Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets

As far as our large supermarkets are concerned, such effects are just the natural law of the retail jungle. If local shops, even smaller supermarkets, close, so what? Small-scale retailing RIP. As one supermarket expert put it: ‘The supermarket groups are running businesses (#litres_trial_promo). The success of superstores shows that they are meeting the needs of shoppers, at least the majority of them. The retailers have discovered the right business model, recognized the opportunity; government policy let them rip. People want to use their cars and will do so whenever possible.’

Mention the words ‘parking’ or ‘pedestrianisation’ to independent shopkeepers and be prepared to stand and listen for some time. They feel a huge sense of injustice at the large supermarket chains’ free-parking advantage over town-based shops. They see themselves as victims of pseudo-environmental town planning, selectively applied. Consumers can drive to out-of-town superstores and park for free. But if they would prefer to spread a significant amount of their household shopping around local shops, either they will need strong arms to transport heavy shopping by foot – in 2000 the average family food shopping weighed around 36 kilos – or they will have to cruise round patiently in their cars to find one of a diminishing number of parking spaces. When the DETR’s Select Committee looked at this issue, it confirmed the disadvantage that small shopkeepers feel so intensely. ‘The large amounts of free car parking (#litres_trial_promo) offered by existing out of town supermarkets gives them an enormous competitive advantage over city-centre stores. In addition, supermarkets at these sites generate more car use, making the situation on already congested roads worse. The situation needs to be addressed urgently,’ it concluded. To redress this obvious injustice, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott mooted the idea of a tax on supermarket parking. Supermarkets would have had to pay something back to the country for their acres of free car parks. But the supermarkets lobbied successfully to have this proposal dropped. Hence the current status quo in which supermarkets dangle a free-parking carrot to consumers while local shops and their potential customers dodge vigilant traffic wardens keenly enforcing their council’s green-sounding, leave-your-car-at-home policy.

For the small, local shops that remain, survival gets ever more complicated too. Small shops have to try to survive a campaign of attrition. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s they had to see off not just the first wave of supermarket openings but also the second and third as rival chains competed for market share in their area. The drastically reduced number of small shops that have survived that period now have to watch these supermarket chains replicating like mutants in a sci-fi film as they extend and refurbish existing stores out of town and set up new ones in smaller sizes and formats in the high street. Life isn’t getting any easier for independent shopkeepers.

2 Trolley towns (#ulink_52a2664d-3f20-59bf-a3df-c01a9099c04e)

The term ‘company town’ was coined by historians to describe centres of population made distinctive by the one-dimensional nature of their employment opportunities and the predominance of the large companies that controlled them. Nowadays it may be more apt to distinguish places not according to how locals earn their money, but by how they spend it. Few British towns have a distinctive sense of place any longer. Most have become trolley towns, shaped by the grocery chains that dominate them.

What does a trolley town look like? Approach any significant centre of population in the UK and you must pass through the supermarket ring. The first thing that greets you is not some distinctive civic monument or landmark but the now familiar supermarket sprawl, complete with its new roundabouts, altered road layout, traffic signals with changed priorities, petrol station and sea of parking. Welcome to Asdatown, or Tescotown, or Sainsburytown. Make it into the centre of one of these places and you’re in Anytown, Anywhere. Or even Clonetown. You’ll search to find anything approximating to a small greengrocer, fishmonger or butcher. These have been replaced by charity shops, video shops and, in more affluent centres, branches of large retail chains. This is the new urban landscape our large supermarket chains have bequeathed us.

Dundee is a typical trolley town, or city. Once an important port at the mouth of the River Tay, its heyday was during the industrial revolution. Dundee’s reputation was built on the three Js: jam, jute and journalism. By dint of its seafaring history, Dundee claims the credit for introducing Britain to the delights of jam made from imported exotic fruits, otherwise known as marmalade. In the nineteenth century, its jute mills swelled its population. In the twentieth century, it was better known as the home of the Beano and the Dandy comics created by local publisher D. C. Thomson. Now Dundee has a population of around 165,000. On paper, it is an interesting place to live in and visit, and not short of visual attractions. It has the silvery Tay itself and the Tay Rail Bridge, a dark mass of sturdy Victorian metal. You can still see the stump of its notorious predecessor, the one that collapsed into the river. You can visit the historic sailing ship the Discovery, famed for its early exploration of the Arctic. But the first thing that hits you when you approach Dundee from any direction these days is not this unique and impressive heritage but supermarkets.

In the 1990s Dundee was home to William Low, a Scottish supermarket chain with relatively small stores throughout the country. It was acquired by Tesco as a quick way for it to build its base in Scotland and compete with the then dominant chain, Safeway. Soon the whole look of Dundee started to change. Locals were amazed when, after the council had spent lots of money improving the approaches to the city, planting floral displays, landscaping and so on, Tesco got planning permission for a superstore on the city’s most desirable and scenic location, Riverside Drive, with its long, open views over the Tay. Then Asda started flexing its muscles and Sainsbury’s entered the fray. Now most key routes through and past Dundee seem to lead to vast supermarkets. They loom so large that they dwarf the city’s outstanding historic and civic heritage. The city struggles to put itself on the tourist map, and no wonder: to the visitor, it might look as though the main occupation of its residents is supermarket shopping.

Dundee city centre consists of an area of about half a square mile, large parts of which are pedestrianised. At either end, like sentinels, stand two shopping malls, tenanted with a familiar litany of chain shops – Carphone Warehouse, Claire’s Accessories, Clinton Cards and so on. Fast-food chains are also well represented. Most of the small shop units that remain in the centre have been turned into pubs or amusement centres, or charity or video rental shops.

In the 1960s, before the large UK-wide supermarket chains managed to persuade Dundee’s impoverished city council, desperate for cash, to let them have their way, this area was a thriving centre for food shopping. There were ten bakers; now there are two left. There were eight or nine butchers; now there is one. Of the five fishmongers, one has survived. Where there were half a dozen grocers, one remains. Food shoppers – as opposed to food grazers – will find little to sustain them in Dundee city centre these days.

When I visited Dundee in 2003, the city had four Tescos, two Safeways, two Asdas, one Sainsbury’s, one Marks & Spencer and a clutch of discount and low-price outlets. Asda had submitted a planning application to build a third store on a greenfield site. It had commissioned a traffic-impact study to support its application and was reported to be ‘ready and waiting’ to state its case to councillors when it came before the planning committee. Residents, meanwhile, had formed an action group to oppose the application. Not to be left out of Dundee’s supermarket mêlée, Morrisons was also in talks with the city council over its application to build a further 90,000-square-foot superstore in the city, close in scale to a Tesco Extra or an Asda superstore. Since both the Asda and Morrisons proposed sites were on council land, Dundee City Council stood to receive a substantial windfall from the sales. ‘Some estimates have put the amount the local authority stands to make at anywhere between £15 and £20 million,’ reported the Evening Telegraph. Dundee clearly did not need any more supermarkets. Yet with this sort of money to play for, you could see why councillors might be sorely tempted to say yes to a couple more.

As it stands, any Dundonian who wants to shop in independent outlets must travel to Broughty Ferry, now effectively a prosperous suburb of the city and home to a thriving rump of small shops that have so far been sheltered from the city’s supermarket revolution. Here independent shopkeepers are endlessly resourceful in thinking up new ways of seeing off the supermarket threat. ‘We [independent traders] are relying on the overall viability of the area by creating a food shopping cluster,’ baker Martin Goodfellow told me. A few doors along, David Craig has reinvented his butcher’s shop, Robertson’s, as a mini Harrods food hall on the Tay, and it is renowned for its exceptional range and personal service. Both men are optimistic that they can hold the line against the supermarkets, but with new superstores opening and existing ones being extended, they remain far from complacent.

Wherever you go now in the UK, you will find cities and towns whose vitality has been drained by supermarkets. Terence Blacker wrote in the Independent:

I live in East Anglia where the progress of convenience shopping has had a visible effect on the quality of life. My nearest town, Diss, has two supermarkets, squatting each side of the thoroughfare that passes near the town centre. One is adequate, the other cheap but hilariously awful. As a result of their presence, the main shopping street of a market town of 6,000 people consists almost entirely of charity shops, estate agents and, mysteriously, a number of greetings card emporia. As they go out of business, small retailers complain that the life of the town is draining away, but the planning authorities remain unimpressed. It has just been announced that Tesco has been given permission to build another vast superstore beside the main road.

Writing in The Grocer, James Millar (#litres_trial_promo) drew attention to the irony of the situation where he lived in Gloucestershire. ‘A recent survey has just pronounced my local town, Tetbury, the third most desirable place to live in the UK. Tetbury, undeniably, is a nice place to live. Yet the only places you can buy apples, cauliflowers or a bag of potatoes are the local Somerfield and the almighty new Tesco. The fruit and vegetable shop has gone – shut down. We have two local butcher’s shops but I wouldn’t count their chickens.’

A reader wrote to tell me of the similar effect of a new Sainsbury’s on the market town of Bourne in Lincolnshire. Both of the independent greengrocers had closed. One of them had become a doll’s house and miniatures shop. The other had turned into a bargain outlet that sold anything, providing it was extremely cheap.

It is not only small shops that close as supermarket leviathans move in. Small or medium-sized supermarkets – the kind that can coexist with independent retailers rather than close them down – are vulnerable. In November 2003, for example, the Midlands Co-op had to close a store in Thurmaston which had been open since the 1970s after it lost the bulk of its business to a new 45,000-square-foot Asda which had opened directly opposite.

It is a familiar story, one that can be recounted time and time again by people living in every part of the UK. When the big supermarkets move in, towns and cities are pushed to what the New Economics Foundation calls ‘the tipping point’ (#litres_trial_promo). When the number of local retail outlets falls below a critical mass, the quantity of money circulating in the local economy suddenly plummets as people find there is no point in trying to do a full shop where the range of local outlets is impoverished. ‘This means a sudden, dramatic loss of services – leading to food and finance deserts,’ says the Foundation. In the case of big centres of population, this desertification expresses itself in a carbon-copy townscape dominated by omnipresent chains and fast-food outlets. In small places, it manifests itself in one of two forms: either pretty, but useless, main streets with a dearth of everyday services, or wholesale depression and deadness.

3 Small basket (#ulink_bac83d23-a39c-59e2-8ac9-09804c4ff702)

Supermarkets already gobble up a greedy 80 per cent of the nation’s grocery spend. Now they want the remaining 20 per cent. The long-term vision of the largest amongst them is that by 2020 or thereabouts, only two or three major players will possess more or less total control of the grocery market. This would make the supermarket sweep to power complete. These players would then have buyer power that allowed them to dictate terms to farmers, food producers and suppliers all over the world. Even the biggest brands, international household names, would be at their beck and call.

If supermarkets get their way, everything we buy, whether it is from a superstore, a smaller city store, a corner shop or a petrol-station forecourt, will be sold by a supermarket chain. There will be small shops, but not as we know them now. They will be run not by independents but by the supermarket chains. To realise this goal, supermarkets have embarked on a new mission. They’re after what’s known as ‘the small basket’, those more frequent shopping trips we make for just a few items. This market is what one industry commentator has called ‘the new competitive challenge’.

Think of it this way. In the process of sewing up the bulk of our shopping spend, supermarkets have managed to alter our perception of food shopping totally. Where people once shopped for food fairly frequently – if not daily, probably every other day – supermarkets have institutionalised the one-stop shopping trip, a weekly expedition to stock up for the next seven days under one roof. For busy working people this system has its attractions. In theory, the one-stop shop allows us to clear the decks, to get ourselves organised in one fell swoop, saving us from having to think about grocery shopping for the rest of a pressurised week. There are, of course, problems with the concept. Fresh items such as fruit and vegetables don’t all naturally last for a week. This doesn’t stop supermarkets selling them to us: they simply instruct suppliers to harvest them ‘green and backward’ so that they don’t rot and look OK on the shelves, even if they taste of zilch when we get them back home. And do you know any fishmongers who reckon that fish can be stored in domestic fridges for several days at a time, as supermarkets would have us believe, and still taste fresh when it’s cooked?

Apart from making it harder to eat really fresh food, though, the one-stop shop in a big superstore is convenient. If you need to do a marathon shop for Christmas, say, or you have run out of a number of boring basics like toilet rolls, it is indisputably useful. But even the most organised consumers forget things – we run out of milk, salt perhaps; we need a lemon instantly, or dishwasher tablets – and we’re getting increasingly disenchanted with having to jump in a car and drive to the nearest superstore to buy them. Five years ago, the average shopping visit or time taken to go round a supermarket was forty-five minutes. Now it only takes thirty-five minutes. Consumers are shopping more frequently for smaller amounts and becoming increasingly reluctant to trail around a vast retail shed to do so. They are deserting superstores for smaller outlets, traditional small shops (butchers, bakers, fishmongers) and convenience stores or ‘C’ stores which are growing in popularity. Though their ranks have severely contracted as the number of supermarkets has grown, those that are left turn a decent penny or two because we have come to rely on them more than ever before. Why leave that residual business to independents, the supermarkets ask. Their conclusion? Time to mop up the whole lot.

Smaller outlets are attractive to supermarkets because they represent a whole new opportunity to get into a market they simply could not tap with larger stores. Added to that fact is supermarkets’ continuing difficulties in getting planning permission for out-of-town stores. At the end of the day, they may well get it, but what chain wants to spend years, and vast reserves of money, arguing with councils and planners when it can simply take over existing stores or sites in well-placed, central locations, with only a fraction of the hassle? What’s more, the one-stop superstore market is becoming saturated. Competition is stiff and the scope for making profit or gaining market share is slimmer.

By contrast the potential for growth in town and city centres is huge because, killed off by – guess what? – those out-of-town supermarket developments with free parking, they have become food deserts. As well as buying up small outlets, they are stealing business from them. As the Guardian’s Brian Logan (#litres_trial_promo) put it, ‘Not content with all those out of town developments perverting the social geography of Britain, the latest supermarket wheeze is to pop up “locally”, right next door to the few remaining independents and, like bogeymen, scare ’em away.’ Now, ironically, supermarket chains are colonising the vacant sites that they emptied with new medium-format stores with different fascia: Tesco Metro, Safeway’s Citystore, Sainsbury’s Central and smaller, convenience-sized outlets such as Sainsbury’s Local and Tesco Express. The latter is reported to have caused drops in business of 30–40 per cent for other local shops (#litres_trial_promo).

Typically these stores stock a relatively low proportion of fresh, unprocessed food and a high proportion of fast-turnaround prepared foods. When Safeway’s pioneer Citystore opened in Glasgow in 2003, its shelves were filled with sandwiches, crisps and fizzy drinks, although its windows were filled with nostalgic black-and-white images of a Victorian high street, complete with trams and thriving small shops, the message being, apparently, that small supermarket convenience stores were the twenty-first-century equivalent. These smaller-format stores leach business not only from remaining independents who have stayed in business – often only by the skin of their teeth, because they offered a good service, most notably long hours – but also from other outlets such as snack bars, bakers, even chain restaurants. Increasingly, supermarkets are widening their ambitions to embrace more of what Sainsbury’s calls ‘the Food Continuum’ (#litres_trial_promo) – a concept based on the observation that supermarkets have brought about a ‘blurring of boundaries’ between cooking from scratch from primary raw ingredients and eating out. They have been instrumental in developing ‘component cooking’ (meals assembled using some prepared items), ready meals and takeaways such as Happy Bags, Hot Chicken and Indian or Chinese Banquets. Having strayed profitably into the ‘snacking on the hoof’ market and developed ‘hand-held’ snacks like sandwiches and sushi, the supermarkets’ commercial logic leads them to more potential sales, currently made in takeaway or restaurant outlets: hot pizzas ‘to go’ or hot sandwiches. The further supermarkets move away from stocking raw materials for traditional scratch cooking, and the more they move towards more restaurant-like instant meals, which present various opportunities to ‘add value’ to the basic raw ingredients by means of food processing and packaging, the better their bottom line will be.

Corner-store formats also allow supermarket chains to charge different prices for groceries. Consumers tend to assume that chains charge the same for any given line in all their stores. Asda, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Iceland, Booths, Aldi and Lidl say they operate a strict national pricing policy. But other chains don’t. This practice is called ‘price flexing (#litres_trial_promo)’, which means that a chain sets a different retail price for a product in different geographical areas to compete with the local opposition. Price flexing cuts two ways. You can end up paying more for tea bags on the high street than you do in that edge-of-town superstore run by the same chain because there is no strong competition from rivals. Or you might be able to pick up tea bags for less on the high street because the market is particularly price sensitive there and so a supermarket chain is offering lower prices on certain lines. Somerfield, for example, told The Grocer that it runs extra promotions ‘where there is strong local competition’. The Co-op said that although it runs national pricing on key lines, ‘other prices vary by format or store size’.

When the Observer investigated the prices being charged in seven London stores in 2003, it concluded that customers were paying between 4 per cent and 7 per cent more for the privilege of shopping in supermarket ‘convenience’ stores compared with what they would pay for exactly the same products in larger-format stores in the same area. A report by the government’s Competition Commission in 2000 concluded that when carried out by big chains such as Safeway, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, this practice ‘operates against the public interest’. Both Tesco and Sainsbury’s challenged the methodology of the Commission’s analysis, and all chains operating price flexing said that the practice reflected the higher operating costs of more centrally located stores.

You might think that the regulatory authorities would be concerned about supermarkets’ tightening noose on the grocery market, but you’d be wrong. When the Competition Commission investigated them, our supermarket chains got lucky. It decided that supermarkets did not have a worrying monopoly on our grocery shopping. It divided the grocery market in two: ‘one-stop’ at supermarkets and ‘top-up’ at convenience stores. Our supermarkets had successfully fed the government and the Commission the line that these were two distinct markets (#litres_trial_promo) without any particular bearing on one another. Any citizen with common sense could see that there is a fairly direct relationship between the decline in independent stores in the town centre and the ascendancy of out-of-centre superstores. But the Commission employed a rather narrow definition of the term ‘competition’. In its book, competition in the grocery sector meant competition between rival supermarket chains. Choice for consumer did not mean a choice of both small shops and a supermarket to shop in but a choice of supermarkets run by different chains. The logic was absurd. It implied that if you lived in a small town with a reasonable collection of small shops level pegging with one relatively small supermarket run by chain A, you were positively deprived of choice. The Commission seemed to believe that new competitor supermarkets run by chains B, C and D would give you greater choice. It ignored the fact that another supermarket would accelerate the rate of closures amongst independent shops that were just holding their own.

Given this regulatory climate, it is not surprising that the big multiples’ efforts to build their portfolio in the ‘small basket’ sector are escalating. As Richard Hyman (#litres_trial_promo) of the market research company Verdict told The Times, ‘this was always a market that the big boys were going to get into big time’. In October 2002, the Co-op started off the big buying with its acquisition of the grocery chain Alldays. Three days later, it was no surprise to discover that Tesco had got the go-ahead from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to buy up the T&S chain of convenience stores, using this two-market yardstick. Tesco gained out of the deal the 450 new Express stores it created from the T&S stores, adding a cool 1 per cent to its market share, without raising a regulatory whimper. The OFT decided that the T&S acquisition gave Tesco only 5 per cent of the convenience market so that was OK. But as one industry analyst told the Daily Telegraph, with the T&S deal, ‘Tesco had done a land grab (#litres_trial_promo) which would probably have taken them eight years to do piecemeal and probably 15 years in terms of all the planning wrangles there would have been.’ By the end of 2003, Tesco was opening Express stores at a rate of one a week.

There’s no doubt that the Competition Commission’s artificial division of the grocery market has turned out to be highly advantageous for the large supermarket chains. As Bill Grimsey (#litres_trial_promo), the chief executive officer of the retail and wholesale Big Food Group, put it: ‘It allows the already dominant multiples to bring their strength back into the high streets and local neighbourhoods, eventually working against the interests of shoppers, suppliers and the livelihoods of the smaller independents … They will also, in the long term, limit consumer choice and potentially lead to higher prices as competition eventually diminishes. Suppliers and consumers will be faced by a world dominated by two or three companies.’ A troubling prospect, isn’t it?

4 Working the system (#ulink_60b48880-974f-5770-b381-630669065451)

How on earth did Britain get into a situation where independent shops are an endangered species and a handful of powerful retailers are heading for total control of the nation’s food shopping – all in three decades? If consumers had been asked to vote on whether this was a desirable set of affairs, the resounding response would have been no; yet this is precisely what has happened. How did our regulatory system let us down?

When supermarkets started appearing in Britain during the 1960s, it was not instantly obvious that they were the forerunners of retail monsters. They were sufficiently few and far between not to cause undue concern. By today’s standards they were relatively small. Small shopkeepers were fearful about losing business to the new retail giants, but most people welcomed them. For most shoppers, they were something of a novelty, a new retail experience, a welcome addition to traditional shopping outlets – butchers, fishmongers, grocers and so on – adding to the all-round grocery shopping choice. Consumers saw the new supermarkets as an ‘as well as’ not an ‘instead of’ feature of the shopping scene. Local councils often viewed them positively as a whole new pot of rateable revenue.

By the late 1980s, however, supermarkets were multiplying at a steady rate. They were becoming bigger too. The nightmare scenarios articulated by independent shopkeepers were beginning to be played out on the high street. Belatedly, the penny dropped that a supermarket land grab was under way. It became obvious that some restrictions to curb the spread of supermarkets would be needed. In 1988, the Department of the Environment issued a planning policy note (PPG6) for England containing general guidance for local authorities. This said that although the planning system should not inhibit competition between retailers – perish the thought! – it should take into account whether a new supermarket would affect the vitality and viability of a nearby town centre. But this guidance proved totally inadequate to slow down the supermarkets’ inexorable push for retail space. A proliferation of large superstores followed.

The supermarket retail revolution no longer meant the odd useful store on the edge of urban areas, but a ring of similar developments creating a supermarket bracelet around towns and cities, a bracelet elastic enough to allow the insertion of ever more links. Chain B would build a new store, bigger and better than chain A’s existing store in the area. So chain A would respond with another bigger store to claw back the business the newcomer had taken away. Chain C, meanwhile, not to be outdone, would open its store to make sure it got its slice of the retail action.

People were surprised, and even shocked, to find that these superstores were sometimes constructed on greenfield land, even playing fields, which they had always supposed would never be put under hard landscaping of any sort, naively assuming that they would be protected by local development plans. Such plans proved to be weaker and more open to interpretation than many had supposed. Local planners felt their hands were tied. Even if they had the will to say no, they lacked the regulatory ammunition.

By 1993, the decline of small traders as a critical proportion of their customers began to drift off to the shiny new superstores with limitless free parking had become sufficiently acute for the government to issue a revised version of PPG6. This stressed the need for a suitable balance between developments in town centres and out of centre. It said that the scale, type and location of the supermarket should not undermine the vitality and viability of town centres. A year later this guidance was strengthened by PPG13. This stressed the need to promote more sustainable transport choices and to reduce the need to travel, especially by car. No one disputed that supermarkets were major generators of car travel. Their existence was encouraging shoppers to get in their cars and drive, even for just a carton of milk, when there was a local shop within walking distance.

But even though local authorities now had new grounds on which to cramp the supermarkets’ style, the supermarkets’ takeover of grocery retailing continued. By 1996, PPG6 had to be strengthened again. But by this point the horse had bolted. A further flurry of supermarket developments on the edge of towns and cities was of particular concern. This time PPG6 required local authorities to give preference to applications for supermarket developments on town-or district-centre sites. Out-of-centre sites were ranked below them and would not be approved if town-centre sites were available. New out-of-centre supermarkets should only be in locations that were well served by public transport.

The situation was and still is different in other parts of the British Isles. In Wales, the regulatory framework is less supermarket-friendly: if a new out-of-centre supermarket is ‘likely to lead to the loss of general food retailing in the centre of small towns’, this is grounds for refusal. In Scotland, the notion of whether or not a supermarket is needed is not addressed in law. Northern Ireland’s planning regulations allow supermarkets on sites outside town centres, providing certain criteria are met. In Ireland, there is a cap on the amount of floor space that supermarkets can have: 3,000 square metres outside Dublin and 3,500 in the greater Dublin area. In addition, there is a presumption against supermarket developments on out-of-town sites and local authorities must safeguard local shops in their development plans.

In the twenty-first century, supermarket chains face tighter planning controls than they did in the previous one. In theory, it is currently quite hard for them to get planning permission for new stores out of town. That is why they have largely turned their attention to the inner cities where they are looking to expand into ‘brownfield’ sites. Such sites have previously been built on and are usually in an advanced state of dilapidation, and so proposed developments do not attract the same objections as a new superstore on a greenfield site would. On the other hand, because a new supermarket on a brownfield site must fit into an already developed urban area, it is subject to a number of detailed and more specific planning considerations that do not always apply to out-of-town sites: the impact on local views, congestion of small streets, noise and light pollution and so on.

On paper anyway, there are grounds for local authorities to refuse permission for a new supermarket. But more often than not, our supermarket chains succeed. Of 170 supermarket planning applications (#litres_trial_promo) submitted in the UK in the three years to 31 March 2003, 83 (49 per cent) were approved, 33 (19 per cent) were rejected or withdrawn and 54 (32 per cent) were still pending at the time of writing. John Sweeney, leader of North Norfolk District Council, summed up the dilemma faced by local authorities. ‘They are too big and powerful for us. If we try and deny them they will appeal, and we cannot afford to fight a planning appeal and lose. If they got costs it could bankrupt us.’ Supermarkets simply don’t like to take no for an answer, and come back with one revised plan after another, until they get their way.

5 Sugar daddies (#ulink_63044747-c869-5701-a34a-80fd706f657e)

Stopping or even seeking to downsize a new supermarket development is a daunting task. No wonder really organised community opposition is rare. As one pro-supermarket commentator sanguinely put it:

At the end of the day (#litres_trial_promo), most planning authorities have bowed to a combination of consumer apathy – or even tacit support for the new supermarket sites – and the ability of retailers to ‘sweeten the pill’ on their arrival in a new locality … Key local aspirations that had seemed too expensive to fulfil – cleaning up derelict areas, building sports fields and social centres were favourites – gained crucial new support. Hundreds of new jobs were immediately created. The only losers were the collections of locally owned high street stores which had been fighting a losing battle for custom with prices that were perceived as too high, parking that was inadequate and service that appeared and indeed often was both slow and old-fashioned. Furthermore, it was usually months or even years after the new superstore’s arrival that the downside consequences became apparent.

Nowadays supermarket chains know that they have a better chance of securing planning consent for a new store if they parcel it up in a mixed development. The Town and Country Planning Act recognises the concept of ‘planning gain’ or elements included in a planning application to make an application more attractive to local authorities. It allows for what are known as Section 106 agreements. A council and supermarket chain can agree that certain work must be carried out before permission can be granted. For example, the supermarket might have to pay for trees to be replanted, traffic lights moved and roads relaid, or sports facilities provided. Often these take the form of sizeable cash payments from the would-be supermarket developer to the council. Using Section 106 agreements, supermarkets have the perfect sweetener to dangle before local authorities. Developers talk excitedly of ‘synergies’ with supermarkets that might make possible what previously seemed like unprofitable developments. Supermarkets, arm in arm with property developers, can act as sugar daddies to the community, even to the extent of getting permission for out-of-centre developments that would otherwise be out of the question.

In Coventry in 2000, Tesco won planning consent for one of its biggest stores in the country by agreeing to part-fund a new stadium. ‘Sometimes the value of the land (#litres_trial_promo) is enough to push the deal,’ said a Tesco spokesperson; ‘sometimes you have to build the stadium.’

In 2003, a property consortium submitted a planning application for a stadium for Wimbledon Football Club near Bletchley and Milton Keynes. This new 30,000-seat stadium and 6,500-seat arena would be part-financed or enabled by a 100,000-square-foot Asda Wal-Mart Supercentre, the largest Asda format. The consortium’s website aimed at encouraging locals to write letters to council planners in support of the plan was headed, ‘Dreams can become a reality for Milton Keynes and Bletchley.’ The consortium’s chairman, Pete Winkleman, argued the case as follows: ‘Milton Keynes needs an international stadium. Wimbledon FC needs a home. Asda needs a store in the largest city in the UK where it doesn’t already have one. Bletchley needs a major investment scheme to kickstart its regeneration … Without the stadium, without a revitalised Bletchley, without Wimbledon FC, Milton Keynes remains incomplete. Without Asda none of it happens.’

The more desirable elements that go into the development mix the better, and housing, as well as sport, is usually a winner. In 2003, Tesco announced its plans to build 3–4,000 affordable homes nationwide. Among these were an application for a development in Streatham, South London, where it wanted to build a complex which would include a leisure centre, Tesco store and 250 homes, 40 per cent of which would be for key workers. In Romford, Essex, Sainsbury’s new superstore was part of a mixed-use development that included housing, a health club, restaurants, a bowling alley and cinemas.

Just as they were being accused of taking away business from town centres and encouraging traffic by means of such projects, supermarkets have reinvented themselves as urban regenerators with pockets deep enough to make long-cherished community goals possible. As The Grocer noted archly: ‘Regeneration projects (#litres_trial_promo) can gain speedy approval from councils and local communities. A whole regeneration package, promising mixed use development … is likely to prove far more attractive to planners than just a plain old superstore.’ Our large supermarket chains’ enormous retail power certainly provides them with the money to make things happen. But the downside of these carrot-and-stick regeneration packages is that they are another way in which supermarkets are insinuating themselves into all aspects of our lives, embedding themselves deeper and deeper in our manmade landscape and hence our consciousness. In Kilmarnock in Scotland, for example, certain areas of the town are listed in local bus timetables according to the supermarket chain that dominates them: Wester Netherton has become Kwik Save and Scott Ellis has become Asda.