Right on, John!

[Guest guest]

vegan-network, jallan@f... <jallan@f...> wrote:>

financial support of a good cause that keep money in local

> economies rather than a faceless supermarket that takes money out

of

> communities and away to shareholder's accounts.

 

Found the article below on urban75.org.

 

--

Rob

 

Tesco: superstores killing the community

by George Monbiot (25.09.98)

 

Tesco's announcement this week that it will be creating 10,000 new

jobs was greeted with rapture by a workforce shivering at the

prospect of global recession. The chain was extolled by the Guardian

yesterday as a good employer, as it pays higher wages than most other

shops. It has been praised by both the current government and its

predecessor as a beacon of free enterprise. British shoppers honour

it as their champion, battling on their behalf with Adidas and Calvin

Klein. There are several words for people like us: suckers is perhaps

the most polite.

 

For Tesco's business, in common with that of the other superstores,

is the business not of generation, but of displacement. It doesn't

create jobs, it destroys them. A report published by the National

Retail Planning Forum shows that the opening of a superstore costs,

on average, a net 276 local jobs, as independent grocers, village

shops, newsagents, milk rounds and pharmacists are closed down in

droves.

 

Tesco creates neither choice nor convenience, but merely concentrates

them, laying waste to the diversity of social and economic life

outside the store, shattering community, cluttering our streets with

traffic. It relies for its expansion not upon nimble enterprise, but

upon the ponderous might of political influence and regional control.

Like a super-gravitational black hole, it sucks in and compacts the

worlds that lie beyond it.

 

No commercial sector is better represented than the superstores. Lord

Sainsbury is a minister at the Department of Trade and Industry

(DTI), which sets the terms by which business in Britain is allowed

to proceed. Archie Norman, the head of ASDA, is deputy chairman and

chief executive of the Conservative Party. Ian McLaurin, Tesco's

former chief executive, sits in the House of Lords. So too, if ever

she dares to show her face, does the heiress to the chain, the

disgraced former leader of Westminster Council, Dame Shirley Porter.

Executives from Tesco inhabit no fewer than six government task

forces, including, ominously, the DTI's Competitiveness Advisory

Group.

 

The superstores enjoy a remarkable immunity from the laws by which we

lesser mortals have to live. Over the past four years, they have been

able first to ignore and then to remove the Sunday trading laws, the

restrictions on opening hours, the Net Book Agreement and the

chemists' Retail Price Maintenance. Two months ago, the superstores'

lobbying prevented the Integrated Transport White Paper from

proposing that their car parks be taxed.

 

Yesterday, the Office of Fair Trading, which is supervised by the

DTI, published a report suggesting that no new laws were required to

address the extraordinary control the superstores exert over their

suppliers. Despite driving farmers and manufacturers out of business

by forcing them into restrictive contracts and then paying less than

the price of production for their goods, British superstores still

manage to charge 40 per cent more to their customers than stores on

the Continent, with the result that they make three times as much

money. As control over their suppliers was to have been the main

theme of the OFT's inquiry into the superstores' profits, it looks as

if they will yet again be let off the hook. Two

earlier " investigations " by the OFT and the Monopolies and Mergers

Commission concluded that the superstores' market dominance,

predatory pricing and uncompetitive practices, while wiping out small

shops, mysteriously posed no threat either to healthy competition or

to the wider public interest.

 

When John Gummer announced that there would be no more out-of-town

superstores, it looked as if their power would at last be curbed. In

truth, the ruling has achieved precisely the opposite, which was

surely why it was allowed to happen. While Tesco, Sainsbury and the

others had already lined up enough planning consents to keep

expanding for years to come, the door was conveniently slammed shut

on the continental warehouses trying to enter the market. Even so,

the British superstores are managing to shrug off these restrictions

as blithely as they have disposed of all the others. Now, as Tesco

links up with Esso, and Safeway develops its relationship with BP,

the superstores have discovered in the petrol stations a new and

largely unregulated frontier of out-of-town development.

 

The end-game is already being played. Having crippled village shops,

Sainsbury is now allowing them to stock its own products. Having

helped create " food deserts " in Britain's poorest places, Tesco now

has the government's blessing to move back into them, on its own

terms. The superstores tell us that their expansion is all about

choice. What choice would that be, exactly?