops had closed down in the time I had been away and just up the road, where there used to be playing fields for schoolchildren, the dreariest of Tescos had sprung up. There it was, big, ugly and floodlit twenty-four hours a day, squatting behind a brash new roundabout in a sea of new roads and concrete parking spaces. Still, it was close and convenient (or so I thought), the obvious place to head for when the milk and toilet rolls ran out.

So I used it anyway, but it was only a matter of months before I realised that shopping there was stultifying any creative urge I had to cook because I simply couldn’t find the sort of food I want to eat and feed to my family. In exasperation I started driving further to other supermarket chains, but I found myself having the same reaction. The penny dropped that what I was looking for was fresh, local, seasonal ingredients produced by a large number of small, diverse producers. What supermarkets excel at, on the other hand, is over-packaged, often over-processed, much-travelled ingredients that put two fingers up to the seasons and any notion of locality or geographical specificity.

I began to see what a spirit-crushing and alienating experience supermarket shopping actually was. How in UK chains, any given day of the year is just like every other day. How the experience of shopping in Salford is exactly like shopping in Southampton, Sheffield or Stirling. I realised that supermarket shopping was turning me into a robotic Stepford wife – minus the fixed smile. I bought the same repeat items and gritted my teeth as I made my way round the aisles on autopilot. I spent a fortune every time. My cupboards and fridge were constantly stuffed with food and yet somehow I could never think of anything to cook.

Slowly but surely I became deeply discontented with the quality of food that was on offer. I wasn’t interested in ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offers on fizzy drinks and multi-packs of flavoured crisps, which seemed to be something of a supermarket speciality. I didn’t buy much processed food and always bypassed the sprawling shelves loaded up with ready meals. I was looking for fresh, unprocessed food ingredients and I came to see that in this department UK supermarkets just didn’t deliver. Ripe fruit? That’s too much hassle for them so forget it. Properly hung meat? That takes too long and cuts profit margins, so forget that too. Decent bread without chemically hardened fats or GM enzymes? Nicely ripened cheese? Dream on. A chicken that has not stood in excrement in an overcrowded broiler shed? ‘Well, we only get two boxes of free-range/organic chicken once a week and we’ve run out and even then it’s only whole birds not chicken pieces …’ Why? ‘Because there’s not enough demand for it.’

Eventually, I got fed up with being marginalised as a cranky customer with odd and unrepresentative eating habits. My patience ran out, and on 1 January 2002, I made a New Year resolution to support the independent food sector and stop shopping routinely in supermarkets. I started revisiting independent butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers and greengrocers with increasing relish. I rediscovered vigorous coriander in fist-sized bunches, not a few limp and olive-coloured stalks in shiny plastic. My fish was lustrous and had a sparkle in its eye, unlike the matt, flaccid specimens on the supermarket slab. I was nudged into remembering how good beef was reddish-brown, marbled with creamy fat and tender, not bright red, lean and tough. I signed up for an organic vegetable box and really looked forward to Thursdays when it was delivered to my door, just for the sheer pleasure of seeing what was different and seasonal that week. Fortnightly farmers’ markets became an unmissable event on Saturday mornings. I got to know the shopkeepers, stallholders and delivery men, and came to value my interaction with them. It’s hard to build a relationship with a low-paid, mind-numbed checkout operator or a harassed shelf-stacker. Gradually, supermarkets became a residual shopping possibility for me, generally when I had completely run out of uninteresting and heavy items.

In no time at all it was as if a horrible black burden had been lifted off my shoulders. The day-in, day-out struggle to feed everyone seemed to abate. My urge to cook and my gastronomic creativity soared. The contents of my rubbish bin shrank as it no longer had to accommodate excessive quantities of unnecessary and unsustainable supermarket packaging. An unforeseen bonus was that far from spending more money, I was spending less. This was chiefly because the independents’ prices were lower: supermarkets are surprisingly expensive places to shop for fresh, unprocessed meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. But it was also because I wasn’t routinely over-buying and being snared into stocking up with products I did not need and probably would never get around to eating. In fact, we were spending less money on food but eating better and more healthily than before.

Then I got the idea of writing a book about supermarkets. I wanted to investigate why they were so incapable of supplying the kind of food that I, and a growing number of people, want to eat. I began to see how we consumers had unwittingly relinquished sovereignty over what we eat to a handful of large corporations that now control 80 per cent of the UK’s shopping spend.

In effect, our shopping choices are now dictated by a few monopolistic retailers who, by wooing consumers with apparently low prices and lobbying subsequent governments not to interfere with their divine right to make money, have been allowed to develop an unhealthy grip over the nation’s shopping basket. At the beginning of 2007, Tesco ate up almost 32 per cent of the UK’s spend, giving it a scary degree of purchasing power over suppliers and considerable scope to redesign what we eat to suit its own objectives.

Let’s be clear that large supermarket chains are companies whose aim is not, first and foremost, to meet society’s interests. They aren’t too concerned about being excellent grocers, or supplying the nation with good-quality, wholesome food, or supporting British farmers or treating Third World workers ethically or being kind to turkeys or helping working mothers to feed their children better – or any other goal of which many of us would approve. The leading supermarket chains are all making great play of how ‘green’ they are. Tesco says that it is going to publish the carbon footprint of each of its products while Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose have all pledged to reduce waste, amongst other measures. Some supermarket green claims sound better than they really are. Tesco has introduced degradable bags, but they are still made from plastic. These ‘degradable’ bags need sunlight in order to break down, and the majority will probably end up in landfill sites where they are more likely to break down into methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

UK supermarkets are definitely making efforts to green up their act, but when the National Consumer Council examined their performance in 2006 – looking at food transport, waste, sustainable sourcing and farming – it concluded that no supermarket rated well on all criteria. The truth is 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.

SUPERMARKET SPACE

1 Forgotten people

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 the effect of the opening week. If it is not, we will be stuffed,’ said postmaster Nayan Shah.

When the New Economics Foundation examined the phenomenon know as ‘Ghost Town Britain’ – the slow death of community life in small towns and villages – it probed the mechanism by which supermarkets suck life from local shops and reported:

Suppose a supermarket opens on the outskirts of a town and half the residents start to do one third of their shopping there. These people still do two thirds of their shopping in the town centre, while the other half of the population continues to do all its shopping in the centre. Although all the residents still patronise the town centre, its retail revenue drops about 16.7% – enough to start killing off shops. This is a perverse market dynamic; a loss to the entire community that not a single person would have wanted. It is also self-reinforcing: once the downtown starts to shut down, people who preferred to shop there have no choice but to switch to the supermarket. What begins as a seemingly harmless ripple becomes a powerful and destructive wave.

Statistics on small shops read like casualties of a curiously uneven war. In 2000, when the DETR Select Committee considered the impact of supermarkets, it noted that the number of independent grocers in the UK had fallen from 116,000 in 1961 to only 20,900 in 1997. Statistics compiled by the Meat and Livestock Commission using figures from the Institute of Grocery Distribution, Taylor Nelson Sofres and the Office of National Statistics show that there were only 23,960 independent grocers in the UK in 2001 compared to 62,000 in 1977.

The same pattern is mirrored in figures for specialist shops. Independent butcher’s shops, for example, declined from 25,300 to 8,344 in the same period. Roughly two out of every three butchers have gone out of business in the last twenty-five years. Between 1990 and 2000, supermarkets’ share of the fresh fish market increased from 21.4 per cent to over 66 per cent, while fishmongers’ market share fell to 20.3 per cent. Between 1997 and 2002, specialist stores like butchers, bakers and fishmongers closed at the rate of fifty a week. Figures logged by the Office of National Statistics show that the number of businesses selling food, tobacco and beverages fell by 37 per cent between 1994 and 2001; if decline persists at the same rate, another 10,000 businesses will have vanished by 2005 and the total number of local shops selling these goods will have been halved in just over a decade. Researchers at Manchester School of Management have predicted that if current trends continue there might not be a single independent food store left in the whole of the UK by 2050.

This projected disappearance of independent food shops is a disturbing possibility, not only because it erodes choice, but also because these shops produce more economic benefits for their immediate community than supermarket chains. It has been calculated that every £10 spent in a local food initiative (shop, farmer’s market, farm shop or box scheme) is worth £25 to the local economy because small local food businesses – by using local farmers, the nearest locksmith or printer and so on – support other local businesses. That same £10 spent in a supermarket produces just £14 worth of benefits for the local community.

Obviously the closure of small shops means job losses – and these losses are not compensated for with new supermarket jobs. The National Retail Planning Forum has calculated that new food superstores have, on average, a negative effect on retail employment. Its 1998 report said that every superstore opening resulted in a net loss in employment of 276 fulltime equivalents. A majority of supermarket jobs are part-time, so the arrival of supermarkets means that many fulltime jobs in the local community are replaced by part-time ones.