Daft Old Duffer returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I bet you’ve all got your own favourite supermarket.
You may not want to admit it, even to yourself. But I bet if you ever find yourself in a different one – perhaps because ‘your’ store is closed for stock-take or refurbishment: or perhaps because you’re in some town with time to waste and think you might as well get your shopping done while you’re there – you’ll soon be muttering that you can’t find anything, this one’s not so well stocked as yours and why do they stock every make of bread there is, except the one you like?
And you end up thinking, “I think I’ll wait till tomorrow and do my shopping in my usual place.”
All much the same
Hard to find a reason for this. They are all, let’s face it, nothing but large sheds lined with shelving. And I don’t think price has much to do with it either.
I’m sure we’re all aware that once the special offers and so-much-in-our-basket is cheaper than the other chap’s so-much-in-his-basket advertising spree is ended, prices will quietly revert to the original. Plus a bit more to help pay for said advertising.
And in any case I’ve never seen hordes of baying shoppers racing from one supermarket to another because of an occasional penny off a packet of teabags.
So we seem to be left with nothing more than a shrug of the shoulder and a “I’ve just sort of got used to it” attitude.
Supermarket loyalty
Yet I think there are reasons for choosing to worship at one store rather than another. Sometimes, even when the spurned outlet is nearer to home.
And what concerns me is, it’s the suits who know those reasons. When we don’t.
And so precisely, they know where to site their next store, and what size it will be, for that has been calculated and entered up on their graphs before they’ve even bought the land.
Get outta town
I remember being quite surprised when Tesco located their ‘local’ supermarket well outside town, on the edge of a defunct airfield.
Surely it’s a mistake I thought. Why would anyone bother to get in their car and motor out there when they’ve got perfectly good supermarkets within walking distance in the town itself?
Of course I was wrong. You’ve only got to look at the way the store has expanded, and the way the huge car park outside fills up to realise the store planners knew right from the get-go exactly what they were doing.
And what made it all the more disturbing for me was that, as the store size expanded over a few years from modest to big to enormous, with its car park keeping exact pace, it was never at any time too small for the increasing crowds of shoppers, nor so large that it appeared empty.
All planned out
In a word, the men with the graphs and stopwatches and analysis charts knew precisely the pace at which to expand it, and how much capital to invest at every stage.
They knew, and know, all the time how we’re all going to behave, and when.
Now consider if you will, the number of superstores spread across the land, together with the vast centralised warehouses set to serve them, and the near-uncountable ant-swarm of lorries travelling oh so precisely between them, filling the shelves with exactly the amount and type of goods that we’re going to be buying that day – no more and no less.
Doesn’t that scare you? Just a bit?
