Free market my eye!
Rod Liddle says that supermarkets are cruel to the customer, cruel to the farmer and cruel to the farm animal First, the good news. Sainsbury's is in trouble and heading for its first loss in 135 years. I know this isn't good news if you're a shareholder, or if you own it. But it's a glimmer of light for the rest of us and especially for the small farmers. I daresay the glimmer of light will turn out to have certain chimeric properties, because although Sainsbury's is in the red there's not much chance of Asda or Safeway-WalMart or that hideous giant, Tesco, losing money this year. In fact Tesco expects to record underlying profits of about two billion quid. So maybe we're not witnessing the beginning of a long decline for the supermarket cartel, and all that will happen is that even more Sainsbury's customers will simply switch to Tesco, if there's a store close enough to them.
Tesco currently bags 27 per cent of the British grocery market. A share of 25 per cent is usually enough to trigger a monopolies investigation. Maybe when Tesco hits 30 per cent, as inevitably it will, we'll see some action. But I doubt it.
These days, almost 80 per cent of the money we spend on food goes to the supermarket cartel. If you take a look around England's old market towns you'll soon see why that is. In Bicester, Brackley and Buckingham, for example, Tesco is about the only shop in town. You may be inclined, if you are a conservative, to hail the successes of our supermarkets as a triumph for the spirit of the free market. But I always assumed that the term 'free market' implied competition somewhere along the way. In Bicester, Brackley and Buckingham there is no competition whatsoever. There's just Tesco. In fact in most market towns your choice, if you're buying food, is between one of at most two supermarkets. You can go either to the chavstore (Lidl, Somerfield) and buy deep frozen battered muck for your nutritionally challenged young family, or you can go to a more bourgeois supermarket (Waitrose, Tesco, etc.) and buy four beautifully pre-packaged apples which are identical in size, colour and texture, for your convenience. Quite a lot of towns have only one supermarket, so it's lucky that the likes of Tesco and Safeway and Sainsbury's sell both deep frozen battered shit and weirdly cloned apples, otherwise you'd really be in trouble.
You know all about the effect supermarkets have had upon our high streets. Maybe, as you walk along what used to be your main shopping street, you play that popular if rather arid and uneventful game, Spot the Fishmonger. Or Spot the Butcher. Soon you'll be able to play Spot the Chemist with a similar lack of result. Or, indeed, Spot the Bookseller.
My nearest major town is Warminster, in Wiltshire. We're quite lucky, by comparison, because we have two chav supermarkets and a sort of lower-middle-class supermarket (Safeway-Wal-Mart). For six and a half days every week you cannot buy fish or shellfish in the town unless it's pre-packed anaemic prawns or pre-packed dried-out cod or pre-packed chunks of livid farmed salmon. Then, on a Friday morning, a chap sets up a caravan, tucked away in a quiet carpark, and surreptitiously dispenses Brixham crab and fresh mullet as if they were Class-A drugs. If you want fresh fish in south-west Wiltshire, you have to turn up between ten o'clock and one o'clock, just opposite the bicycle shop, nudge nudge.
Defenders of the supermarkets insist that the stores increase choice for the consumer. This is Big Lie number one. They diminish choice on an epic scale.
My time is divided between south London and Wiltshire: London is even worse than Warminster. The nearest nonhalal butcher is three miles distant. God knows where the nearest fishmonger is — Billingsgate, I would guess. What we have instead is the 24-hour hell of Tesco with a fish counter that would be shunned by a ravenous cat. The old local chemist is giving up and closing down.
The defenders of our supermarkets insist that the stores are providing cheap, or at least affordable, food. This is Big Lie number two. What the stores do is provide very cheap staples, things which used to be known as Giffen goods but which are now called by the supermarkets Known Value Items, or KVIs. These KVIs are stuff like milk, bread, baked beans and so on, which the stores sell at low, sometimes ludicrously low, prices in order to attract the customers who know the value of each item. All the supermarkets sell milk at a loss. But the biggest loss is felt not by the supermarkets but by the small dairy farmers. Ten years ago the supermarkets purchased milk from the farmers at about 24 pence per pint. Today, the farmer is paid between 13 and 14 pence per pint. Do the math. As a further digression. the pressure on farmers and ultimately, er, cows, to deliver milk at such a low cost means that the cows themselves are used up and knackered after two years rather than ten. So they're killed.
Meanwhile, the other stuff sold by the supermarkets is not cheaper at all — it's a lot dearer. Compare those four pre-packed apples with four — admittedly less homogeneous — apples from your local greengrocer or fruiterer, if you are lucky enough to still have one The price difference may well astonish you. And incidentally, the imperative that all fruit and vegetables must be the same size, weight, colour, etc., leads to quite appalling levels of waste — the bill for which is met partly by you, the consumer, but largely by the supplier. Up to 60 per cent of a crop is considered useless by the supermarkets because it's considered an unappetising size or colour. This is the sort of thing which drives the small suppliers out of business.
Or compare the price of a dressed crab from Waitrose with one purchased from the surreptitious chap opposite the bicycle shop in Warminster, something I was able to do quite recently. Pound for pound, the Waitrose crab was more than twice the price. And as you would imagine, far less tasty.
It is all our fault, of course. We shop in supermarkets because they are allegedly convenient — all that stuff under one roof,
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