Julie Burchill

cymrococh · December 19, 2007

I read Jeanette Winterson's recent Guardian article about the joy of small shops and the evil of supermarkets with bemusement, amusement and amazement. Whose ego could possibly be so big and yet so fragile that whenever they nip out to the shops they demand "passion, commitment - something more than the transaction", because, "I'm not here to make a profit for somebody who couldn't care less about what they are selling, about how it is made, or about me"?

Maybe I'm lucky, but personally I find I get all the validation, passion and commitment I need from my family, friends, religion and voluntary work; that I might go looking for proof of my worth over the wet fish counter seems quite eye-wateringly daft. But then, as with so many of those who idealise small shops and demonise big shops, Winterson's arguments seem to be based around prejudice and superstition rather than fact.

Though they use the word "pleasure" a lot, I can't help thinking that there is something rather sad about people who bang on about the joys of "slow shopping", and its kissing cousin "slow food"; this always seems to mark out a dull and dreary nostalgia-hound with too much time on their hands and a morbid fear of modernity. A Tesco-hater in my local paper recently fumed, for instance, that "Tesco is rampaging through Hove like Attila the Hun - it's also ruining things around the world. Onions have been flown in from other countries even when they are in season in England. Tesco is trying to make everything uniform; that makes for a uniform life." Bloody foreign onions, coming over here, taking our shelves ...

I love Tesco; here in Hove we have six of the beauties. Of course the less unhinged among us will always go for speed and convenience over drudgery and difficulty, and we can also grasp that the very same small shopkeepers who get into a sweat about Tesco didn't go into their racket to make the world a better place, despite their mealy-mouthed protestations that they are working for the benefit of the "community". They chose to go into their kind of business because they are capitalists who wanted to make a profit - as did the man who started Tesco.

In 1919, after serving with the RAF during the first world war, 21-year-old Jack Cohen invested his £30 demob money in surplus food stocks and a stall in the East End of London. On his first day he had a £4 turnover and made £1 profit; now £1 in every £8 spent by shoppers in this country is handed over in his shops. The idea that Tesco has always been a corner-shop-crushing colossus is a lie, one perpetuated by bitter, third-rate businessmen who would dearly love to have achieved a quarter of what Cohen did but lacked the ability and luck to pull it off, and who now seek to clothe their envy and hypocrisy in the rhetoric of care for the community. But with a bit less moaning and a bit more ingenuity, what's to stop them doing the same? Instead they would rather spend their time whining, in the manner of one Ken Stevens of the Federation of Small Businesses in East Sussex to the Brighton Argus newspaper, "Where they start selling everything cheaper, that can be very damaging."

Gosh, selling things cheap to people - burn them down, let's, and make the world safe for greedy, over-charging rotters! Don't get me wrong; small local shops are all very well, abroad, where it's sunny and one doesn't have to stagger through the streets in the pissing rain for six months of the year in search of the perfect pain au chocolat. But there can be few humdrum feelings more satisfying than knowing that one has bagged a week's worth of shopping in 45 minutes, and that one is now free to party the remaining days away and sleep in late every morning, safe from the fear that the cupboard is bare. If one can also find cheap books, CDs and pet insurance under the same roof, so much the better.

Far from making our lives limited, supermarkets open us up to taste thrills from all around the world at any time of the year - as opposed to laying down the law that we can only have strawberries in a month with "J" in it, or whatever small-minded voodoo the foodies subscribe to. And let me please declare that I, for one, wasn't put on this earth to make life easy for British farmers, who are a reactionary and misanthropic lot as a rule - gaily destroying wildlife, backing blood sports, feeding animals the remains of their relatives and driving them mad. The EU has done enough to feather their nests; I don't need to add to their nest eggs when I go shopping. This sort of backward thinking, taken to its logical conclusion, would also see the return of morris dancing, inbreeding and operations without benefit of anaesthetic; no thanks, make mine modern!

I love the lights and rush and exhilaration of speeding round the supermarket; let those saddoes who want to dawdle their day away over errands, but some of us love the buzz of getting things done quickly so one can then move on and do something one loves, be it sex, conversation or lazing away the day on the sofa or the beach with a good book. People who are against Tesco are the sort of people who 50 years ago would have been against labour-saving devices on the grounds that they might conceivably give women time to put their feet up, have a cup of tea and watch daytime telly for half an hour.

Winterson dismisses supermarket employees, in all their diversity, as "phoney", "robotic" and full of "fake helpfulness". That's certainly not my experience of these good-humoured people, and speaks of a snobbish and unimaginative view of a whole swathe of humanity. She also attempts to convince us that small shops keep "communities" - always a slightly shady word, as conservative as it is comfy - together. And she fetishises the family, as slow-shop lovers so often do, as in her comment that "in every European city, family-run bars and shops have held their own against global-market madness", and her later reference to "family-run concerns who spend much of their income where they live". Whenever I hear the word "family" used as a moral absolute, I immediately reach for my amyl nitrate and my whistle. Families are only as good or as bad as the individual family in question; seeing the word used as shorthand for all that is good and pure is ridiculous.

I am neither old nor poor, but I am able to put myself in the cheap chain-store shoes of people to whom supermarkets have proved nothing but a blessing. This is probably because I have no fear of the modern world, a fear that runs like mad mercury through those who celebrate small shops. But it is the modern world which has given so many of us the right to follow our hearts, live our dreams and hold fast to our freedom. The traditional world Winterson now worships, on the other hand, would have seen her living a lie and being forced by convention into a joyless marriage with a local lad, to eke out her days in the sort of rainy English provincial town she so despises.

One of the lowest blows used by the enemies of supermarkets is that old people, especially, feel frightened and alienated by them. This argument drives me mad: a) what an ignorant and condescending view of a generation who faced Hitler (a man who actually wanted to ban chain stores and give back the power to the small shopkeeper, fact fans!) and have more spirit in their little toes than we do in our entire scaredy-cat, food-intolerance-ridden bodies. And, b) they should get out a bit more, beyond the chi-chi "family concerns" they breathe the rarified air of, and see the very different looks of the faces of the old people I see shopping in my local pedestrianised parade of small shops and in my local big, beautiful Tesco. It's so sad to see them stumble from shop to shop in the teeming rain, weighed down under their shopping bags; so lovely to see them strolling in the warm, dry brightness of the supermarket, leaning on their trollies like they were leaning on the backyard walls of their younger days, blocking the aisles without a care as they bump into their similarly strolling friends and set up a gossip-station right there. Then home - to await a big strong man lugging all that heavy shopping for them at their convenience. Perfect.

Des · December 19, 2007

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