Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets
Joanna Blythman
An elegant demolition of the supermarket miracle, this book charts the impact that supermarkets have had on every aspect of our lives and culture.Did you know…• Almost 50% of supermarket fruit and vegetables contain pesticide residues?• UK supermarkets make 40p on every £1 spent on bananas while plantations workers are paid just 1p?• Supermarkets instill a climate of fear amongst their suppliers?• Every time a supermarket opens the local community loses on average 276 jobs?In the 1970s, British supermarkets had only 10% of the UK's grocery spend. Now they swallow up 80%, influencing how we shop, what we eat, how we spend our leisure time, how much rubbish we generate, even the very look of our physical environment.Award-winning food writer Joanna Blythman investigates the enormous impact that these big box retailers are having on our lives. She meets the farmers who are selling food to supermarkets for less than they need to survive and the wholesalers who have been eliminated from the supply chain; she travels to suburban retail parks to meet the teenagers and part-timers who stack our shelves and reveals the hoops third world suppliers must jump through to earn supermarket contracts.This thought-provoking, witty and sometimes chilling voyage of discovery is sure to make you think twice before you enthusiastically reach for that supermarket trolley again.Contains new material on the ‘Tesocisation’ of Britain.
Shopped
THE SHOCKING POWER OF BRITISH SUPERMARKETS
Joanna Blythman
Dedication (#ulink_82db0811-8c5a-5ef6-a918-2bde2f52500d)
For Lynda and Nick
Contents
Cover (#ueca49b5f-ea8d-55e4-8e4a-a25518207341)
Title Page (#u5c0fd8d0-c725-5226-ba27-01513b4d1eee)
Dedication (#ufde25afa-5143-5897-a7a0-9b446a0622f4)
Supermarket starters (#uaff813bd-7bec-59c2-a320-2981e6993cf6)
SUPERMARKET SPACE (#ub7300163-ba5b-59ca-837f-3c1517005d4e)
1 Forgotten people (#u1a7d44a9-919a-5185-8b79-c008e149494a)
2 Trolley towns (#u86d633cf-5682-528c-ba4d-074d32742a54)
3 Small basket (#u7b43f962-5dde-549f-be25-645ffe8cb237)
4 Working the system (#ub09d08d1-e932-5fbc-8f92-e409c320862d)
5 Sugar daddies (#u727edce5-ea8e-57fd-9ac5-25224d1cdb0d)
6 Pimlico v. Sainsbury’s (#u5437102e-1ded-58bc-8301-c2b53d8d2440)
SUPERMARKET FOOD (#uc027fd66-9ac4-51e7-92e9-221df50003fa)
7 Giving us what we want (#u33a32025-1aa0-5d40-9fed-947b6e2a71a5)
8 Feeding bad food culture (#uf4f74ada-056b-5f46-8058-2e79ef311e43)
9 Why it all tastes the same (#u71e17c87-23f6-5a71-a3c0-46156d284340)
10 Fresh is worst (#u16d5fd6e-995b-58b4-abad-a3be0a46ad9c)
11 Permanent global summertime (#u3d7f31c4-a9ea-57a0-9a79-4a642df89167)
12 Lost at sea (#u7dfdfba6-2f20-575c-a2b4-53936d03a4d2)
13 Bright red meat (#u4b8a805e-f7e9-537d-96c9-6a65488a3445)
14 Our weekly bread (#uf292a831-6ebb-5e54-8576-1eccef11090e)
15 Gastro-gap (#u3fd56551-bb08-546e-b91f-64143dcae687)
SUPERMARKET WORKERS (#u3f5c7639-8588-590e-a3e6-87005329287a)
16 My big welcome (#u7d4fcf07-8c02-50fd-9351-b93c6a71e5a2)
17 Life on the checkout (#u3cecdded-8046-53c2-bcec-3f9efd3f6720)
SUPERMARKET SUPPLIERS (#ub5846941-c891-57a4-984f-5ba8ce62ff47)
18 Climate of fear (#u6967872b-25e4-5652-9dbb-60a09dc8a412)
19 Extracting the best deal (#u99dcf088-1b38-501d-af7e-f35f8be439aa)
20 Pay to play (#u7fbba011-9e3e-57af-93b4-2357069479f7)
21 Green beans from Kenya (#uba89a7e6-bb86-58bb-a487-c2274fde0811)
22 Get it in writing (#u8591ff46-8285-5521-a6c9-79075fcafa52)
23 You’ve been category managed (#ud8408828-0a1b-5860-8257-1913ed29bc26)
24 Business as usual (#ue330ef59-15d1-5a13-b41a-7b267f3f28bf)
SUPERMARKET WORLD (#u7577befc-6886-582c-8b1d-ffaebae17e6a)
25 Pruning horticulture (#ub5db9fd2-5e54-50df-a739-721b88236fbe)
26 Market grab (#u094d079e-05ac-5b71-b8a6-11b365b895fd)
27 A perfect world (#u3b8e170c-6dbc-5d19-872b-ba811738ec23)
28 Variety is not the spice of life (#u6da217d1-221f-5a1c-bd5d-853b7fe6b0d9)
29 First stop Europe (#u1cf4bdb0-beea-54cd-980b-f826d4e21be1)
30 Next stop the world (#u6807a998-ef7b-5c91-902c-fda7dbce9edb)
SUPERMARKET CULTURE (#uc77afa66-8f0c-5f94-85f3-47308691c6f3)
31 The new community (#u669d7d96-170d-5ce0-bedf-8514e6e69be9)
32 That’s supermarket price (#ud5fc45aa-b072-5853-85ae-3d632fa0ade1)
33 Take our word for it (#u756e8abc-88c6-5a1c-9150-6354464d01de)
34 Safety in numbers (#u39b86e56-010e-5f80-afac-c03e35ef6d5d)
35 Meet the locals (#u7b558f87-e4e1-59aa-ad9d-62dae2448423)
36 Race to the bottom (#u571c1d28-e600-55d4-a1b1-b6b2735ded9f)
SUPERMARKET FUTURE (#u4796b70d-668f-56df-a168-1045bd71406a)
37 Retail domination (#ude526cbc-db65-592b-a7bf-5aae4e7f79fa)
38 Big day out (#u92c54cec-4dae-58c1-9f92-2488b9007778)
39 Tesco world (#ue1df524f-03ce-5f2c-89ed-c97736b25172)
Supermarket solutions (#ubb55addb-0746-5641-ac26-00b2000545b1)
Supermarket responses (#u1803787d-95d5-5e08-9cf3-e0a842dabc9e)
Index (#ua15704b5-f372-56dc-bcbd-c59eb276fc5a)
Acknowledgements (#u3614e8e1-19d2-5510-b387-c9453c443f0a)
About the Author (#ud6820769-4397-5571-8887-6207962d6867)
Notes (#u9e0a4dfb-e906-522c-8c8f-2163285957da)
Praise (#u5cfa7b34-6de7-5e7f-97d0-c5f9a77f4c7c)
By the Same Author (#u60df3b2e-3f18-512a-8b26-c248f6858303)
Copyright (#uaed325f5-9045-5624-a635-1efe587af47f)
About the Publisher (#u39e626a7-551e-5e37-87f4-4e61ef8ac786)
Supermarket starters (#ulink_83d07928-76f5-55b6-8051-eb8a7c8c429e)
Leafing through this book you might get the impression that it is written by a longstanding opponent and critic of supermarkets. It might surprise you to know that actually there was a time when I pushed my trolley around the supermarket just like the next person. In common with most food shoppers, I believed that supermarkets offered a welcome addition to traditional shopping outlets – butchers, fishmongers, grocers and so on – expanding the all-round food shopping choice. I thought, naively, that supermarkets were an ‘as well as’ not ‘instead of’ feature of the retail scene.
Then in 1992 I moved to Strasbourg in France. There I shopped like a typical French person. I used small shops and food markets routinely, making a trip out of town about once a month to stock up at the hypermarket on boring items such as cat food and dishwasher salt. Naturally, when I was there, I cherry-picked any attractive special offers. But I soon learnt that to a French person – or any other European for that matter – the British idea of buying everything you need in a once-a-week supermarket shopping blitz was alien, bizarre even. The French are quite clear that although supermarkets are handy for standard items, the best food is on sale elsewhere.
Returning to the UK in 1995, I found that I was bridling at the prospect of readjusting to the prevailing supermarket-shopping pattern. Indeed, I saw it with new eyes. Several useful independent local shops had closed down in the time I had been away and just up the road, where there used to be playing fields for schoolchildren, the dreariest of Tescos had sprung up. There it was, big, ugly and floodlit twenty-four hours a day, squatting behind a brash new roundabout in a sea of new roads and concrete parking spaces. Still, it was close and convenient (or so I thought), the obvious place to head for when the milk and toilet rolls ran out.
So I used it anyway, but it was only a matter of months before I realised that shopping there was stultifying any creative urge I had to cook because I simply couldn’t find the sort of food I want to eat and feed to my family. In exasperation I started driving further to other supermarket chains, but I found myself having the same reaction. The penny dropped that what I was looking for was fresh, local, seasonal ingredients produced by a large number of small, diverse producers. What supermarkets excel at, on the other hand, is over-packaged, often over-processed, much-travelled ingredients that put two fingers up to the seasons and any notion of locality or geographical specificity.
I began to see what a spirit-crushing and alienating experience supermarket shopping actually was. How in UK chains, any given day of the year is just like every other day. How the experience of shopping in Salford is exactly like shopping in Southampton, Sheffield or Stirling. I realised that supermarket shopping was turning me into a robotic Stepford wife – minus the fixed smile. I bought the same repeat items and gritted my teeth as I made my way round the aisles on autopilot. I spent a fortune every time. My cupboards and fridge were constantly stuffed with food and yet somehow I could never think of anything to cook.
Slowly but surely I became deeply discontented with the quality of food that was on offer. I wasn’t interested in ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offers on fizzy drinks and multi-packs of flavoured crisps, which seemed to be something of a supermarket speciality. I didn’t buy much processed food and always bypassed the sprawling shelves loaded up with ready meals. I was looking for fresh, unprocessed food ingredients and I came to see that in this department UK supermarkets just didn’t deliver. Ripe fruit? That’s too much hassle for them so forget it. Properly hung meat? That takes too long and cuts profit margins, so forget that too. Decent bread without chemically hardened fats or GM enzymes? Nicely ripened cheese? Dream on. A chicken that has not stood in excrement in an overcrowded broiler shed? ‘Well, we only get two boxes of free-range/organic chicken once a week and we’ve run out and even then it’s only whole birds not chicken pieces …’ Why? ‘Because there’s not enough demand for it.’
Eventually, I got fed up with being marginalised as a cranky customer with odd and unrepresentative eating habits. My patience ran out, and on 1 January 2002, I made a New Year resolution to support the independent food sector and stop shopping routinely in supermarkets. I started revisiting independent butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers and greengrocers with increasing relish. I rediscovered vigorous coriander in fist-sized bunches, not a few limp and olive-coloured stalks in shiny plastic. My fish was lustrous and had a sparkle in its eye, unlike the matt, flaccid specimens on the supermarket slab. I was nudged into remembering how good beef was reddish-brown, marbled with creamy fat and tender, not bright red, lean and tough. I signed up for an organic vegetable box and really looked forward to Thursdays when it was delivered to my door, just for the sheer pleasure of seeing what was different and seasonal that week. Fortnightly farmers’ markets became an unmissable event on Saturday mornings. I got to know the shopkeepers, stallholders and delivery men, and came to value my interaction with them. It’s hard to build a relationship with a low-paid, mind-numbed checkout operator or a harassed shelf-stacker. Gradually, supermarkets became a residual shopping possibility for me, generally when I had completely run out of uninteresting and heavy items.
In no time at all it was as if a horrible black burden had been lifted off my shoulders. The day-in, day-out struggle to feed everyone seemed to abate. My urge to cook and my gastronomic creativity soared. The contents of my rubbish bin shrank as it no longer had to accommodate excessive quantities of unnecessary and unsustainable supermarket packaging. An unforeseen bonus was that far from spending more money, I was spending less. This was chiefly because the independents’ prices were lower: supermarkets are surprisingly expensive places to shop for fresh, unprocessed meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. But it was also because I wasn’t routinely over-buying and being snared into stocking up with products I did not need and probably would never get around to eating. In fact, we were spending less money on food but eating better and more healthily than before.
Then I got the idea of writing a book about supermarkets. I wanted to investigate why they were so incapable of supplying the kind of food that I, and a growing number of people, want to eat. I began to see how we consumers had unwittingly relinquished sovereignty over what we eat to a handful of large corporations that now control 80 per cent of the UK’s shopping spend.
In effect, our shopping choices are now dictated by a few monopolistic retailers who, by wooing consumers with apparently low prices and lobbying subsequent governments not to interfere with their divine right to make money, have been allowed to develop an unhealthy grip over the nation’s shopping basket. At the beginning of 2007, Tesco ate up almost 32 per cent of the UK’s spend, giving it a scary degree of purchasing power over suppliers and considerable scope to redesign what we eat to suit its own objectives.
Let’s be clear that large supermarket chains are companies whose aim is not, first and foremost, to meet society’s interests. They aren’t too concerned about being excellent grocers, or supplying the nation with good-quality, wholesome food, or supporting British farmers or treating Third World workers ethically or being kind to turkeys or helping working mothers to feed their children better – or any other goal of which many of us would approve. The leading supermarket chains are all making great play of how ‘green’ they are. Tesco says that it is going to publish the carbon footprint of each of its products while Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose have all pledged to reduce waste, amongst other measures. Some supermarket green claims sound better than they really are. Tesco has introduced degradable bags, but they are still made from plastic. These ‘degradable’ bags need sunlight in order to break down, and the majority will probably end up in landfill sites where they are more likely to break down into methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
UK supermarkets are definitely making efforts to green up their act, but when the National Consumer Council examined their performance in 2006 – looking at food transport, waste, sustainable sourcing and farming – it concluded that no supermarket rated well on all criteria. The truth is that supermarkets find it extremely difficult to ‘go green’ because environmental damage is part of the fabric of their business, thanks to transport-related carbon emissions, excessive packaging and their endless expansion plans. So they are happy to go along with ideas or demands that are generally progressive, such as stocking more organic food or installing solar panels, but only as long as it is in their commercial interest to do so. The crunch comes when doing the right thing – the ethical thing – would actually cost them money or interfere with their modus operandi. Then they are not so keen. The bottom line is that they are stock market-driven corporations whose overarching goal is to keep their shareholders happy. And the sad fact is that, in partnership with the food industry, they have debased our whole appreciation of food. It is no coincidence that the UK, the country with the worst food culture in Europe, the one with the most palpable obesity problem, is also the country most wedded to supermarket shopping.
When you read this book I hope you too will come to see that ‘Big Food’ and ‘Big Retail’ are really two sides of the same coin. Big global food manufacturers need big supermarket chains to get their products on to the shelves and our big supermarkets need big food processors to churn out items such as chicken kievs glued together with additives to make their profits. It’s an unholy alliance where supermarkets are effectively gatekeepers for a system of food production that is about putting profit before quality, the environment or public health.
Next time you are in a supermarket, take a look at what products are on prominent special offer on those lucrative shelf ends. You can bet your bottom dollar that the vast majority will be stacked high with everything the nation would be better off not eating. The business logic, of course, is faultless. Supermarkets make more money out of selling value-added processed junk than they do good food. There’s a limit to how much they can charge for a potato, even well-scrubbed ‘heirloom’ varieties. But process a nondescript white spud into a pre-cooked, microwavable baked potato or ‘child-friendly’ potato shapes and the sky is the limit.
While consumers think that the supermarkets are there to serve us, they actually operate to a totally different agenda. Supermarkets sell us what it suits them to sell. They decide what makes them money and then they figure out ways of marketing it to us so that we want to buy it. Their stocks-in-trade are products sourced nationally or globally at their behest from an increasingly small number of large, but nevertheless captive, suppliers. In that process they are reshaping our food chain for the worse. The buying terms and prices that they impose on farmers reward and encourage intensive farming and militate against smaller, more quality-conscious producers. The supermarket system does not reward flavour or biodiversity, just volume and standardisation. You will doubtless have heard murmurings about how supermarkets treat their suppliers. Let me tell you that it is even worse than you might suspect. Nowadays supermarkets and suppliers have a feudal relationship with each other: they are lord and vassal.
The irony of the great supermarket revolution is that the concept they sold us, choice, has actually become a vehicle for denying us that. What ‘choice’ do we really have when all we have to choose between is a Tesco or an Asda, a Sainsbury’s or a Morrisons? You may have noticed, at least at a subliminal level, how one chain’s sandwich is pretty much like another’s, how supermarket chicken tikkas all share that haunting industrial gloopiness. Large supermarkets typically stock some 32,000 lines, but a bit like a subscription to endless American or Italian TV channels, it’s a quantitative, not qualitative choice. And this supermarket monotony becomes all the more oppressive as the supermarkets recolonise with smaller-format stores the high streets they killed off in the first place.
But as more centres turn into anonymous, identikit trolley towns dominated by the suffocating presence of big supermarket chains, we consumers do have a choice. We can lie down and let the supermarkets take total control of what ends up on our plates. We can stand by, dismayed but passive, as they drive all but the largest farmers and food suppliers out of business by sourcing products from parts of the globe where they can buy for even less. Or we can change our food shopping habits and use them to vote for a different sort of food economy, one that supports small, local and diverse, not large, global and monotonous. I hope that when you read this book, you’ll ask yourself which sort of food world you want to live in. We can’t have both.
SUPERMARKET SPACE (#ulink_a9986d12-6faf-5e47-94d1-93a4ee18da8c)
1 Forgotten people (#ulink_8f293fbe-a27b-51d5-8a0d-6654a2cb24d5)
In June 2003, when a new Sainsbury’s Local, complete with cash machine, sliding doors and eight gleaming tills, opened opposite them, the owners of Belmont Mini Market in Chalk Farm were worried. A new shiny supermarket right across the street is every small shopkeeper’s nightmare. History shows that when a supermarket opens, local shopkeepers can moan and complain all they like, but it’s just a matter of time until all but the most exceptional amongst them lose just enough business to the newcomer to make their own enterprises unviable. But the Belmont Mini Market refused to lie down and be ignored. It had been open seven days a week, from seven in the morning until eleven at night, for the last eighteen years. Locals valued the service it provided, and in particular the pleasantness of the hard-working Sri Lankan owners. Belmont Mini Market joined forces with an especially appreciative customer, a creative communication agency, to make local people think twice before bypassing them for Sainsbury’s. With the agency’s help, the owners sent letters to local residents and printed fly-posters and stickers with photos of the Mini Market’s staff that read, ‘Sainsbury has got electric sliding door but please do not be forgetting us.’ They even posted a man with a placard outside Sainsbury’s to emphasise the point. Three months after the opening of Sainsbury’s, one of the owners, Mariathas Suthakaran, told me that although sales of some lines such as bread and milk were slightly down, customers were still coming into his store.
Chalk Farm’s residents and workers may not easily forget the endearing staff at the Belmont Mini Market, but statistics show that the UK collectively has forgotten thousands of other shopkeepers. The figures vary depending on the source and its classification of shops, but the overall picture is remarkably consistent, showing a steady decline in small shops as the supermarkets have progressively taken control of the nation’s shopping basket. The nation of shopkeepers has become a nation of supermarkets.
In 1950, supermarkets had only 20 per cent of the grocery market while small shops and traditional Co-ops had 80 per cent between them. By 1990, this situation had been more or less reversed, with supermarkets eating up almost 80 per cent of the grocery market. In 1998, when the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) undertook what is considered to be the most comprehensive governmental assessment of the implications of food store developments, it confirmed a phenomenon that most consumers had already observed first hand. ‘Our research has shown that large foodstores can and have had an adverse impact on market towns and district centres … The level and consequences of impact will vary depending on the particular local circumstances … Smaller centres which are dependent to a large extent on convenience retailing to underpin their function are most vulnerable to the effects of larger foodstore development in edge-of-centre and out-of-centre locations,’ it concluded.
This study underlined just how dramatic the supermarket effect could be. When Tesco had opened a store on the edge of Cirencester in Wiltshire, the market share of town-centre food shops declined by 38 per cent. For convenience shops the study found that the damage was even more acute. In Fakenham in Norfolk, for example, it found that the opening of an out-of-town supermarket had caused a 64 per cent decline in market share for the convenience shops in the town centre. At Warminster in Hampshire, the decline was even more marked – 75 per cent. The trend has continued since the study. When Tesco opened a new 37,000-square-foot store in Hove in 2003, for instance, the effect on neighbouring retailers was almost instant. Within a week, small shopkeepers’ sales had tumbled. The local greengrocer said that he had hoped that Tesco would bring extra footfall into the area, but sales were down 25–30 per cent. It was the same story at the post office. ‘They [sales] are about 25 per cent down. Hopefully it’s only the effect of the opening week. If it is not, we will be stuffed,’ said postmaster Nayan Shah.
When the New Economics Foundation examined the phenomenon know as ‘Ghost Town Britain’ – the slow death of community life in small towns and villages – it probed the mechanism by which supermarkets suck life from local shops and reported:
Suppose a supermarket opens on the outskirts of a town and half the residents start to do one third of their shopping there. These people still do two thirds of their shopping in the town centre, while the other half of the population continues to do all its shopping in the centre. Although all the residents still patronise the town centre, its retail revenue drops about 16.7% – enough to start killing off shops. This is a perverse market dynamic; a loss to the entire community that not a single person would have wanted. It is also self-reinforcing: once the downtown starts to shut down, people who preferred to shop there have no choice but to switch to the supermarket. What begins as a seemingly harmless ripple becomes a powerful and destructive wave.
Statistics on small shops read like casualties of a curiously uneven war. In 2000, when the DETR Select Committee considered the impact of supermarkets, it noted that the number of independent grocers in the UK had fallen from 116,000 in 1961 to only 20,900 in 1997. Statistics compiled by the Meat and Livestock Commission using figures from the Institute of Grocery Distribution, Taylor Nelson Sofres and the Office of National Statistics show that there were only 23,960 independent grocers in the UK in 2001 compared to 62,000 in 1977.
The same pattern is mirrored in figures for specialist shops. Independent butcher’s shops, for example, declined from 25,300 to 8,344 in the same period. Roughly two out of every three butchers have gone out of business in the last twenty-five years. Between 1990 and 2000, supermarkets’ share of the fresh fish market increased from 21.4 per cent to over 66 per cent, while fishmongers’ market share fell to 20.3 per cent. Between 1997 and 2002, specialist stores like butchers, bakers and fishmongers closed at the rate of fifty a week. Figures logged by the Office of National Statistics show that the number of businesses selling food, tobacco and beverages fell by 37 per cent between 1994 and 2001; if decline persists at the same rate, another 10,000 businesses will have vanished by 2005 and the total number of local shops selling these goods will have been halved in just over a decade. Researchers at Manchester School of Management have predicted that if current trends continue there might not be a single independent food store left in the whole of the UK by 2050.
This projected disappearance of independent food shops is a disturbing possibility, not only because it erodes choice, but also because these shops produce more economic benefits for their immediate community than supermarket chains. It has been calculated that every £10 spent in a local food initiative (shop, farmer’s market, farm shop or box scheme) is worth £25 to the local economy because small local food businesses – by using local farmers, the nearest locksmith or printer and so on – support other local businesses. That same £10 spent in a supermarket produces just £14 worth of benefits for the local community.
Obviously the closure of small shops means job losses – and these losses are not compensated for with new supermarket jobs. The National Retail Planning Forum has calculated that new food superstores have, on average, a negative effect on retail employment. Its 1998 report said that every superstore opening resulted in a net loss in employment of 276 fulltime equivalents. A majority of supermarket jobs are part-time, so the arrival of supermarkets means that many fulltime jobs in the local community are replaced by part-time ones.
As the DETR Select Committee noted, supermarket blight has been most pronounced in smaller towns, villages and rural areas. By 2000, the Countryside Agency was saying that seven out of ten English villages had been left without a shop. In 2001 the Rural Shops Alliance found that there were fewer than 12,000 rural shops left in the UK; and, according to The Grocer magazine, these were closing at the rate of 300 a year.
The haemorrhage of small independent shops that started in the 1980s and accelerated throughout the 1990s has settled down to a steady drip in the last couple of years. In 2001, net closures amongst smaller newsagents, for example, were running at the rate of almost one a day. The Institute of Grocery Distribution has reported that there were 953 fewer convenience stores in the UK in 2001 than there were in 2000: a 1.7 per cent drop. It predicts that this trend will continue, with another 3,700 shops disappearing by 2006.
As far as our large supermarkets are concerned, such effects are just the natural law of the retail jungle. If local shops, even smaller supermarkets, close, so what? Small-scale retailing RIP. As one supermarket expert put it: ‘The supermarket groups are running businesses. The success of superstores shows that they are meeting the needs of shoppers, at least the majority of them. The retailers have discovered the right business model, recognized the opportunity; government policy let them rip. People want to use their cars and will do so whenever possible.’
Mention the words ‘parking’ or ‘pedestrianisation’ to independent shopkeepers and be prepared to stand and listen for some time. They feel a huge sense of injustice at the large supermarket chains’ free-parking advantage over town-based shops. They see themselves as victims of pseudo-environmental town planning, selectively applied. Consumers can drive to out-of-town superstores and park for free. But if they would prefer to spread a significant amount of their household shopping around local shops, either they will need strong arms to transport heavy shopping by foot – in 2000 the average family food shopping weighed around 36 kilos – or they will have to cruise round patiently in their cars to find one of a diminishing number of parking spaces. When the DETR’s Select Committee looked at this issue, it confirmed the disadvantage that small shopkeepers feel so intensely. ‘The large amounts of free car parking offered by existing out of town supermarkets gives them an enormous competitive advantage over city-centre stores. In addition, supermarkets at these sites generate more car use, making the situation on already congested roads worse. The situation needs to be addressed urgently,’ it concluded. To redress this obvious injustice, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott mooted the idea of a tax on supermarket parking. Supermarkets would have had to pay something back to the country for their acres of free car parks. But the supermarkets lobbied successfully to have this proposal dropped. Hence the current status quo in which supermarkets dangle a free-parking carrot to consumers while local shops and their potential customers dodge vigilant traffic wardens keenly enforcing their council’s green-sounding, leave-your-car-at-home policy.
For the small, local shops that remain, survival gets ever more complicated too. Small shops have to try to survive a campaign of attrition. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s they had to see off not just the first wave of supermarket openings but also the second and third as rival chains competed for market share in their area. The drastically reduced number of small shops that have survived that period now have to watch these supermarket chains replicating like mutants in a sci-fi film as they extend and refurbish existing stores out of town and set up new ones in smaller sizes and formats in the high street. Life isn’t getting any easier for independent shopkeepers.
2 Trolley towns (#ulink_52a2664d-3f20-59bf-a3df-c01a9099c04e)
The term ‘company town’ was coined by historians to describe centres of population made distinctive by the one-dimensional nature of their employment opportunities and the predominance of the large companies that controlled them. Nowadays it may be more apt to distinguish places not according to how locals earn their money, but by how they spend it. Few British towns have a distinctive sense of place any longer. Most have become trolley towns, shaped by the grocery chains that dominate them.
What does a trolley town look like? Approach any significant centre of population in the UK and you must pass through the supermarket ring. The first thing that greets you is not some distinctive civic monument or landmark but the now familiar supermarket sprawl, complete with its new roundabouts, altered road layout, traffic signals with changed priorities, petrol station and sea of parking. Welcome to Asdatown, or Tescotown, or Sainsburytown. Make it into the centre of one of these places and you’re in Anytown, Anywhere. Or even Clonetown. You’ll search to find anything approximating to a small greengrocer, fishmonger or butcher. These have been replaced by charity shops, video shops and, in more affluent centres, branches of large retail chains. This is the new urban landscape our large supermarket chains have bequeathed us.
Dundee is a typical trolley town, or city. Once an important port at the mouth of the River Tay, its heyday was during the industrial revolution. Dundee’s reputation was built on the three Js: jam, jute and journalism. By dint of its seafaring history, Dundee claims the credit for introducing Britain to the delights of jam made from imported exotic fruits, otherwise known as marmalade. In the nineteenth century, its jute mills swelled its population. In the twentieth century, it was better known as the home of the Beano and the Dandy comics created by local publisher D. C. Thomson. Now Dundee has a population of around 165,000. On paper, it is an interesting place to live in and visit, and not short of visual attractions. It has the silvery Tay itself and the Tay Rail Bridge, a dark mass of sturdy Victorian metal. You can still see the stump of its notorious predecessor, the one that collapsed into the river. You can visit the historic sailing ship the Discovery, famed for its early exploration of the Arctic. But the first thing that hits you when you approach Dundee from any direction these days is not this unique and impressive heritage but supermarkets.
In the 1990s Dundee was home to William Low, a Scottish supermarket chain with relatively small stores throughout the country. It was acquired by Tesco as a quick way for it to build its base in Scotland and compete with the then dominant chain, Safeway. Soon the whole look of Dundee started to change. Locals were amazed when, after the council had spent lots of money improving the approaches to the city, planting floral displays, landscaping and so on, Tesco got planning permission for a superstore on the city’s most desirable and scenic location, Riverside Drive, with its long, open views over the Tay. Then Asda started flexing its muscles and Sainsbury’s entered the fray. Now most key routes through and past Dundee seem to lead to vast supermarkets. They loom so large that they dwarf the city’s outstanding historic and civic heritage. The city struggles to put itself on the tourist map, and no wonder: to the visitor, it might look as though the main occupation of its residents is supermarket shopping.
Dundee city centre consists of an area of about half a square mile, large parts of which are pedestrianised. At either end, like sentinels, stand two shopping malls, tenanted with a familiar litany of chain shops – Carphone Warehouse, Claire’s Accessories, Clinton Cards and so on. Fast-food chains are also well represented. Most of the small shop units that remain in the centre have been turned into pubs or amusement centres, or charity or video rental shops.
In the 1960s, before the large UK-wide supermarket chains managed to persuade Dundee’s impoverished city council, desperate for cash, to let them have their way, this area was a thriving centre for food shopping. There were ten bakers; now there are two left. There were eight or nine butchers; now there is one. Of the five fishmongers, one has survived. Where there were half a dozen grocers, one remains. Food shoppers – as opposed to food grazers – will find little to sustain them in Dundee city centre these days.
When I visited Dundee in 2003, the city had four Tescos, two Safeways, two Asdas, one Sainsbury’s, one Marks & Spencer and a clutch of discount and low-price outlets. Asda had submitted a planning application to build a third store on a greenfield site. It had commissioned a traffic-impact study to support its application and was reported to be ‘ready and waiting’ to state its case to councillors when it came before the planning committee. Residents, meanwhile, had formed an action group to oppose the application. Not to be left out of Dundee’s supermarket mêlée, Morrisons was also in talks with the city council over its application to build a further 90,000-square-foot superstore in the city, close in scale to a Tesco Extra or an Asda superstore. Since both the Asda and Morrisons proposed sites were on council land, Dundee City Council stood to receive a substantial windfall from the sales. ‘Some estimates have put the amount the local authority stands to make at anywhere between £15 and £20 million,’ reported the Evening Telegraph. Dundee clearly did not need any more supermarkets. Yet with this sort of money to play for, you could see why councillors might be sorely tempted to say yes to a couple more.
As it stands, any Dundonian who wants to shop in independent outlets must travel to Broughty Ferry, now effectively a prosperous suburb of the city and home to a thriving rump of small shops that have so far been sheltered from the city’s supermarket revolution. Here independent shopkeepers are endlessly resourceful in thinking up new ways of seeing off the supermarket threat. ‘We [independent traders] are relying on the overall viability of the area by creating a food shopping cluster,’ baker Martin Goodfellow told me. A few doors along, David Craig has reinvented his butcher’s shop, Robertson’s, as a mini Harrods food hall on the Tay, and it is renowned for its exceptional range and personal service. Both men are optimistic that they can hold the line against the supermarkets, but with new superstores opening and existing ones being extended, they remain far from complacent.
Wherever you go now in the UK, you will find cities and towns whose vitality has been drained by supermarkets. Terence Blacker wrote in the Independent:
I live in East Anglia where the progress of convenience shopping has had a visible effect on the quality of life. My nearest town, Diss, has two supermarkets, squatting each side of the thoroughfare that passes near the town centre. One is adequate, the other cheap but hilariously awful. As a result of their presence, the main shopping street of a market town of 6,000 people consists almost entirely of charity shops, estate agents and, mysteriously, a number of greetings card emporia. As they go out of business, small retailers complain that the life of the town is draining away, but the planning authorities remain unimpressed. It has just been announced that Tesco has been given permission to build another vast superstore beside the main road.
Writing in The Grocer, James Millar drew attention to the irony of the situation where he lived in Gloucestershire. ‘A recent survey has just pronounced my local town, Tetbury, the third most desirable place to live in the UK. Tetbury, undeniably, is a nice place to live. Yet the only places you can buy apples, cauliflowers or a bag of potatoes are the local Somerfield and the almighty new Tesco. The fruit and vegetable shop has gone – shut down. We have two local butcher’s shops but I wouldn’t count their chickens.’
A reader wrote to tell me of the similar effect of a new Sainsbury’s on the market town of Bourne in Lincolnshire. Both of the independent greengrocers had closed. One of them had become a doll’s house and miniatures shop. The other had turned into a bargain outlet that sold anything, providing it was extremely cheap.
It is not only small shops that close as supermarket leviathans move in. Small or medium-sized supermarkets – the kind that can coexist with independent retailers rather than close them down – are vulnerable. In November 2003, for example, the Midlands Co-op had to close a store in Thurmaston which had been open since the 1970s after it lost the bulk of its business to a new 45,000-square-foot Asda which had opened directly opposite.
It is a familiar story, one that can be recounted time and time again by people living in every part of the UK. When the big supermarkets move in, towns and cities are pushed to what the New Economics Foundation calls ‘the tipping point’. When the number of local retail outlets falls below a critical mass, the quantity of money circulating in the local economy suddenly plummets as people find there is no point in trying to do a full shop where the range of local outlets is impoverished. ‘This means a sudden, dramatic loss of services – leading to food and finance deserts,’ says the Foundation. In the case of big centres of population, this desertification expresses itself in a carbon-copy townscape dominated by omnipresent chains and fast-food outlets. In small places, it manifests itself in one of two forms: either pretty, but useless, main streets with a dearth of everyday services, or wholesale depression and deadness.
3 Small basket (#ulink_bac83d23-a39c-59e2-8ac9-09804c4ff702)
Supermarkets already gobble up a greedy 80 per cent of the nation’s grocery spend. Now they want the remaining 20 per cent. The long-term vision of the largest amongst them is that by 2020 or thereabouts, only two or three major players will possess more or less total control of the grocery market. This would make the supermarket sweep to power complete. These players would then have buyer power that allowed them to dictate terms to farmers, food producers and suppliers all over the world. Even the biggest brands, international household names, would be at their beck and call.
If supermarkets get their way, everything we buy, whether it is from a superstore, a smaller city store, a corner shop or a petrol-station forecourt, will be sold by a supermarket chain. There will be small shops, but not as we know them now. They will be run not by independents but by the supermarket chains. To realise this goal, supermarkets have embarked on a new mission. They’re after what’s known as ‘the small basket’, those more frequent shopping trips we make for just a few items. This market is what one industry commentator has called ‘the new competitive challenge’.
Think of it this way. In the process of sewing up the bulk of our shopping spend, supermarkets have managed to alter our perception of food shopping totally. Where people once shopped for food fairly frequently – if not daily, probably every other day – supermarkets have institutionalised the one-stop shopping trip, a weekly expedition to stock up for the next seven days under one roof. For busy working people this system has its attractions. In theory, the one-stop shop allows us to clear the decks, to get ourselves organised in one fell swoop, saving us from having to think about grocery shopping for the rest of a pressurised week. There are, of course, problems with the concept. Fresh items such as fruit and vegetables don’t all naturally last for a week. This doesn’t stop supermarkets selling them to us: they simply instruct suppliers to harvest them ‘green and backward’ so that they don’t rot and look OK on the shelves, even if they taste of zilch when we get them back home. And do you know any fishmongers who reckon that fish can be stored in domestic fridges for several days at a time, as supermarkets would have us believe, and still taste fresh when it’s cooked?
Apart from making it harder to eat really fresh food, though, the one-stop shop in a big superstore is convenient. If you need to do a marathon shop for Christmas, say, or you have run out of a number of boring basics like toilet rolls, it is indisputably useful. But even the most organised consumers forget things – we run out of milk, salt perhaps; we need a lemon instantly, or dishwasher tablets – and we’re getting increasingly disenchanted with having to jump in a car and drive to the nearest superstore to buy them. Five years ago, the average shopping visit or time taken to go round a supermarket was forty-five minutes. Now it only takes thirty-five minutes. Consumers are shopping more frequently for smaller amounts and becoming increasingly reluctant to trail around a vast retail shed to do so. They are deserting superstores for smaller outlets, traditional small shops (butchers, bakers, fishmongers) and convenience stores or ‘C’ stores which are growing in popularity. Though their ranks have severely contracted as the number of supermarkets has grown, those that are left turn a decent penny or two because we have come to rely on them more than ever before. Why leave that residual business to independents, the supermarkets ask. Their conclusion? Time to mop up the whole lot.
Smaller outlets are attractive to supermarkets because they represent a whole new opportunity to get into a market they simply could not tap with larger stores. Added to that fact is supermarkets’ continuing difficulties in getting planning permission for out-of-town stores. At the end of the day, they may well get it, but what chain wants to spend years, and vast reserves of money, arguing with councils and planners when it can simply take over existing stores or sites in well-placed, central locations, with only a fraction of the hassle? What’s more, the one-stop superstore market is becoming saturated. Competition is stiff and the scope for making profit or gaining market share is slimmer.
By contrast the potential for growth in town and city centres is huge because, killed off by – guess what? – those out-of-town supermarket developments with free parking, they have become food deserts. As well as buying up small outlets, they are stealing business from them. As the Guardian’s Brian Logan put it, ‘Not content with all those out of town developments perverting the social geography of Britain, the latest supermarket wheeze is to pop up “locally”, right next door to the few remaining independents and, like bogeymen, scare ’em away.’ Now, ironically, supermarket chains are colonising the vacant sites that they emptied with new medium-format stores with different fascia: Tesco Metro, Safeway’s Citystore, Sainsbury’s Central and smaller, convenience-sized outlets such as Sainsbury’s Local and Tesco Express. The latter is reported to have caused drops in business of 30–40 per cent for other local shops.
Typically these stores stock a relatively low proportion of fresh, unprocessed food and a high proportion of fast-turnaround prepared foods. When Safeway’s pioneer Citystore opened in Glasgow in 2003, its shelves were filled with sandwiches, crisps and fizzy drinks, although its windows were filled with nostalgic black-and-white images of a Victorian high street, complete with trams and thriving small shops, the message being, apparently, that small supermarket convenience stores were the twenty-first-century equivalent. These smaller-format stores leach business not only from remaining independents who have stayed in business – often only by the skin of their teeth, because they offered a good service, most notably long hours – but also from other outlets such as snack bars, bakers, even chain restaurants. Increasingly, supermarkets are widening their ambitions to embrace more of what Sainsbury’s calls ‘the Food Continuum’ – a concept based on the observation that supermarkets have brought about a ‘blurring of boundaries’ between cooking from scratch from primary raw ingredients and eating out. They have been instrumental in developing ‘component cooking’ (meals assembled using some prepared items), ready meals and takeaways such as Happy Bags, Hot Chicken and Indian or Chinese Banquets. Having strayed profitably into the ‘snacking on the hoof’ market and developed ‘hand-held’ snacks like sandwiches and sushi, the supermarkets’ commercial logic leads them to more potential sales, currently made in takeaway or restaurant outlets: hot pizzas ‘to go’ or hot sandwiches. The further supermarkets move away from stocking raw materials for traditional scratch cooking, and the more they move towards more restaurant-like instant meals, which present various opportunities to ‘add value’ to the basic raw ingredients by means of food processing and packaging, the better their bottom line will be.
Corner-store formats also allow supermarket chains to charge different prices for groceries. Consumers tend to assume that chains charge the same for any given line in all their stores. Asda, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Iceland, Booths, Aldi and Lidl say they operate a strict national pricing policy. But other chains don’t. This practice is called ‘price flexing’, which means that a chain sets a different retail price for a product in different geographical areas to compete with the local opposition. Price flexing cuts two ways. You can end up paying more for tea bags on the high street than you do in that edge-of-town superstore run by the same chain because there is no strong competition from rivals. Or you might be able to pick up tea bags for less on the high street because the market is particularly price sensitive there and so a supermarket chain is offering lower prices on certain lines. Somerfield, for example, told The Grocer that it runs extra promotions ‘where there is strong local competition’. The Co-op said that although it runs national pricing on key lines, ‘other prices vary by format or store size’.
When the Observer investigated the prices being charged in seven London stores in 2003, it concluded that customers were paying between 4 per cent and 7 per cent more for the privilege of shopping in supermarket ‘convenience’ stores compared with what they would pay for exactly the same products in larger-format stores in the same area. A report by the government’s Competition Commission in 2000 concluded that when carried out by big chains such as Safeway, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, this practice ‘operates against the public interest’. Both Tesco and Sainsbury’s challenged the methodology of the Commission’s analysis, and all chains operating price flexing said that the practice reflected the higher operating costs of more centrally located stores.
You might think that the regulatory authorities would be concerned about supermarkets’ tightening noose on the grocery market, but you’d be wrong. When the Competition Commission investigated them, our supermarket chains got lucky. It decided that supermarkets did not have a worrying monopoly on our grocery shopping. It divided the grocery market in two: ‘one-stop’ at supermarkets and ‘top-up’ at convenience stores. Our supermarkets had successfully fed the government and the Commission the line that these were two distinct markets without any particular bearing on one another. Any citizen with common sense could see that there is a fairly direct relationship between the decline in independent stores in the town centre and the ascendancy of out-of-centre superstores. But the Commission employed a rather narrow definition of the term ‘competition’. In its book, competition in the grocery sector meant competition between rival supermarket chains. Choice for consumer did not mean a choice of both small shops and a supermarket to shop in but a choice of supermarkets run by different chains. The logic was absurd. It implied that if you lived in a small town with a reasonable collection of small shops level pegging with one relatively small supermarket run by chain A, you were positively deprived of choice. The Commission seemed to believe that new competitor supermarkets run by chains B, C and D would give you greater choice. It ignored the fact that another supermarket would accelerate the rate of closures amongst independent shops that were just holding their own.
Given this regulatory climate, it is not surprising that the big multiples’ efforts to build their portfolio in the ‘small basket’ sector are escalating. As Richard Hyman of the market research company Verdict told The Times, ‘this was always a market that the big boys were going to get into big time’. In October 2002, the Co-op started off the big buying with its acquisition of the grocery chain Alldays. Three days later, it was no surprise to discover that Tesco had got the go-ahead from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to buy up the T&S chain of convenience stores, using this two-market yardstick. Tesco gained out of the deal the 450 new Express stores it created from the T&S stores, adding a cool 1 per cent to its market share, without raising a regulatory whimper. The OFT decided that the T&S acquisition gave Tesco only 5 per cent of the convenience market so that was OK. But as one industry analyst told the Daily Telegraph, with the T&S deal, ‘Tesco had done a land grab which would probably have taken them eight years to do piecemeal and probably 15 years in terms of all the planning wrangles there would have been.’ By the end of 2003, Tesco was opening Express stores at a rate of one a week.
There’s no doubt that the Competition Commission’s artificial division of the grocery market has turned out to be highly advantageous for the large supermarket chains. As Bill Grimsey, the chief executive officer of the retail and wholesale Big Food Group, put it: ‘It allows the already dominant multiples to bring their strength back into the high streets and local neighbourhoods, eventually working against the interests of shoppers, suppliers and the livelihoods of the smaller independents … They will also, in the long term, limit consumer choice and potentially lead to higher prices as competition eventually diminishes. Suppliers and consumers will be faced by a world dominated by two or three companies.’ A troubling prospect, isn’t it?
4 Working the system (#ulink_60b48880-974f-5770-b381-630669065451)
How on earth did Britain get into a situation where independent shops are an endangered species and a handful of powerful retailers are heading for total control of the nation’s food shopping – all in three decades? If consumers had been asked to vote on whether this was a desirable set of affairs, the resounding response would have been no; yet this is precisely what has happened. How did our regulatory system let us down?
When supermarkets started appearing in Britain during the 1960s, it was not instantly obvious that they were the forerunners of retail monsters. They were sufficiently few and far between not to cause undue concern. By today’s standards they were relatively small. Small shopkeepers were fearful about losing business to the new retail giants, but most people welcomed them. For most shoppers, they were something of a novelty, a new retail experience, a welcome addition to traditional shopping outlets – butchers, fishmongers, grocers and so on – adding to the all-round grocery shopping choice. Consumers saw the new supermarkets as an ‘as well as’ not an ‘instead of’ feature of the shopping scene. Local councils often viewed them positively as a whole new pot of rateable revenue.
By the late 1980s, however, supermarkets were multiplying at a steady rate. They were becoming bigger too. The nightmare scenarios articulated by independent shopkeepers were beginning to be played out on the high street. Belatedly, the penny dropped that a supermarket land grab was under way. It became obvious that some restrictions to curb the spread of supermarkets would be needed. In 1988, the Department of the Environment issued a planning policy note (PPG6) for England containing general guidance for local authorities. This said that although the planning system should not inhibit competition between retailers – perish the thought! – it should take into account whether a new supermarket would affect the vitality and viability of a nearby town centre. But this guidance proved totally inadequate to slow down the supermarkets’ inexorable push for retail space. A proliferation of large superstores followed.
The supermarket retail revolution no longer meant the odd useful store on the edge of urban areas, but a ring of similar developments creating a supermarket bracelet around towns and cities, a bracelet elastic enough to allow the insertion of ever more links. Chain B would build a new store, bigger and better than chain A’s existing store in the area. So chain A would respond with another bigger store to claw back the business the newcomer had taken away. Chain C, meanwhile, not to be outdone, would open its store to make sure it got its slice of the retail action.
People were surprised, and even shocked, to find that these superstores were sometimes constructed on greenfield land, even playing fields, which they had always supposed would never be put under hard landscaping of any sort, naively assuming that they would be protected by local development plans. Such plans proved to be weaker and more open to interpretation than many had supposed. Local planners felt their hands were tied. Even if they had the will to say no, they lacked the regulatory ammunition.
By 1993, the decline of small traders as a critical proportion of their customers began to drift off to the shiny new superstores with limitless free parking had become sufficiently acute for the government to issue a revised version of PPG6. This stressed the need for a suitable balance between developments in town centres and out of centre. It said that the scale, type and location of the supermarket should not undermine the vitality and viability of town centres. A year later this guidance was strengthened by PPG13. This stressed the need to promote more sustainable transport choices and to reduce the need to travel, especially by car. No one disputed that supermarkets were major generators of car travel. Their existence was encouraging shoppers to get in their cars and drive, even for just a carton of milk, when there was a local shop within walking distance.
But even though local authorities now had new grounds on which to cramp the supermarkets’ style, the supermarkets’ takeover of grocery retailing continued. By 1996, PPG6 had to be strengthened again. But by this point the horse had bolted. A further flurry of supermarket developments on the edge of towns and cities was of particular concern. This time PPG6 required local authorities to give preference to applications for supermarket developments on town-or district-centre sites. Out-of-centre sites were ranked below them and would not be approved if town-centre sites were available. New out-of-centre supermarkets should only be in locations that were well served by public transport.
The situation was and still is different in other parts of the British Isles. In Wales, the regulatory framework is less supermarket-friendly: if a new out-of-centre supermarket is ‘likely to lead to the loss of general food retailing in the centre of small towns’, this is grounds for refusal. In Scotland, the notion of whether or not a supermarket is needed is not addressed in law. Northern Ireland’s planning regulations allow supermarkets on sites outside town centres, providing certain criteria are met. In Ireland, there is a cap on the amount of floor space that supermarkets can have: 3,000 square metres outside Dublin and 3,500 in the greater Dublin area. In addition, there is a presumption against supermarket developments on out-of-town sites and local authorities must safeguard local shops in their development plans.
In the twenty-first century, supermarket chains face tighter planning controls than they did in the previous one. In theory, it is currently quite hard for them to get planning permission for new stores out of town. That is why they have largely turned their attention to the inner cities where they are looking to expand into ‘brownfield’ sites. Such sites have previously been built on and are usually in an advanced state of dilapidation, and so proposed developments do not attract the same objections as a new superstore on a greenfield site would. On the other hand, because a new supermarket on a brownfield site must fit into an already developed urban area, it is subject to a number of detailed and more specific planning considerations that do not always apply to out-of-town sites: the impact on local views, congestion of small streets, noise and light pollution and so on.
On paper anyway, there are grounds for local authorities to refuse permission for a new supermarket. But more often than not, our supermarket chains succeed. Of 170 supermarket planning applications submitted in the UK in the three years to 31 March 2003, 83 (49 per cent) were approved, 33 (19 per cent) were rejected or withdrawn and 54 (32 per cent) were still pending at the time of writing. John Sweeney, leader of North Norfolk District Council, summed up the dilemma faced by local authorities. ‘They are too big and powerful for us. If we try and deny them they will appeal, and we cannot afford to fight a planning appeal and lose. If they got costs it could bankrupt us.’ Supermarkets simply don’t like to take no for an answer, and come back with one revised plan after another, until they get their way.
5 Sugar daddies (#ulink_63044747-c869-5701-a34a-80fd706f657e)
Stopping or even seeking to downsize a new supermarket development is a daunting task. No wonder really organised community opposition is rare. As one pro-supermarket commentator sanguinely put it:
At the end of the day, most planning authorities have bowed to a combination of consumer apathy – or even tacit support for the new supermarket sites – and the ability of retailers to ‘sweeten the pill’ on their arrival in a new locality … Key local aspirations that had seemed too expensive to fulfil – cleaning up derelict areas, building sports fields and social centres were favourites – gained crucial new support. Hundreds of new jobs were immediately created. The only losers were the collections of locally owned high street stores which had been fighting a losing battle for custom with prices that were perceived as too high, parking that was inadequate and service that appeared and indeed often was both slow and old-fashioned. Furthermore, it was usually months or even years after the new superstore’s arrival that the downside consequences became apparent.
Nowadays supermarket chains know that they have a better chance of securing planning consent for a new store if they parcel it up in a mixed development. The Town and Country Planning Act recognises the concept of ‘planning gain’ or elements included in a planning application to make an application more attractive to local authorities. It allows for what are known as Section 106 agreements. A council and supermarket chain can agree that certain work must be carried out before permission can be granted. For example, the supermarket might have to pay for trees to be replanted, traffic lights moved and roads relaid, or sports facilities provided. Often these take the form of sizeable cash payments from the would-be supermarket developer to the council. Using Section 106 agreements, supermarkets have the perfect sweetener to dangle before local authorities. Developers talk excitedly of ‘synergies’ with supermarkets that might make possible what previously seemed like unprofitable developments. Supermarkets, arm in arm with property developers, can act as sugar daddies to the community, even to the extent of getting permission for out-of-centre developments that would otherwise be out of the question.
In Coventry in 2000, Tesco won planning consent for one of its biggest stores in the country by agreeing to part-fund a new stadium. ‘Sometimes the value of the land is enough to push the deal,’ said a Tesco spokesperson; ‘sometimes you have to build the stadium.’
In 2003, a property consortium submitted a planning application for a stadium for Wimbledon Football Club near Bletchley and Milton Keynes. This new 30,000-seat stadium and 6,500-seat arena would be part-financed or enabled by a 100,000-square-foot Asda Wal-Mart Supercentre, the largest Asda format. The consortium’s website aimed at encouraging locals to write letters to council planners in support of the plan was headed, ‘Dreams can become a reality for Milton Keynes and Bletchley.’ The consortium’s chairman, Pete Winkleman, argued the case as follows: ‘Milton Keynes needs an international stadium. Wimbledon FC needs a home. Asda needs a store in the largest city in the UK where it doesn’t already have one. Bletchley needs a major investment scheme to kickstart its regeneration … Without the stadium, without a revitalised Bletchley, without Wimbledon FC, Milton Keynes remains incomplete. Without Asda none of it happens.’
The more desirable elements that go into the development mix the better, and housing, as well as sport, is usually a winner. In 2003, Tesco announced its plans to build 3–4,000 affordable homes nationwide. Among these were an application for a development in Streatham, South London, where it wanted to build a complex which would include a leisure centre, Tesco store and 250 homes, 40 per cent of which would be for key workers. In Romford, Essex, Sainsbury’s new superstore was part of a mixed-use development that included housing, a health club, restaurants, a bowling alley and cinemas.
Just as they were being accused of taking away business from town centres and encouraging traffic by means of such projects, supermarkets have reinvented themselves as urban regenerators with pockets deep enough to make long-cherished community goals possible. As The Grocer noted archly: ‘Regeneration projects can gain speedy approval from councils and local communities. A whole regeneration package, promising mixed use development … is likely to prove far more attractive to planners than just a plain old superstore.’ Our large supermarket chains’ enormous retail power certainly provides them with the money to make things happen. But the downside of these carrot-and-stick regeneration packages is that they are another way in which supermarkets are insinuating themselves into all aspects of our lives, embedding themselves deeper and deeper in our manmade landscape and hence our consciousness. In Kilmarnock in Scotland, for example, certain areas of the town are listed in local bus timetables according to the supermarket chain that dominates them: Wester Netherton has become Kwik Save and Scott Ellis has become Asda.
The supermarkets are happy to bask in their role as the new civic developers as long as they get their pound of retail flesh. But the price for planners and their communities is that they may have to say yes to a new store when they would otherwise prefer to say no. Where once people strolled in the park, or walked around the local duck pond, a day out in our supermarket-saturated country is beginning to mean a visit to a shopping and leisure centre of which a supermarket is an integral part. Naturally, supermarket chains are keen to promote their stores as places in which to while away leisure time. Under the headline ‘Everyone Asda have a hobby’, the freesheet Metro told the story of septuagenarian Richard Bunn who, after enjoying a bargain all-day breakfast at his local store in Weston-Super-Mare, had made his hobby visiting Asda stores. When he had travelled some 100,000 miles to visit all its stores in Britain, Asda grasped the public relations opportunity and asked Mr Bunn to open a new store in Oldbury in the West Midlands. ‘I know people think I’m batty but I love Asda and once I decided to visit every store, I became a man with a mission,’ Mr Bunn told assembled press.
If an obdurate local authority says no to a supermarket development, even if it is cloaked in a halo of urban revitalisation, supermarkets have further avenues to pursue. The original foot-in-the-door tactic was to construct smaller stores – which are more likely to get planning permission – that just happened to have ridiculously large numbers of parking places. This built in a generous margin of surplus land for future extensions. A few years later, the chain could apply to extend the original store into the car park. Little by little, the chain could realise its greater plan. Nowadays the buzz words are ‘space sweating’. Chains ‘sweat assets’ by building mezzanine floors in existing stores where they would not be allowed to extend externally. UK planning law excludes internal building work from the definition of development requiring planning permission. In 2003, Asda Wal-Mart announced its intention to build mezzanine floors in up to forty stores in what Dow Jones International News reported as ‘a way of increasing space amid strict planning laws’. After a successful mezzanine was slotted into its York store, Asda Wal-Mart set about building floors in stores in Sheffield, and Cumbernauld and Govan in Glasgow. In the Sheffield Asda, the mezzanine added 33,000 square feet to the store – almost the same sales area as the largest supermarket now permitted in Ireland. Friends of the Earth blew the whistle. ‘Asda Wal-Mart is making a mockery of planning guidance. By installing mezzanines in existing stores, the company does not even have to submit a planning application to the local authority. This leaves the local authority powerless to assess the impact on local shops or traffic levels and local communities have no say in the development,’ it pointed out. Sheffield MP Clive Betts told the House of Commons that the mezzanine expansion in his constituency had made existing traffic problems worse. ‘Traffic is considerably heavier, yet there has been no analysis or plan to deal with it, because there has been no requirement for the store to sit down with the highways authority and the planning authority to work out these problems, because there is no need for planning permission.’
Yet another approach is to include housing in proposals for extensions to existing stores. Sainsbury’s, for example, got the go-ahead to extend its Richmond store from an already substantial 55,000 square feet to 63,500 square feet largely because it would build 179 flats on top of the existing store and the extension.
Our supermarket chains are determined to get planning permission for new stores and extensions to existing ones. And despite the fact that theoretically they now operate in a tricky planning climate, it is amazing how often they get what they want. As Tesco’s finance director told the Daily Telegraph, ‘Planning approvals have not stopped. It’s just more difficult than it used to be. Out of town is very difficult to get but you are seeing brownfield sites redeveloped. Planning changes have not killed development. They have acted to redirect it.’
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