article: "A Nation of Shoppers"

Bagehot : A nation of shoppers

A new wave of supermarket-bashing is elitist and muddle-headed

May 19th 2011 | from the Economist print edition

EVEN armed with a product as popular as dried pigs’ ears (for dogs to chew), Steve Staddon struggles to make money at the weekly market in Stalham, an ancient town in the watery flatlands where East Anglia meets the North Sea. Mr Staddon sells pet food; a decade ago Stalham market was so busy it took two people to man his stall. In good weeks more than a hundred stalls used to fill the town’s auction ground. This week just eight traders turned up. “Basically,” charges Mr Staddon, “Tesco has killed this market.”

The supermarket firm—the country’s biggest—opened in Stalham in 2002. Tesco’s car park displaced the market, now relocated to a small, sad site on the edge of town. On Stalham high street, locals grumble, businesses such as a greengrocer, fishmonger, bakery, butcher and a convenience store have closed, to be replaced by charity shops, Chinese takeaways and (prompting mordant jokes) a funeral parlour. Stalham has become a case study for critics of Tesco and other big chains.

Such criticism is in vogue. The charge sheet against supermarkets is lengthening, moving beyond longstanding allegations that they bully suppliers, run rings round town planners and harm the environment (all that packaging, all those air-freighted mangos from Brazil and car journeys to out-of-town stores).

Increasingly, supermarkets have become proxies for modernity itself, and not in a good way. Eager to soothe anxious, recession-hit voters, as well as those squeezed by globalisation, politicians have turned nostalgic, talking up old traditions as a response to the anomies of 21st-century British life. They pledge to look beyond economic growth and worry more about well-being and the survival of small shops. There is much talk of family life, and of resetting the work-life balance. The promise hovers, just over the horizon, of a Britain in which parents and children stroll from their homes with wicker baskets to pick up homely, local goods from storekeepers who know them by name.

On May 17th the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government commissioned a television shopping guru, Mary Portas, to report on ways to protect independent shops, prevent the proliferation of “clone towns” and, in the words of David Cameron, “bring back the bustle to our high streets”. Meanwhile, after a new Tesco store was smashed up by rioters in Bristol, the Labour leader Ed Miliband called for tighter controls on store-openings, opining: “people think the character of their local high street is being changed and they have no power against big corporations.”

Strip away the pieties and this is illiberal stuff. It implies that the British need protecting from their own consumer choices.

The nostalgics don’t even have their history right. A big research project at the universities of Surrey and Exeter is currently studying shopping in post-war England. For one thing, high streets were not as quaint as politicians think. As far back as 1939, chain stores and co-operative retail societies already controlled about half of the grocery market. It was middle class matrons, the sort who dressed up to go shopping, who missed the deference shown by traditional grocers. Supermarkets were often welcomed by younger and working-class women. A retired secretary interviewed by the project recalled, as a young bride, asking the butcher for a tiny amount of mince. “Oh, having a dinner party, madam?” he sneered. A woman who bought anything expensive or unusual risked disapproving gossip, spread by shop assistants. The project found press advertisements promoting the anonymity of supermarkets, as well as their convenience.

Giant supermarket chains wield great power: it is legitimate to demand that power is wielded fairly. Not every shopper at a Tesco loves that company: some use such shops through gritted teeth. But others might have spotted that supermarkets, thanks to late opening or online ordering, actually buy working families time. From the first, the British have been ambivalent about supermarkets. It is wrong and elitist for politicians to dismiss their success out of hand, just because it clashes with some sepia-tinted vision of how society should be run.