Consuming Interest
Supermarkets
By LESLIE ADRIAN Wan more and more shops here converting themselves into supermarkets—or, at least, into self-service stores based on the supermarket pattern—I was interested to get the views of a friend of mine just back from living in the United States, where self-service has become the norm.
Did she think, I wanted to know, that super- markets are a valuable institution? And, if so, are they likely to become the norm in England?
On the first question, my friend had no doubts at all. She had found her local supermarkets ad- mirable institutions in almost every respect. The .chief advantage is the enormous range and variety of goods they can offer. Instead of having only two or three varieties of, say, canned peas, they have twenty—not to mention another dozen varieties of packaged frozen peas. And the stuff is laid out in such a way that the eye readily sees the whole choice available—instead of being stacked high on shelves and low behind counters, often out of sight,, and consequently out of mind.
Secondly, prices in supermarkets are relatively low. Over a wide range of foodstuffs, in fact, they run surprisingly little higher than they do here. The reason, of course, is the economies obtain- able through increased turnover, coupled with a reduction in labour costs. Service is limited to advisers, wandering round the counters to help people in doubt; to checkers at the exits, who take the purchases from your trolley (on which, incidentally, there is a kiddy-car attachment, so that you can carry round a child), compute the cost, pack them in strong bags (which are neatly designed to fit into the interior of your kitchen- garbage disposal can at home); and to porters (in the bigger establishments), who hand these bags out to you as you come by in your car when you have fetched it from the parking place.
Here is the rub, as far as the prospects for supermarkets in England are concerned. There are two essentials, my friend insists, before you can hope to make the best use of their facilities : you should be the owner of a freezer (not merely a refrigerator) and of a car. Now, the proportion of people whp have freezers here is tiny; whereas in the United States they are now standard equip- ment in the middle-class home. Their advantage is that you can do all your shopping in one— meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, the lot—transferring all perishables in a matter of minutes from super- market to freezer, where they will keep almost indefinitely.
I was sceptical about this 'keeping almost in- definitely,' but she assures me it is so. She hap- pens to be very fond of strawberries; by waiting till they were at their cheapest and then buying one hundred pounds, she was able to have straw- berries cheap—and fresh—until late autumn. Every housewife, she admits, has some fads about what will not keep when frozen (hers is tomatoes, which, she claims, don't taste the same); but in her experience there are very few snags. Occa- sionally she found vegetables which had been stowed away at the back of the freezer over a year before, as good as ever.
An ordinary refrigerator, assuming it is big enough, will keep a week or two's supply of frozen food in its freezing compartment (another argument for always buying a larger refrigerator than you think you'll need). But that brings up the second difficulty in connection with super- markets here : cars and parking. In America, supermarkets have their own parking lots (much bigger than the supermarket itself); and they stay open till nine or later, so that where there is only one car in the family and where father is out commuting, in it during the day, it can be used by mother when he comes back in the even- ing to bring the supplies home.
But in Britain, my friend notes, there is tre- mendous resistance by shopowners of all kinds to the idea that they ought to provide parking accommodation for their customers. And there is even greater resistance to the idea of allowing shops to remain open till late for the convenience of those customers—their number grows every year—who are unable to shop during the day. This, she insisted, is a habit of mind we will have to change if the institution of the supermarket is to be made best use of here. When I told her that only recently a Government—and a Con- servative Government at that—had actually brought in a Bill to compel shops to close even earlier, she was staggered. As well she might be!
While I am on the subject of American innova- tions : when, some time ago, I bemoaned the lack of an ice tray which would deliver ice cubes with- out bother, mess .or effort, I received a number of suggestions; but none of them, it seemed to me, offered real hope of improvement over the traditional ice tray, with its apt-to-be-immovable grid. But Mr. A. S. Webb, of Warwick, Rhode Island, has sent me an ice tray of a type now common in America which fills the bill exactly. The cubes come out easily by finger leverage on a small handle attached to the grid (something that is easier to do than to describe); they do not leap out all over the kitchen floor, nor do they defy all efforts to Move them in the way that cubes in most English ice trays do until hot water is run over them, when they fall out among the tea-leaves in the sink.
There is one snag : American refrigerators are on average twice the size of ours, and the tray is too large for the ordinary English model. If you should have friends in America who you think might get one 'for you, it's best to send exact measurements.
But perhaps this type of tray has arrived in the shops here? I have not myself seen one, but, sooner or later, these gadgets tend to filter in.
Previous page
