Now, I haven't put up any posts about shopping for a while, mainly because I haven't needed to do any. A few weeks ago I got entire carrier bags full of apples, onions, potatoes and other veg for pennies from stands with honesty boxes outside people's houses and at farm entrances, and these have been lasting me. Also the big packs of beans from Hodmedod, practically a sack's worth of flour from the windmill and so on.
So all I've needed to buy for a while now has been milk and cheese. Cheese I now get from Myer's in Horncastle, where you're really spoilt for choice. And I've found the longer lasting Tesco 'Pure' milk (the only non-homogenised they do other than Jersey) has saved me a few bucks despite it being dearer per litre, as I can get a fortnight's worth in one go, saving extra trips.
All of which has meant that this week and last week, the money I'd ordinarily have had to set aside for food could be spent on more fun things instead -- to wit, a trip up to the Flamborough heritage coast where I enjoyed a 10 mile hike with my brother whom I haven't seen in almost a year, and a trip over to Worcester to see a friend in person that I've grown fond of over years of online contact.
So much for supermarkets supposedly setting us free with all their time/stress/money saving conveniences. Apropos of that, I've done an interesting experiment with a friend (let's call him Bob, as he coyly doesn't want to be identified on the interwebz) to find out just exactly how convenient they are...
Bob and I devised a shopping list of general everyday household food items and took a copy of it each - he to the big Sainsbury's in Lincoln and I to the little market town of Horncastle. We picked these two because we didn't want to be accused of unfairly comparing, say, a large city centre and all its associated facilities with, say, a smaller branch of a supermarket. So we did the opposite - a large branch of the supermarket compared to a small rural town.
The results were interesting. We had assumed that Bob would, effortlessly, emerge from the glass panelled electric doors in half an hour with everything off the list, 'price checked' to be cheaper than anywhere else and with the rest of the afternoon free, while I'd spend all day hoofing it round little individual shops and frustratedly not being able to get everything I needed.
What happened was kind of the opposite. For a start, he found parking stressful despite the massive free carpark offered by the store - thanks to inconsiderate parkers, morons leaving trolleys all over the place and the sheer crowdedness of it, more than 5 minutes elapsed between his turning his car into the premises and his actual walking through the shop door.
The big Sainsbury's, being open 24 hours, was full of the usual aisle-blocking round-the-clock shelf stackers, which meant he had to dodge, shove and snake his way through crowds of rather rude and impatient fellow-customers and their trolleys in these aisles that had effectively become single-track lanes with passing places. This he found very stressful. The rule we'd agreed on beforehand of only buying things that have their provenance and date of picking/packing (where appropriate) clearly marked on them had to go out of the window as this was by far the exception rather than the rule of what was on offer there.
In short, he emerged from the shop roughly 50 dodgem-like, label-scrutinising minutes later, in a foul temper, ranting about everything from the crowds and queues to the fact that despite the constant shelf-stacking, there were still one or two things he couldn't get as there was nothing but empty space and a price tag where they should be. His receipt showed that he'd paid £38.56 and obtained some few pence-worth of Nectar points.
My experience was quite different. I drove into the centre of Horncastle, parked my car (£1.50 for up to 4 hours), and within two minutes from putting the little ticket on the dashboard I was in the butcher's, where all the meat hailed from local farms. I then crossed the road to the greengrocer's, where the origin of everything on offer was clearly marked - a great deal of it with the "LOCAL" label I was on the lookout for. Seasonal produce in both butcher's and grocer's was clearly fresh, but the shopkeepers were happy to answer my questions about the age/freshness of their produce to within a day or two. Then I popped round the corner to Myer's for my cheese, tins and jars and freshly baked bread.
I joined Bob in Myer's café to review my yield: a mere 25 minutes was all it took from parking to sitting down to peruse the menu. I'd managed to obtain everything on the list for just under £27, all fresh, all of local provenance (unless you count the flour in the bread, which was nonetheless still British), and I was in a cheerful mood, having been chatting amiably with shop owners who were happy to bung a bit extra in for the same price, here and there. At no point had it been necessary for me to push, shove or dodge, nor even queue.
So we agreed that the ideas that supermarkets are a) convenient b) less stressful c) cheaper and d) offer equal or better quality than local independent shops are just about 100% myth. In fact, by the time I'd finished my first coffee at Myer's I was still a minute under Bob's time spent in Sainsbury's. We also noticed that the distance I had to carry my shopping from there back to my car was probably no less than the distance from the supermarket door to the average non-disabled parking space, but quite significantly safer and more pleasant to walk, being not full of people driving twattishly in search of spaces.
And there you have it. We've been programmed by years of relentless advertising to believe the four myths mentioned above - it's become so automatic for us to just go straight to the supermarket to get all our things in the belief that we're saving ourselves time, stress and money, when all we're actually doing is filling some fat cat's pockets.
Yes - they provide jobs, which we're told justifies everything else they do. But would they need to 'provide' jobs if their all-providing presence didn't pretty much preclude the possibility of people in the area opening their own businesses? I have to ask myself whether, of the 200 or so people employed by a big supermarket branch, 50 or so wouldn't be happier running their own shops and the other 150 happier working for those 50 than for the whip-cracking, zero-hour-contract-offering, remote ivory-tower-dwelling head honcho? Who can say...?
But I encourage you, dear reader, to give it a go. I'll be giving it another one shortly as I want to compare these two shopping trips with one on a market day.
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