This book is subtitled how one shop, came out on top and why it matters; and that's exactly what it talks about. This book is a damning indictment of Tesco, the PLC and Britain's largest supermarket chain. As a result of this book I no longer intend to do my shopping at Tesco.

I have to say, however, that this book is written in the tone of a whiner and someone who wears sandals and eats brown rice. Nevertheless, the message is extremely powerful. I think it's best if I let the book speak for itself. What follows is largely a series of quotations, which I will then pull together with some thoughts of my own.

Andrew Simms, works for the new economic foundation or nef and his job is to protect consumers from companies like Tesco. Simms seems to be famous, since when this book was published, he was interviewed by television and radio stations as he gave his views on what he called cloned towns. He also vented forth on all the bad things that he thought that Tesco was guilty of. I have to confess, however, that I have not seen this man in action so I cannot comment on how he appears in real life. As few quotations

Figure 4: treatment of suppliers by Tesco.

• Just go required or requested payments from suppliers as a condition of stocking and displaying their products or as a precondition for being on its list of suppliers.
• Tesco required or requested suppliers to give it an improvement in terms in return for increasing the range or depth distribution of their products in its stores.
• Tesco required salt supply of a product other than retailers, own label ie that the supplier did not supply the product to any other retailer or multiple.
• Tesco required or requested a financial contribution from a supplier in return to the suppliers products being promoted install during the year.
• Tesco required suppliers to give overriding all in anticipation discounts.

Tesco denies some of these accusations. However, the implications are serious and if any of them are true then Tesco needs to begin an advertising campaign and apologise. After all, the source of these quotations is the Competition Commission from the year 2000. Those quotations are taken from chapter 4. There are many more such examples in chapter 4.

Chapter 5, this sets out arguments relating to social and economic consequences of modern retail development. Josephine is at the centre of this chapter. Josephine runs Simms’ local shop, where she sells bread, milk, magazines batteries and so on. Simms’ point, however, is that Josephine and her like provide a social service as well as an economic one. Supermarket chains by Tesco, cannot provide the social services of two or three people having a friendly chat and helping each other out. The book then sets out how jobs and communities are lost as a result of the loss of independent retailers following on from the activities of the chains like Tesco having set up their hypermarkets and supermarkets.

Chapter 7 profiting from poverty. This paragraph begins with this quotation; actually, it's a song.

Down the valley.
At the Mountain
Tesco is our dear friend.

And then there's

A poor man’s field may produce abundant food, but injustice sweeps it away. Proverbs, 13: 23.

The essence of the story in the chapter is that men in suits travel the world working for Tesco to find the source of very cheap food for which he pays very little. But then Tesco sells them at a massive markup. Tesco pays 1p for picking a packet of mange tout that sells 99p in a Tesco shop. Now of course administration costs, distribution costs and there are other costs but the point is that Simms feels that the ratio of one to 99 is grossly unfair. He may be right; and if he is right then Tesco can go hang; but if he is wrong that Tesco needs to defend itself. I haven't heard of Tesco defending itself in any major way have you?

Page 305. Figure 10 a few things that regulators can do. This is a table of problems and suggested solutions that supermarkets might apply. Such as

• supermarkets, having too much control of the supply chain
• supermarkets holding land for their own expansion and to block competitors
• supermarkets engage in practices that farm suppliers at home in the UK and abroad.

Look at page 305 and 306 for the suggested solutions to these problems and more. I think some of the solutions provided ridiculous others, however, have a lot to recommend them.

There is also on pages 290 and 291 a rather churlish bit of blether. On these pages Simms discusses Tesco’s vouchers for education scheme. This is a good initiative, and I know schools that have benefited greatly from it. On page 291 we read.

• to get a pack of three tennis balls, available from any average online retailer at around 1.25. You would have to spend 1,140 at a Tesco supermarket.
• A pair of plastic inflatable armbands for swimming, would set you back 840
• football, too, to all.
• hockey stick 2,360

I think it is unfair to talk like this.

Page 320: there is an excellent quotation from Colin Tudge and it is excellent, because it is something that I have said for many years:

… the best food in the world is based on peasant cooking.

I would add to that that the best bread in the world is peasant bread.

The message, quite clearly, is that supermarkets and hypermarkets do not and cannot provide peasant food for peasant cooking to eat with peasant bread. I agree. As a vegetarian, I also agree that supermarkets and hypermarkets cannot and do not provide many products that aren't wrapped in unnecessary metal paper, plastic and goodness knows what else.

Any vegetarian will tell you that their dustbins filled at the rate of one to four. That is, my dustbin will take me four weeks to fill, whereas yours, as a meat eater, will be full within a week. That's my estimate, you may fill yours at twice that rate or half that rate; but the point is, non peasant food leads to gross waste.

There are a number of websites, given in this book such as

• www.tescopoly com
• www.tescotown co.uk

whilst tescopoly.com will not work on my computer, there are other websites given in the book that do work and that are worthy of a visit. Please try them.

You may see from these quotations and examples exactly what it is that this book is trying to get at. In addition, it spent a lot of time discussing the situation in America, with Wal-Mart for example. It also talks about Tesco and its role in the Far East. It talks about French supermarkets and their role in the development of the third and first worlds. There is nothing complimentary in the sentiments in this book.

I really didn't like the style of writing in a lot of this book: it got on my nerves. Nevertheless, I stuck with it I read it and I admired it; and as I said at the beginning, even though my nearest retail outlets is Tesco, I will not use it now and for the foreseeable future, unless and until the arguments set out in this book are resolved to my satisfaction.

Not only is it a terrible thing that we can read of exploitation of very poor people (I should say, though, that I don’t take every story in this book literally) and not only is it a terrible thing that people are being offered food and produce that is clearly sub standard: for example, standard sized tomatoes, standard sized bananas, bland tasting cucumbers … and so on. I think it is even worse that our local and central government officers and councillors seem impotent in the face of all the machinations of Tesco and all other major supermarket chains as far as I can tell. If Tesco wants to open a new store, it will: that is the message. I don't like it and we need protection from these outfits.

I have to confess that in the 1970s and 1980s I admired Tesco: I liked the way it was developed, it gave consumers freedom of choice, its prices were low and it seemed to be at the foundation of high quality retail competition. Now I see hypermarkets that are open 24 hours a day, with pharmacies inside, selling clothes, selling newspapers and magazines, selling garden supplies, selling petrol, selling animal products … it's too much. They are ripping the heart out of the country: let them stop.

Buy or borrow the book: after all, it's only eight pounds and join the fight.

There is a problem with Figure 1 on page 58: it's all walted as we say in Yorksire: columns all skew whiff, that is.

Language style

I also object to some of Simms' supposed English in that he uses what I call 'TeeVee' talk: he talks about elevators instead of lifts and onscreen instead of on screen; had jointly authored instead of was the co author or had jointly written; found dead in a broom cupboard instead of found dead in a store room or something.

As you can see from my other book reviews. I don't like such appalling language usage and is one of the reasons why I downgraded the book.

Duncan Williamson
20^th May 2007