greets
minor complication
our two village shops are both franchises, ie one is happy shopper and the other is SPAR.
so we get the combination of crap products and range compared with big town supermarkets and market stalls.
i use lidl when i go to town - to buy their fresh veg (neither of the village shops sells decent veg - lack of demand apparently) and cheapo fruit'n'fibre
i go to tescos for their own brand veggie frozen stuff. (can't get locally)
also go to town for wholefood shop goodies.
(but only go to town every couple of months)
mal
Can comment on articles and discussions
Nah I wasn't venturing an opinion overall regarding yay or nay on supermarkets (except the minor cop-out of 'depends on the circumstances', which I've said all along) in the current setting. In the long term I reckon monopolistic cartels will be bad for us, regardless of how they work now, but I don't think that's a particularly controversial thing to say.
What I've mostly been doing so far is finding out whether I personally should shop with them, which I've kind of decided I shouldn't (cos I'm prepared to make the effort to hunt around for better deals and better food/nutrition, and I have enough money that I reckon I can afford to pay a bit extra even if it's a bit more expensive).
Well in terms of small rural towns, yes alot do have a supermarket now, but there are alot of gutted towns around. With dockland/tourism places like you just mentioned, there is the supporting monetary bonus of a dedicated income which can sustain these places regardless of whether the town centre stays active. Hence 'depending on circumstance'. I reckon in general it comes down to sustainability.
If you think of a supermarket as providing a certain kind of service, at the cost of removing a large chunk of local money from circulation every month in profit, then it makes sense. Under those circumstances, a place like Ipswich can handle the loss, and most of the population benefits in the way I mentioned earlier. A place like Hadleigh, with a large tourism business, can also just about manage (though again, a colleague who regularly visits complains constantly that the town centre is dead). Others, like Stowmarket, which has a lot of big industry but few/no sources of outside funding to offset the impact Tescos has, are ghost towns.
I'd reckon the demographic is larger than you think, because the above can also apply to some quite major connurbations, particularly up north where as we know, the destruction of the big mining centres did a hell of a lot of damage and something like a Tescos would just make that worse.
Edit: Trust me, if you're a kid growing up in a rural town the last thing you are thinking is 'how lucky I am'. Mostly its 'I'm so bored I could shoot myself, oh christ don't tell me we're hanging around the town bench all day again, can't we burn a barn down or something?' Most people are just born and brought up in these places it's not so much a physical choice.