What's wrong with supermarkets?

Not that I want to come across as a petit-bourgeois liberal, but the obvious problem with them is their power. They push farmers to the limit, which no doubt forces down the wages of farm workers, and encourages farmers to exploit migrant workers as cheap labour. When you get a bogof deal on Strawberries, say, chances are the farmer paid for that, and hence the workers. Not that I think boycotts change much. At least not in the long term.

Plus, they bear responsibility for foisting shitty food on the poor, and fucking up the environment (potatoes from Brazil?!).

catch, i agree its aesthetic rather than politcal.

nemo, are supermarkets inherently worse for workers - where they screw farmers they might treat their own workers better. i work for a multinational now (not a supermarket) and thats better than when i worked for a small petit-bourgeois bullying prick in a similar job. i mean supermarket work is shit, but maybe no more so than in small shops. i dunno.

ok, but that's just a standard capitalist argument against monopolies and for competition, so what we're saying is supermarket monopolies circumvent competition and thus screw the working class as consumers, which maybe true but its just asking for capitalism to work like its meant too, which feels a little wierd to me :?

double post

I'm backing the petit bourgeois here. Supermarkets are wank... er... even though I am rather fond of the crap you can get in Aldi.

I'm not saying there's anything great about small shopkeepers and some of them might well be money grabbing arseholes, but by and large, they're just people trying to make a living who don't make large profits but earn enough to get by on.

A goal of the supermarkets and chain stores however is to undercut the local grocers, corner shops and independent sellers to drive them out of business, and then later hike up the prices because there is no longer any alternative to these corporate monstrosities. And all the time, they treat their workers like shit and see the customer as mugs.

Take bookselling as an example... with massive loss-leaders the supermarkets are losing money in order to undercut booksellers (particularly independent booksellers). Once the local independent booksellers fold, then the bookmarket will be cornered by Waterstones, Tesco, Asda, etc who all only stock bestsellers. Anything remotely divergent from the usual airport/railway station trash gets automatically pulped (this has already happened with Waterstones recently pulping hundreds of thousands of books not on their best seller lists).

The same happens with the local grocers which, in its own way, may be responsive to minority demand. The supermarket however has no need to respond to minority demand as such products take up valuable shelf space which could otherwise be occupied by something far more profitable.

There are many other reasons why supermarkets are the much shittier form of capitalism, which is why, though local shops may still be small forms of capitalist enterprise, they at least offer something on a more human level than the retail conglomerates do.

Just to add a note of irony here. I think supermarkets (and branded foods) came into existence at least partly because small shopkeepers would rip people of with watered down / low grade / contaminated products.

Supermarkets are attempting to build monopolies, which are inherently less competitive and therefore worse for us. Not that capitalism is particularly good for us mind. The supermarket demand for uniform produce leads to massive wastage and a loss of variety.
They are also often no cheaper than small shops. At least with a small shop the money stays in the area.

There does seem to have been a bit of a victory won in terms of variety (and I think that the political right probably had more to do with it than anything!). The supermarkets used to stock those awful El Santa strawberries -- selectively bred for longevity, looks, and their ability to withstand bumps during transport. Unfortunately they didn't bother with the taste part, which put me off eating strawberries (which I used to like). This year I noticed that at least two (maybe three) of the big supermarkets actually had other varieties -- and one even had the choice of two decent varieties!

aye, well ...

yeah i'm vegan so the stuff about minority preferences was from personal experience, although its not much of a political point beyond the fact workers are denied a choice of lifestyles by capital, but that kind of pales in comparison to the fact i'm compelled to spend a third of my life in this shitty office!

I know what you mean, but it is limited. For example there are only a few varieties of apples or potatoes stocked. And it is pressure from the right in many cases a lot of the anti-supermarket, pro-small shops/producers stuff is from the right. I still buy from supermarkets, I can't afford not to, but I try to buy from smaller shops when possible. I suppose the only real difference is that the small shops cannot oppress us in the same extent as the supermarkets.

ffs madashell, don't you know that all local shops are specialist butchers/greengrocers/coblers serving as an essential cornerstone of the community and offering a unique service, and aren't merely selling the same shit as supermarkets but with generally lower staff wages, higher prices and less variety of stock.

I mean don't you know that 94% of happy shopper produce sold in small shops is grow directly on land geographically adjacent to said shop?

Yea, to be honest London is very different. However, anywhere else in the country it's largely as I said.

But still, if I'm going to get like pasta, milk or sugar say (not mangoes ), I'm going to go to Tesco rather than Costcutter, innit. Even with the difference not being as glaring as the rest of the country, I still get cheaper prices and better selection if I walk to the Tesco.

It also serves as the 'own brand' version of 'basics' in a lot of non affiliated cornershops. And tastes, almost universally, fucking vile.

I thought it was 25?

If it was 250, then it's obviously wrong.

I mean, Tesco employ 300,000(ish) people.

If 250 jobs were cost per 1, that's 75 million jobs. I mean I know it wouldn't be an exact translation, but I still find it hard to believe.

edit - oops, it's 220,000 in the UK. The rough point still stands tho!

The comparison Monbiot makes in his book is that they cost more jobs than they create tho. If it was just 250 per supermarket then it'd hard;y help his point since an average supermarket is going to employ more than 250 people - and his argument was definitely that they caused unemployment.