Tesco come, Tesco go, John Harris whinges either way. Here he was writing in the Guardian in August 2011:
In Britain a new Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s or Asda opens every other day. But across the country people are battling the relentless march of the ‘Big Four’. John Harris, who has taken up the fight himself, reports
And here is John Harris writing in the Guardian in February 2015:
‘We feel betrayed’: the towns abandoned by Tesco
Tesco’s profits crisis means that plans for 49 shiny new stores have been ditched. Where does that leave places such as Kirkby, Bridgwater and Wolverhampton, where regeneration schemes linked to the supermarket chain now lie in ruins?
There is a fair point to be made relating to the bad effects on a town of endless shilly-shallying about whether a supermarket will be built, but John Harris isn’t making it. One of the commenters, DrRic55, is:
Seems this is less about Tesco, and more a grubby and poor quality class of local politicians.
I know from my old line of work how eyes light up at the mention of Section 106 agreements, and all manor of pet projects appear to be funded – sometimes assisting and enabling the development, sometimes nothing to do with it.
If we didn’t have such ridiculous planning laws the private sector would get on and build where there was demand. Instead we have a system not far off bribery of the local bureaucrats, and endless consultations that drag on forever. If you want to see another effect, look at the state of housebuilding in the UK.
Tesco has obviously failed in some pretty big ways, but I can’t help but see the dead hand of local government all over these disasters.
During the 1930s Britain embarked on a massive road building program with concrete foundations topped with asphalt to stop vehicles sliding of the roads and retractable cat’s eyes to mark the roads because of poor vehicle head lights. The big difference too Hitler’s Autobahns is that there were actually used by private vehicles. In Britain 2 million private vehicles were actually using the roads unlike Hitler’s Autobahns. If you extrapolate the rate of private vehicle ownership to that of America, Britain leaves America for dead. Britain actually butt fucked the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain by really preparing in 1938 and sowed the seeds for Hitler’s defeat in Russia . Englanders are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for. Britain will rise again from the damage of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, you have no choice.
A surprising number of people make their judgements about an action based on who is acting. For them, consistency is about who is right or wrong, not what is right or wrong. I guess that’s what identity politics is fundamentally about, now that I think of it.
Woah! “…regeneration schemes linked to the supermarket chain…”? Seriously?
Kinda’ Cart-before-the-horse in actual tried, and true, “economic theory” isn’t it?
Maybe the nice folks with such Big Ideas can take in each other’s laundry, “teach” each others children, or raise carnivorous minks for fur, or something.
Local councils extort perks from developers in return for planning permission. The fact that the developers are willing to pay the baksheesh does not make it any less reprehensible. I would pay a South London street urchin fifty pence to prevent him scratching up my car, but he’s still a crook and a blackmailer.
Some of the comments seem to miss the point of Natalie’s post.
The left (including the so called “libertarian left”) repeatedly said that Tesco (they used the name of this company) had a stranglehold on the retail trade.
Supposedly this proved that “capitalism” was evil because Tesco (again they used the specific name of the company) controlled the market – and controlled governments.
I used to wonder why the left (including the so called “libertarian left”) used to single out Tesco in this way – and I make no apology for my suspicion that it was a form of thinly disguised anti-Semitism. The same reason that Dame S. Porter, the ex leader of Westminster City Council, was persecuted for “crimes” that were not really crimes at all. The family used to be the leading shareholders in Tesco.
The old National Socialist German Workers Party did the same thing with their campaign against the Department Stores in Germany – which supposedly “controlled the market” and “controlled local governments and the national government”.
Well now the left face a problem – Tesco has declined, it turns out it did not “control the market” at all – the long nosed evil Jews did not have special mind control powers, and had not “bought local and central government with their bribes” – the claims were rubbish.
I will not be holding my breath waiting for an apology from the anti “corporations” Progressives, including the so called “libertarian” ones.
As for “the government builds the roads and this favours the big retailers” point.
If there were no government roads, there would be private roads – roads in this country used to be private Turnpike Trusts.
But let us assume that there were no major roads at all…..
Then my dear people, transport would be by railway – and they used to be private also.
People would mostly live near railway stations (as they used to – look at a population map a century ago, you will find that the vast majority of people lived in walking distance of a railway station).
And that is where the big retail outlets would be – near the railway stations.
You see my dear people, that great “anti corporations” scholar – Mr Cartman of “Southpark” was mistaken – the economic problems of the world are not caused by evil long nosed people making other people shop in their stores and stealing their gold and hiding it a special cave.
As for Tesco……
Well the local one, in walking distance of me (as are several corner shops – you see a big store does NOT “destroy the local corner shops”) might do better if it stopped pushing leftist books and leftist magazines – that nobody wants to buy.
The customer is King – it is the customers who really “control the market”.
Contrary to the rubbish taught about evil retail and other “corporations” by our “friends” on the left.
Including some leftists who actually work at my local branch of Tesco in Kettering (I have overheard them boasting of going to various riots in London) – and seem to do their best to undermine their own employer. Pushing products that no one wants – and so on.
Paul, I cannot agree more.
It’s as if there is an entire generation (no, two generations) that simply takes no regard to the logic of what they say.
For example, that other great bugbear of the chattering classes at the moment: Apple. Where were all those who now bemoan the gigantic pile of cash that Apple sits on during the 1990s? Those of us who were Apple evangelists at the time remember the utterly dysfunctional company that limped from crisis to crisis. The company that squandered its extraordinary head start and potential earned through the 70s and 80s, and produced generation after generation of dreadful beige overpriced boxes.
The same company that basically paid Steve jobs’s NEXT company about $400 million and a massive share deal to take over the company in the late 90s. The alternative was a deal with BE for heaven’s sake! Remember Gill Amelio, anyone, and that other business genius, John Sculley? The men who ran one of the most innovative and successful companies into the ground between them. Remember the industry scorn before the release of the original iMac? Remember the release of the original iPod? The predictions and the industry money were, “who on earth is going to pay £300 for an MP3 player?” Well, quite a lot of people apparently.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Apple was rich. Apple was in the toilet. Apple is now rich, again. Apple may well be in the toilet again in 10 years time. That’s partially why Apple is sitting on a gigantic pile of cash at the moment. Who knows if what they are going to release in the future will be desirable, or saleable? Who knows that they won’t be entirely sidelined by an unforseen disruptive technology?
What do these people want? Presumably if they are discussed by Apple’s gigantic pile of cash and want access to it now, presumably they are only too keen to bail Apple out if it releases a gigantic turd of a product that nobody buys and the bankruptcy entire company.
They ‘why oh why oh why’ both success and failure. It’s inexplicable.
I think you might be right about the hint of anti-semitism Paul. But mainly I think it’s mainly snobbery (how dare the lowerorders have kumquats) and a sort of Ruskinism about inefficiency being noble.
Well there is even a Wikipedia page for the term ‘Tesco Town‘ which is explained therein. a town ‘dominated’ by a supermarket.
We don’t hear much about ‘land banking’ by the supermarkets nowadays. As Paul says, it’s all part of the drip feed of anti-business propaganda, and yes, the nose issue may have a lot to do with it.
Still, the comments show that some Guardian readers see through the drivel.
To the Guardian’s chattering classes Tesco, like Murdoch and McDonalds, is just one of those things you have to dislike and criticise.
They imagine this shows how sophisticated, cultured and caring they are.
A few years ago during the civil partnership arguments, the head of Tesco said something to the effect of Christians who thought homosexuality was sinful were bigots and he didn’t want their custom. Accordingly, I and a great many Christians I know simply stopped shopping there if we could help it. Now there aren’t as many Christians as there once were, so I doubt it had a huge impact on profits, but the attitude concerned did not suggest Tesco was run by the astute businessmen in the world.
Tesco has been outflanked by every other supermarket, but especially Aldis and Lidls. A much smaller range of (nowadays) amazingly high quality merchandise with rotating specials is much more cost effect than Tesco’s attempts at being the UK Walmart with washing machines. Asda of course has the pedigree to make a Walmart model of everything under one roof work. Morrisons has seen which way the wind is blowing and is moving to the Aldi/Lidl model. Sainsburys and Waitrose remain the shop of choice for the upper middle classes hunting for wheatgrass and Italian truffles, although I expect their market share to shrink considerably. When I roll into Lidls in my knackered Zafira with 100,000 miles on the clock, I’m seeing an increasing number of £100,000 Range Rovers in the car park. Cash poor rich people hunting for cheap lobster perhaps? In any case, market shifts have left Tesco without a niche and their failure to respond to this means they deserve everything they’re getting.
The market works.
Teeny bit of pedantry – it may be the local councils that do the actual shake downs, but it is all based on laws enacted by, and fully supported by, central government. These planning permission deals are an official part of local government funding, favoured because they keep the taxing and spending off the books. Another reminder that “regulatory takings” – which then feed through into prices paid by the consumer – are a vast province of the monster state that remains off the radar for the ordinary voter, and the official statistics. Government spending officially measured at 40-50% of GDP is a laugh. And, as it’s off the books, it is a paradise of corruption.
JV
I beg to differ, Sainsburys is simply more expensive. I gave up on Sainsburys after finding that everything I wanted was either out of stock or about to go out of date. They got in consultants to design ‘a new computer system’ (In the UK, an almost universal foreshadowing of doom) and actually drove me to go to Asda instead, until it was too awful to bear (but the beer range is good).
I have never seen wheatgrass or Italian truffles in my Waitrose, just a clean shop staffed by intelligent and helpful people with full shelves, some high margin stuff and free-range MNX. I’m not otherwise fussy. The nearby Aldi and Lidl are just random jumbles of stuff, not all of which is of any apparent use to me, it feels like going to a scrapyard looking for a part for a 1990s Ford Fiesta, you just have to hope, but many like them.
Tesco, like Asda but with Sainsbury’s prices, and most annoying for me the other week, a car tyre pump that costs 20p (free at Sainsburys) (and with me being short of change) it only ran long enough to adjust 3 tyres, leaving me literally deflated. All goodwill gone in a lack of a puff, for ever and ever, amen. I never ate the horse meat stuff anyway, but that has really done for them.
However, the Tesco expansion and crash also probably has a credit bubble genesis.
Yes JV – Tesco attracted a bunch of P.C. university type managers who have dragged the company down (and even tried to cover up their blunders by pretending to make profits which they had not made – which is so absurdly stupid I do not know where to start).
Stuck Record – the people attacking Apple for having a cash reserve, are like those morons who attacked the British G.E. for having a cash reserve (back in the days of great Lord W.).
Mr Ed – good I am glad some comment people at the Guardian are seeing the utter contradiction that its “damned if you do – and damned if you do not” coverage, represents.
Lee Moore – of course the left were saying that Tesco was evil for paying money (in “planning gain” and so on) that it was force-by-lay to pay.
I am an old man now – my head hurts even trying to think about the leftist mindset that turns the victim into the criminal.
Still, at least in Britain, the government spending figures are actually fairly honest.
But that is cold-as-ice comfort.
As government spending at almost half the entire economy is not sustainable.
We are denounced every day for “government spending cuts” – and the person locally responsible for those savings that have been made is me (I am the evil “fat, bald Tory Councillor who is obsessed with money” – yes that is me, I am to blame for councillors not getting free meals and so on).
What they should be denouncing me for is not saving ENOUGH money.
The British government is spending a fortune – an amount of money I can not even get my Midlands Hobbit brain (I even have the big hairy feet) round.
Yet every day the media (and so on) denounce us for not spending ENOUGH – say we should be spending MORE (both nationally and locally).
It is difficult not to despair.
I am known locally as having a short temper (at least when I encounter liars who pretend that provision has not been made for X when it has been, and demand skate board parks and whatever on top of the ones we already have) – but, a least in private, I weep far more than I rage.
The numbers do not work Mr Moore – they do not.
The national numbers – in so many Western countries just do not work, the unfunded liabilities (even in countries such as Germany that supposedly have a balanced budget) just do not work.
I can not make the numbers add up – not when I try and force my brain to examine them.
The wild government spending in the Western countries is unsustainable, yet the people (of Greece, of Spain of….) are demanding MORE – MORE spending.
And the media and education system are pushing it.
Apologies Ed, we don’t actually have Waitrose up here so I was just guessing about that bit. They do seem to market themselves to the middle classes though.
My mother liked Waitrose – but there is none in Kettering.
Of course as a workers partnership it has (“boo-hiss”) limited liability.
If it went bust the houses and clothes (and so on) of the worker-owners would not be taken.
Creditors know this IN ADVANCE they make a CHOICE to deal with a limited liability enterprise.
This is one of my hobby horses – the people who pretend that limited liability was invented by this or that 19th century stature. As if the Turnpike Trusts (the roads) and the colleges and the Churches had not always been limited liability undertakings.
The whole thing was explored, in great detail, by private “Law Merchant” and Canon (Church) Law (often used in commercial matters) as far back as the Middle Ages.
Yet, again and again and again, I come upon “libertarians” who write that it was the creation of the state in the 19th century – because the Rothschilds control the world or something.
There is only a certain number of times I am prepared to explain something before I start to think that people are deliberately provoking me by lying – and then I respond accordingly.
This does not mean I think the specific Acts of Parliament that cover limited liability in this country are well drafted – actually the are not. They should be quite different (if they should exist at all).
But the idea that the concept itself is the creation of the state, is drivel.
I find the protesters approach just plain lazy. If they believe that local shops are better all around why not convince potential Tesco shoppers of that fact? The hubris, the paternalistic turpitude of arrogating to oneself the right to save others from their own putatively poor decisions is appalling.
Surely, if they believe their argument is correct it would be much better to have the evil capitalists spend all the money to build the place, then shut it down by convincing customers that the choices these protesters prefer are in fact better choices. Surely it is better to snicker with one’s friends over one’s Beaujolais and Brie and the ruination of the capitalists hoist on their own petard?
And should the worker-owners be tortfeasors, why should they walk away from paying for their tortious acts? It is no answer to say that the victims of the torts knew this, they might well not know, they would not know that they were about to be the victim of a tort almost by definition.
Isn’t that the whole point of modern politics? What are they for if not that? It’s like complaining that seagulls are noisy and crap on cars, that is the whole point of them.
I remember in the 1980s and 1990s Sainsbury’s was considered far superior to the more grubby Tesco. Then in the late 1990s and early 2000s Tesco leapfrogged Sainsbury’s to become the No. 1 supermarket in the UK. I am quite surprised to find Tesco has lost a lot of ground, but happy that the market can shake incumbents from their spot. In Australia there are 2 supermarkets: Woolworths and Coles, and a very cosy little duopoly they enjoy.
Tim,
There’s also Aldi and IGA.
I’m of stout working class stock, and I think Waitrose is effing marvellous. Good food and friendly staff.
Anyway, regarding John Harris – the man is basically a good old fashioned Daily Wail “why-oh-why” commentator but with a (possibly hypothetical) goatee beard. The mill must have grist, so grist it will have, and if we used a completely different brand of grist last time, what of it?
Paul:
In your best interests, as well as in the interest of your constituency, please allow me to give you some personal advice:
go on a low-carb diet.
That won’t cure baldness, and you can remain a Tory concillor who is obsessed with money (in fact, you’ll be able to do so for much longer); but, on the basis of my experience, you’ll lose FAT (not to be confused with losing weight), your temper will becomes “longer”, and you’ll weep less often.
There’s also Aldi and IGA.
True, although I never saw an Aldi (I was in Melbourne). I used to shop in an IGA but from what I could make out they seemed limited to small inner-city branches like a Tesco Metro.
Rob
” The mill must have grist, so grist it will have, and if we used a completely different brand of grist last time, what of it?”
Very good.
And if localism is such a good idea, where are the anti-globalisation campaigners who are campaigning to ban imports of those pesky iPhones and only allow us to own UK-built computers and phones – even if they weren’t as good. Even if they fall further and further behind each year.
And why don’t thy stop those pesky pineapples and coffee and bananas and Italian mozarella and all that foreign globalised stuff from getting in. Let those Kenyans go back to subsistence farming. Let our own British farmers take care of all our food needs, until we have a bad summer and the whole country starves!
Hurrah, for localism.
To add to their woes, poor Tesco now face the fearsome Groceries Code Adjudicator
Isn’t it good to know that our taxes go to fund the Groceries Code Adjudicator fearlessly enforcing the Groceries Supply Code of Practice.
How the bloody hell is it that I’m starting to feel sympathy with a bloody Supermarket chain.
@Mr. Ed: “The nearby Aldi and Lidl are just random jumbles of stuff”
Indeed, and they smell disgusting.
You go in the door and it’s like stepping into some student flat that hasn’t been cleaned since last term but one…
Kevin B said:
It is beginning to sound like a regulatory pile-on desperate to find Tesco guilty of something so one of them can say they are useful. In the time it has taken well-to-do types to campaign against Tesco’s success and lobby for government authority to push back against Tesco’s success, consumers have done plenty to check the rise of Tesco themselves by shopping elsewhere.
Hate it while it’s here, mourn it when it’s gone. ‘Twas ever thus.
As a kid growing up in the 70s, I remember reading articles about the utterly boring, dehumanising nature of factory work. Then, ever since the factories closed in the 80s, I’ve read numerous articles decrying the decline of British manufacturing some, inevitably, calling on the government to protect and nurture it.
Nothing lasts forever.
But for some reason many of those of a leftish mindset seem to forget this, and be surprised when things change.
Although to be fair, as shown in the original post, it is not as if their opinions last forever either…
Tim,
In this rural berg there two Aldi and a Supa Iga.
Reminds me of a scene in the “Claire in the Community” sit-com
“Have you heard? They’re knocking down a feature in the old town centre, and building a new Asda store.”
“That’s outrageous” etc.
“Oh, I heard it was going to be a Waitrose”
Embarrassing pause …
“Well,let’s not rush to judgement on this …”
(Note for overseas viewers: the sit-com is about a team of social workers. Asda is the UK subsidiary of Wal-mart; Waitrose is more up-market and a (sort of) co-operative.