Evil Supermarkets

This is a piece I wrote a while back on how evil supermarkets are. I found out that something like 70% of Wal-Mart shoppers voted Bush, which confirmed my feelings.

See also www.monbiot.com www.corporatewatch.co.uk and Shopped by Joanna Blythman.

Did anyone read that article about how Tesco’s were making significantly more profit in their Irish stores that their shops in Britain? I guess many people were so busy shopping around to find cheaper places that they might have missed it.

Our beloved Tainiste thinks that the way the stop getting fleeced is to amble around to a plethora of different emporia and compare prices. This is pretty rich from a government which has done everything in it’s power to promote the growth of out-of-town shopping centres which lead ineluctably to the death of many smaller, specialist stores and the dystopian homogenisation of our high streets.

In addition, when your job seems to consist of little more than going round to open factories and saying “low taxes, flexibility and deregulation” on TV every once a week or so, as well as welcoming the odd genocide monster like Henry Kissinger to Ireland, then you probably have enough time to shop around, and to be fair, Ms. Harney does look like she goes round to every confectioners in the Dublin commuter belt and assesses their chocolate cakes for taste and value.

The rest of us aren’t so fortunate. These days, in most families both parents have to work to pay off the mortgage or rent and help to pay for the second or third sports car or Tuscan villa of the property speculators and developers. Many people are simply too busy to shop around, and in addition, if people have bought a house for E300,000 they’re probably not going to notice an extra 20 or 30 cent on a packet of lentils. Of course one reason that healthy food might cost so much is that they same four or five conglomerates that process most of the food we eat are vertically integrated with the companies who make weight loss products, so it’s not in their interests to sell high-fibre food.

In Tesco’s British heartland it’s a slightly different story, as anyone who feels they’re being taken for a ride can bally well take their custom to Sainsbury’s or Asda, or the yuppie’s choice, Waitrose; whereas here the supermarket alternative is the Stygian Dunnes. (I seem to remember going into a Roches supermarket once, but that might have been a dream).

Yet even over there, they take £1 for every £8 that are spent by consumers over there, and exert huge influence on the government, forcing the construction of new roads and roundabouts and forcing their customers to picking up the tab for parking, all of which they secured in part by contributing £12m to the construction of the Millennium dome.

The reason they need all these new roads is that their operation is so highly centralised that, for example, every carton of milk sold in Britain goes through one processing centre, though I’m damned if I can remember the name of this lactopolis. So whatever savings they do provide comes at the expense of massive fossil fuel use, though there’s plenty of oil left in the world, even if some of did manage to get under the Arab’s sand, and that whole global warming thing is a bit of a sham, isn't it? In addition, in supermarkets everything has to be so shiny and homogenised that it’s estimated that around 80% of the chemicals sprayed on their vegetables are for purely cosmetic reasons.

But even if you don't care about the environmental impact of all this stuff being moved around so much and the pointless waste this entails, consider an American study that indicates that supermarkets provide only a quarter as many jobs for every dollar spent as smaller, friendlier, speciality shops. So every surly, impolite girl immobilised behind a Tesco’s counter could be four smiling, happy young women showing you round a bright, colourful health food store.

I’m relatively lucky that I live in Cork where there’s a variety of small, speciality shops, some of which represent the cuisines of some of the ethnic groups which have recently found a home here, as well as the first organic shop in the country; between which I can get almost everything cheaper than I would in either Tescos or Dunnes, all within walking distance of each other. For those living in medium-sized towns, or in the sprawling, hyperthropied suburbs of Dublin, shopping around might be a more difficult proposition. But I think it’s worth the effort, to help regenerate the streets, to give ourselves a more varied and healthy diet, to free ourselves from our dependence on the car, and to try and put some limits on our merciless exploitation of the environment. So, I don't say this very often, in fact it’s the first time I’ve said, this and it’ll probably be the last, but in this case, in principal, broadly speaking, Mary Harney isn't wrong.