I live in the nicest town in the country. That’s not bias, bigotry or a pathetic attempt to increase my house price. It’s official – at least according to Kirstie and Phil of the Channel 4 programme Location Location Location. After an extensive nation-wide survey Messers Allsopp and Spencer (sadly no relation) concluded that Epsom and Ewell in Surrey was Britain’s best place to live.
‘You get the best of all worlds if you live here today,’ the programme declared. The town has (apparently) 35 parks and open spaces, excellent rail links to London stations, ‘astonishingly low’ crime rates and ‘sky-high’ educational standards.
Even if the programme’s assessment occasionally verges into fiction (its description of Ewell as ‘the epitome of idyllic village life’ makes you wonder whether they’ve actually visited the place), on the whole I’d have to agree: Epsom and Ewell is a pretty decent place to live.[1]
Sadly, Location Location Location might be running another, rather different story next series. ‘Best place to live turned into giant, polluted, parking lot by vast new hypermarket,’ perhaps? The reason? The developers are coming to town.
You see, Epsom is special in more ways than one. Extraordinarily, it is one of the dying breed of British towns that are without a Tesco. (Yes, there are still some).
There is a reason for this and it is not, regrettably, because Epsom’s residents are unusually alert to the corporate takeover of Britain. The truth is that Epsom does not need a Tesco. The town has a vast and profitable Sainsbury’s about 800 yards from the town centre. It also boasts a Waitrose, a Marks & Spencers, a busy market, an excellent monthly farmer’s market, a butchers, several bakers and, of course, numerous coffee houses. There is also, in case this were not enough, a (vast and profitable) Asda superstore about 2 miles away.
This, however, does not seem to matter. The good folk of Epsom seem destined to get another superstore, at least if the developers and their polished PR team get their way. Nobody has yet admitted to it being a Tesco (just in case any attentive lawyers were sharpening their Mont Blancs to respond). ‘Tesco and Asda are currently considering the site,’ residents have been told. But all the smart money is on another smart move by the UK’s smartest retailer.
Why are the good people of Epsom getting so worked up? For some it is what is known as NIMBYism. They don’t want a development like this on their doorstep (almost literally in some cases). When that development is a vastly out-of-scale, multi-storey supermarket, with hundreds of parking places, and an estimated increased traffic flow of 6,000 cars a day (not to mention umpteen delivery lorries), can you really blame them?
For others, there is blind fury at seeing a multi-million pound property developer and a slippery PR company bounce an ignorant public into a decision they do not fully understand. When a humble, well-orchestrated presentation (“We are here to help… This is your exhibition…”) tells local residents, “You need to decide which design is the most appropriate for the site” (rather than asking them whether they want a superstore in the first place), some local residents decide and others get angry. When the same presentation insists the new store will attract a significant number of new shoppers and inward investment without causing any traffic problems (but conveniently omits any traffic flow figures); or argues that the new store will help the town ‘to remain strong’ (because supermarkets are famous for strengthening rather than destroying towns, aren’t they?) that anger turns to blind fury.
For some, however, this is simply the local tip of a national iceberg that has grown to monumental proportions over the last 20 years and that threatens sink us all if we do not try to break it up.
The cost of the exodus
Until the 1960s the majority of people relied on walking or public transport for their grocery shopping. As car ownership increased, town centres, with their restricted parking facilities and traffic congestion, became less attractive, leading to an exodus of high street retailers.
This resulted in two things: commercial centralisation and the demise of the high street. Because out-of-town relocation invariably favours chain over independent stores (larger stores, high rents, compulsory seven day opening, etc), Britain has experienced unparalleled commercial centralisation over recent decades. In 2003, 94% of retail businesses in the United Kingdom had a turnover below £1 million, whereas only ½ per cent had a turnover of greater than £10 million. However, the former group’s share of total market value was just 16 per cent, compared with the 74% of the latter group. The market is dominated by a tiny minority of very large players.
The only reason why the percentage of smaller businesses is not even higher is that so many have closed over recent decades. Specialist stores, like butchers, bakers and fishmongers, have been closing at the rate of around 50 per week for many years. In 1961 there were, for example, 116,000 independent grocers in the UK. By 2001, this had dropped to under 24,000. As these stores die, so does the British high street.
According to research conducted by the think thank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), Britain is slowly turning into a nation of ghost and clone towns.[2] A ghost town is one in which there is no easy access to the local banks, post offices, corner shops and pubs that provide the social glue that holds communities together. In their place there is often little more than a grim façade of McDonalds, Poundstretchers and derelict shops.
A retail exodus does not invariably lead to a town become ghostlike, however. Sometimes, chain stores fill the vacuum left by independent closures, and the town becomes a ‘clone’. NEF defines a clone town as ‘a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a monochrome strip of global and national chains… [so that it] could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country.’ When it published the results of it national Clone Town survey in 2004, it reported that of the towns surveyed, 41 per cent qualified as clone towns, 33 per cent as home towns (‘a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive’) and 26 per cent as border towns (some way in between).
Whether a town is a ghost or a clone – one dead, the other feeling like the living dead – the fact remains that whereas forty years ago Britain had a complex and colourful economic ecosystem, today is it increasingly monotonous and susceptible to the power of a tiny handful of retailers.
Supermarket sweep
No retail sector has a greater concentration of power than the food sector, and no food retailer greater power than Tesco.
Of the total amount of money in Britain spent on food and non-alcoholic drink – around £63 billion in 2003 – nearly 80 per cent was spent in a supermarket, the majority of which was in a Sainsbury’s, Asda or Tesco.
This has resulted in a food industry that looks rather like an hourglass: a large (but shrinking) number of suppliers at the top, a large (and slowly growing) number of consumers at the bottom, and a tiny number of suppliers linking the two.[3] This ‘narrow waist’ gives those retailers extraordinary power over suppliers (directly) and consumers (indirectly).
Several recent books, most notably Shopped by Joanna Blythman and Not on the label by Felicity Lawrence, gather evidence about how supermarkets are using this power. Blythman writes about how ‘nowadays supermarkets and suppliers have a feudal relationship with each other’, and Lawrence talks about the way that supermarkets have helped deskill the British cooking public in the interests of profitable cross-selling of processed food. Although millions of us sit down to watch Jamie Oliver or Rick Stein, most do so with a ready meal on our lap. Having long been (or believed ourselves to be) too busy to cook, we are swiftly becoming a nation that is actually incapable of doing so.
Supermarkets are also responsible for a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s CO2 emissions. Between them British supermarket lorries travel the equivalent of to the moon and back twice every day. It has been estimated that around 3.5 per cent of the UK’s total carbon emissions is due to transporting food ‘from farm to fork’, along the increasingly long supermarket supply chain – a figure that, incidentally, excludes emission from sea and air transportation, a significant and growing source of carbon emissions.[4]
Supermarkets also result in job losses. This may seem strange given that one of the supermarkets’ biggest selling points is that they create jobs, and superficially, this argument seems obviously true. A new superstore opens on a site that had previously been unoccupied and all of sudden hundreds of people are working there where before there had been none. However, looked at from a broader perspective, it becomes clear that the opposite is true. One of the reasons why supermarkets are so successful is that they are highly efficient. Their systems are arranged to minimise costs, foremost among which are labour costs. In 2004, UK small grocery shops had a turnover of around £21 billion and employed more than 500,000 people. By comparison, Tesco, with a £29 billion turnover, employed just 250,000 people.[5] A study conducted by the National Retail Planning Forum concluded that new food superstores have, on average, a negative net effect on retail employment, with an estimated average job loss of about 276 people per new store.
Supermarkets also weaken local economies by ‘vacuuming’ money up into the global economy. Locally owned stores tend to keep profits within the local economy. By comparison, chain stores exist to create profits for shareholders who know and care little for the local economies in which they are created. Money becomes increasingly fluid and anonymous. The market, in effect, becomes ‘disembedded’ from any cultural or social context, a process that can end up hurting the people who make up that context (not to mention, ultimately, the market itself). As Rowan Williams remarked in one the dialogues held at St Paul’s in the summer of 2004, exploring the question ‘Is there an alternative to global capitalism?’, unregulated flows of capital, and the economic ‘rationalisation’ imposed by outside agencies that frequently accompanies them, can end up destabilising and eroding civil society, both on large and small scales.[6]
The Tescover of Britain
Whilst all the supermarkets contribute to this litany of woes, Tesco is considered by many to be the worst of the villains. The fact that it has nearly 2,000 stores, and takes one in every three pounds spent on groceries in the UK, a staggering figure even in our age of commercial centralisation, gives it astonishing economic (and political) power. This it uses, as indeed by law it must, for the benefit of its shareholders, a fact that results in practices that are immoral if not illegal. The well-referenced website, www.tescopoly.org and the Friends of the Earth report The Tesco Takeover describe, in loving detail, Tesco’s impact on farmers, overseas and UK workers, local shops, and the environment. Neither makes uplifting reading.
To take three examples, almost at random: in 2000, the UK Competition Commission report on supermarkets observed that the bigger a retailer is, the better able it is to extract lower prices from suppliers, and recorded that Tesco consistently paid suppliers 4% below the industry average.[7] Research by Oxfam and its partners in South Africa reveals that Tesco loads many of the costs and risks of its fresh-produce business onto farmers, who then pass them on to workers, especially women workers, in the form of temporary and sporadic employment without basic rights.[8] Tesco’s enormous share of the grocery retailing market allows it to secure extremely low prices and exclusive deals with suppliers, a power is increasingly thought to be distorting competition.[9] George Orwell, the patron saint of socialism, once remarked that the problem with competitions is that someone usually wins them. Today in Britain someone is and the consequences are worrying.
A Christian perspective?
It is often customary at this point in Third Way articles to ask why whatever has gone before should concern Christians or whether there is a unique Christian perspective on the issue at had or what Scripture has to say about the whole issue.
Hopefully this will not be necessary. Elevating profit above principles, ill-treating workers, driving farms out of business, killing off local communities, and slowly poisoning the environment should speak for themselves. If the quality of our relationships with eachother and the rest of creation is important in the kingdom of God, it should be obvious why Christians should oppose the slow ‘tescover’ of Britain.
Several other, subtler points do bear mention, however. The principle of ‘subsidiarity’ that is arguably articulated in biblical teaching, in which political and social power is decentralised so that communities themselves (rather than distant shareholders or business executives) run their own affairs, points away from our (super)market state and towards a richer, more localised retail ecology.
On similar lines, the biblical vision of wholeness celebrates variety, with ecological, ethnic and cultural diversity being one of life’s glories. ‘The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great,’ wrote the sixteenth century German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, ‘and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.’ Jonathan Sacks’ put the same point more pithily in his book, The Dignity of Difference, when he wrote, ‘the unity of God is to be found in the diversity of creation.’
Not only does the massive concentration of retail power in the UK and the ghost and clone towns it breeds drain money from local economies and dry up the relational glue provided by genuinely local shops, but it also bleeds the variety from creation, leaving the world a drabber, more sterile place. It denies us, in Louis MacNeice’s words, ‘the drunkenness of things being various.'
What then can we do to stop the tescover? There are a number of measures – details of which are given in the resources section below, but at the very top of the list is: change your shopping behaviour and use supermarkets as sparingly as you can.
In case it needs stating, this does not mean never shopping in a supermarket. Unless you are fortunate enough to live in a truly vibrant local community, that will be all but impossible. It does mean using alternatives when you can.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons not to change (there always will be) but the all-time number one excuse – “I don’t have time” – is really a modern, guiltless translation of “It’s not high enough on my priority list.” (If this seems harsh ask yourself whether you’ve ever used that excuse not to go to a relative’s funeral. Humans have an uncanny knack of making time for the things that are important to them). Other excuses – not knowing where the alternatives are or not having any nearby – are more serious but may be helped by some of the resources below.
Those who don’t shop in supermarket glass houses will find it easier to throw campaigning stones. That might involve writing to the government, your local MP, or the supermarkets themselves, or encouraging others to shop elsewhere. If there is one thing that corporations fear more than lobby groups it is ‘brand anti-evangelists’, individuals who go around spreading critical word-of-mouth.
For those souls unfortunate to be fighting a supermarket development in their backyard, there is hope. www.tescopoly.org has a list of local groups who are in the same boat. Anthony Jay, co-writer of the Yes, Prime/ Minister series has recently written Not in our back yard, a guide on ‘how to run a protest campaign and save the neighbourhood’. Corporate Watch and Grassroots Action on Food and Farming.have published a downloadable DIY guide to stopping supermarket developments.
Those who are involved in such campaigns soon realise that they can be tiresome and depressing. But they an important way of registering local disapproval, helping resist (or maybe just delay) the corporate takeover of Britain, and preserving what remains of our towns and villages.
And, who knows, if yours succeeds, one day your home town might become as idyllic as Epsom and Ewell?
This article first appeared in Third Way.
Nick Spencer's book Christianity, Climate Change and Sustainable Living is available from Amazon.
Resources
For information on supermarkets and their corporate takeover of the UK, check out New Economics Foundation (www.neweconomics.org) and Friends of the Earth (www.foe.co.uk);
See also Grassroots Action on Food and Farming for more information: (www.gaff.org.uk) and Corporate Watch (www.corporatewatch.org.uk)
For more detailed analyses of what supermarkets are doing to out culture see Joanna Blythman, Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets (Perennial, 2005) and Felicity Lawrence Not on the label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate (Penguin, 2004).
To help you shop locally: www.regionalfoodanddrink.co.uk and www.localfoodworks.org
To help you shop directly: www.farmersmarkets.net
To help you shop ethically: www.sustainweb.org and www.fairtradeonline.com
Two useful guides: The Organic Directory (Green Books, 2005) and Rick Stein's Guide to the Food Heroes of Britain (BBC Books, 2005)
To help you campaign: Anthony Jay, Not in Our Back Yard: How to Run a Protest Campaign and Save the Neighbourhood (White Ladder Press, 2005) and Checkout Chuckout (available on www.corporatewatch.org.uk)
[1] For full details on how lovely Epsom and Ewell really is, check out: http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/best&worst/best&worst_epsom.html
[2] There are a number of reports on the subject at www.neweconomics.org
[3] See Felicity Lawrence, Not on the Label (Penguin, 2004) for more details
[4] Tara Garnett, Wise Moves: Exploring the relationship between food, transport and CO2 (Transport 2000 Trust, 2003)
[5] See The Grocer, 15 May 2004; Baker N. (2004) How green is your supermarket? http://www.libdems.org.uk/story.html?id=6271 ; Tesco (2005) Annual review and financial Statement; quoted in Friend of the Earth, The Tesco Takeover
[6] Claire Foster (ed.)and Edmund Newell, The Worlds we live in, (DLT, 2005)
[7] Supermarkets: A Report on the supply of groceries to from multiple stores in the United Kingdom, Competition Commission (2000)
[8] Trading away workers rights: women workers in global supply chains, Oxfam (2004)
[9] Response to OFT Audit report consultation, Association of Convenience Stores (2005)
