on a moment,’ says Des. ‘I can’t see which apples you’re giving me.’
‘I’ll give you whichever bloody apples I like,’ says the man.
‘In which case,’ Des replies, ‘you can keep ’em.’ He turns and walks away only to hear the stallholder shout after him: ‘Suit yourself, you black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard.’
This is one of the stories with which I grew up; one of those legends that all families have. My dad was a black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard. ‘What was it that man called you?’ my mother would ask from the opposite end of the dinner table, when she thought he was being difficult. And we would reply in unison: ‘A black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard.’
What does this story tell us? Just this: that whatever critics of supermarkets might like to tell you, the alternatives – street markets and local shops – were not, and are not, all run by lovely people, with a genuine interest in and concern for all their customers. They are merely run by people. As they are across the rest of society, some people are lovely. Some of them do genuinely care about the people who shop with them. And some of those shopkeepers and market stallholders are miserable scumbags who are to customer service what napalm is to peace.
Another story, this time from the other side of the debate. I am in the very large Tesco supermarket near my home in Brixton, south London, doing the weekly shop. I am with my son Eddie, who must be 2 or 3 years old; certainly he has not yet started school. Usually he does this shop with my wife, who works part-time, and it quickly becomes clear that he is very comfortable here. For, everywhere we go, the staff say hello to him. It doesn’t just happen once or twice during our hour in Tesco. It happens perhaps eight or ten times: from the shelf stackers to the women on the deli counter to those working the checkouts. All of them know Eddie by name and have a few words for him. I am intrigued by this and so begin to notice something. We are not the only people this happens to. There are conversations between staff and customers going on all over the place, and they are not simply about which aisle the dried fruits are located on. The staff here know their customers, which really isn’t surprising, because almost all the employees come from the heart of this community.
So what does this second story tell us? Just this: that whatever critics of supermarkets might like to tell you, they are not all bland, anonymous, swollen warehouses disconnected from the neighbourhoods in which they sit. Of course, some of them might be. Some of them might feel like waiting rooms for death, just as some local shopkeepers are not very nice. But the assumptions we make about these enormous shops from which we buy the vast majority of our food simply do not stand up.
We forget very easily just what life was like in the World Before Supermarkets. I am old enough to remember as a small child being taken on the family food shopping expedition to J. Sainsbury’s in Kenton, north-west London, and the way we really would move from counter to counter. It was my job to say ‘six wings and six legs’ to the man at the butchery counter, so he could fill our weekly chicken order. It was cute. It was adorable. It was one of the ways in which my mother made the whole damn experience in some way bearable. The thing at the chicken counter broke up the tedium. Our bread came from the baker’s on the corner by our house, our fruit and veg from Robert the Greengrocers across the road, and any tinned goods from a small shop called Walton, Hassle and Port ten minutes’ walk away. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it, this patronage of local and small businesses, this tight web of inter-dependent relationships? And we did like the people involved. But gathering everything that the family might need for the week was a tiresome job.
My mother is gone now, but her close friend Carole Shuter, who also had three small kids in the sixties and seventies, remembers it in detail. ‘Oh God, it was a whole morning’s outing,’ she told me. ‘You’d have to clear the diary. I remember the Sainsbury’s thing very well, the way we had to queue half a dozen times and pay separately at each one. People romanticize things like butter being sold in blocks and you asking for a bit to be cut off, but you wouldn’t romanticize it if you had to do it every bloody week. It takes so long.’
Alan Sainsbury, the family-owned firm’s head, had come across the notion of self-service supermarkets in the US in the years immediately after the Second World War, and imported the idea. The company opened its first self-service branch in Croydon, just south of London, in 1950. Still, the roll-out didn’t begin in earnest until many years later, after Sainsbury’s went public in 1973 with what was then the biggest flotation in British stock exchange history. It didn’t reach our corner of London until the early seventies. (The last counter store hung on, in Peckham, until 1982.)
‘The first proper supermarket was a complete revelation,’ Carole says. ‘It was bloody marvellous. People are too quick to demean modern developments like that. They have no idea what it was like before. No idea at all.’
The point is that women like my mother and Carole had far better things to do than waste whole mornings of their week just getting the food shopping done. In Felicity Lawrence’s highly regarded book Not on the Label, a searing critique of Britain’s supermarkets, first published in 2004, she writes about the joys of shopping locally; of how it could be a bonding experience for her and her young family; that there was always time for such pleasures.
Really? Many of the generation of women who came before Felicity Lawrence that I talked to about this regarded it as a retrograde step: an attempt to cast women in a role they had fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century to throw off. One went as far as to say to me that buried within the anti-supermarket argument was one that sounded profoundly anti-woman because it was always the women who were burdened with the job of schlepping around the shops, which in turn made the notion of their having a full-time profession all but unsupportable. Whether the arguments around supermarkets really can be cast in these terms – a modern embarrassment about the idea that such things as food shopping should ever be seen as women’s work do kick in here – there is no doubt that, by reducing the number of hours needed to get domestic chores done, there was more time for other things. And thank Christ for that, because otherwise the economics of domestic life would have been completely unsustainable.
There are, of course, the economies of scale. Supermarkets make things cheaper. They just do. When you have more than 2,500 stores, as Tesco does, or over 1,000 like Sainsbury’s, you have serious buying power. Over 80 per cent of the retail food market spend is concentrated in the hands of the big supermarkets and, whatever the downsides of that, it has, historically, led to cheaper food. In the early post-war years it took over a third of average salary to pay for the food shop. Today it is just under 10 per cent. Or, to put it another way, you had to work until Wednesday morning to pay for the family’s weekly shop; now you’ll have earned enough by some time just after noon on Monday. And that’s not because salaries have increased enormously, compared with all the other costs we face; quite the opposite.
For these are the economic realities within which supermarkets operate. In 1962 average yearly pay was £799. By 2012 it was £26,200. It has increased by a factor of just over thirty. However, the picture with house prices is rather different. In 1962 the average house in Britain cost £2,670. Fifty years later it costs around £245,000. House prices have therefore increased by a factor of over ninety. Just stare at those numbers for a moment. House prices have increased at roughly three times the rate of earnings. Brutal, those figures, aren’t they? Faced with these realities, all those interesting historical debates about the fight by women like my mother and her friend Carole for the right to go out to work in the sixties and seventies become completely irrelevant. It’s no longer about the right to work. It’s about the need to work. The fact of the matter is that to support and run a household both members of a couple with kids need to be holding down full-time jobs. That makes them hideously time-poor. Ask anybody today to clear a morning of their diary just to go down the road to watch a man cut the butter you need off a huge block and they’d laugh in your face. In that context, supermarkets really are not evil. They are a complete godsend.
They are something else too, something the legions of food obsessives who spend so much of their time bemoaning their dreadful impact on our culture could never bring themselves to admit. Supermarkets are a force for change, good change, the