Tescopoly
Can someone explain what the big problem is with Tesco? I noticed that a number of groups have now banded together to form a website called Tescopoly to rally against the giant retailer.
I’d like to post something here for all the people who don’t say much about Tesco. The trolley pushers who spend their money in Tesco instead of around small shops or the co-op.
Small retailers can be great, but they don’t have a right to exist. They are there to serve their customers, not to exist as some sort of museum piece. If they are good, and can offer something people want to buy, then they’ll thrive.
Why should suppliers get special protection? If you are in business, you enter freely into contracts with your customers. If you don’t like the arrangement, you can part company. I’ve repeatedly heard people from suppliers complaining how they get completely shafted by major supermarkets. If it’s so bad, why trade with them?
It’s time to recognise that Tesco delivers for consumers. That society has moved on from the 1960s, and that the social changes since then (globalisation, mobility, working couples) are being met best by the hypermarket model. Maybe Tescopoly should look at the modern consumer and recognise that however much they might dislike it, this is what millions of people choose.
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Well said. I’ve just had an argument with my sister, a food writer, about this. She told me about Tescopoly, which I’d not heard of before, and I found this post through hunting on Technorati for Tescopoly.
I am fed up with small shops that are still stuck in a 1950s timewarp, shops that make you feel guilty for asking for something they don’t stock, shops that say ‘it’s packed that way because that’s the way the customers like it, and if you don’t like it you can go elsewhere’, cafes that open after breakfast and close before supper and have dirty toilets, pubs that won’t serve decent coffee because ‘we’re a pub, not a cafe’, etc.
The big supermarkets might have an unhealthy grip, but when I go in one, I do feel they listen. A while back I wrote to the head ale/bitter buyer complaining about the prevelance of ‘widgets’ in beer cans - he replied that he felt exactly as I did, and wished more people would write to him about it, but that the breweries told him customers didn’t like it - and he didn’t have the evidence to back up his suspicion.
I feel listened-to by the big supermarkets. I don’t feel listened-to by smaller shops.
Thanks Andrew,
There are great small shops, small producers, pubs and farmers markets out there. I buy some of my shopping from them, and some from Tesco. The bacon at my local farmers market is better than what Tesco can sell me, so I choose that.
But that doesn’t mean that certain shops deserve special dispensation.
People have a rose-tinted spectacle view of small shops in the past.