Supermarket giant Tesco is engulfed in a crisis and is seeing its worst fall in UK sales as customers leave in their droves. As the UK's biggest retailer by sales and the worlds largest supermarket group, Tesco has over the years cemented its dominance by expanding massively, making it hard for smaller operators to compete against.
I live in what was once a market town, Tesco opened a superstore here and after months of disruption the infrastructure of the town was adapted to suit the new store. The sheer size of their main superstores gave Tesco immense power and they became aggressive at getting what they wanted at the best deals.
However, word has it that we consumers are becoming disenchanted with superstores and out of town hypermarkets. With the virtual death of our once prized traditional high streets, we have come to realise that the 'under one roof' format of endless anonymous aisles is a totally different atmosphere to visiting our local shopkeepers.
Between 1995 and 2000 we lost roughly one fifth of our local shops including post offices, butchers, grocers and bakers. With it came a loss of community life and a place for meaningful interaction between people of different classes, cultures, ages and lifestyles. A hypermarket is not a conducive environment to make a meaningful connection with your neighbour.
With the cost of living squeeze of the past five years, where prices have risen faster than incomes, we are now seeing a change in shopping habits. Smaller discount chains Aldi and Lidl are becoming popular by offering high quality food at budget prices. The 'big weekly shop' consisting of everything from toilet paper to lawn feed is a dying trend, the excessive days of buy one get one free seem to be over with customers becoming more discerning about their choices.
Food writer Tom Parker Bowles has written a new cookbook: Let's eat meat, in which he advocates a return to our butchers, who are the greatest source of expertise regarding cuts of meat which, he says, we have become nervous of trying. He says: 'Good meat comes from good farming practice, which means the animals aren't cooped up in dark sheds, fattened quickly and killed as soon as possible. In Britain we have some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world.' Sadly because of its mass availability on the supermarket shelves, we tend to see meat as an everyday food, as Tom says: 'You can certainly buy pork and chicken very cheaply, because it has been inhumanely produced. I would rather eat one free range chicken a week than five horrible, intensely farmed birds.' But there lies the problem, we have become used to just cutting up a chicken breast as opposed to going to our butcher for cheaper cuts, such as shin of beef, oxtail or breast of lamb, many people now wouldn't have a clue what to do with those cuts.
Country markets and independent grocers are proving popular once again as we seem to be putting our hearts back into the importance of where our food is coming from ie growers, farmers and suppliers who care.
The 1980s saw a surge in superstores and with it a change in how we viewed both shopping and eating. We became clockwork shoppers, sleepwalking an almost identical route through the aisles, barely registering where the products we were buying came from, or what they contained. Processed ready meals seemed innovative, cooking need no longer be a labour of love, a quick ping of the microwave and 'voila' chicken chasseur at the ready!
Increasingly the more initiated amongst us have come to realise the consequences of an intensely farmed, factory produced, chemically enhanced diet. Take your standard packet of supermarket mince which is perfectly red, hence we believe 'fresh.' The reason it is red is because the sealed meat packages have been flushed with oxygen and carbon dioxide gases, a standard industry procedure.
The good news is that apparently shoppers are now spending time reading food labels to make sure they are healthy and contain the right dietary requirements. More importantly we are becoming more compassionate regarding the welfare of the animals we eat. I follow compassion in world farming via the Internet and it has seriously affected the way I buy meat.
Hopefully what we are seeing in terms of Tesco's dire sales figures is a resurgence of small, independent businesses!
'If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it? That is the fundamental lie we are sold every day.'
- Martin Parr
'Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.'
-Michael Pollan
Love Donna xxxxxx
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