Too Many Tescos?
It is a quite alarming feature of the average British high street in the last few years that Tesco are becoming ubiquitous. It is easy to understand the attraction: they’re cheap (ish), no-frills, plenty of special offers and BOGOFs, everything in one place.
But that’s just the problem. Everything in one place – everywhere. I say it’s alarming because it feels as if, soon, there will be nowhere else to buy groceries because all the independent shopkeepers will have folded. Because Tesco will take over other, smaller companies with less clout and even if you think you’re buying clothes from a fashion chain, that fashion chain will be owned and dictated to by Tesco. You may think you’re buying books from a specialist, but that specialist will be owned and run by Tesco.
It’s a known fact that larger companies are constantly taking over smaller ones. Every day, we hear it on the news. Even L’Oreal took over The Body Shop, insisting the Body Shop’s ethics and morals would be respected. (For the record, I haven’t set foot in any Body Shop branch since.)
The village high street once so typical of Britain’s rural areas are beginning to struggle. Even the independent shops in the cities are starting to disappear. Because Tesco and their like take over.
The only way to stop this spread is for people to refuse to shop in their stores. To go somewhere else. To insist upon it, in fact. To grow their own produce, as far as is possible, and to patronise local, independent businesses, to keep them afloat.
People in Britian have a problem and that’s not just that branches of Tesco are springing up everywhere: the problem here is that we don’t stand up and fight. Protests work, if there are enough of them. If everyone stopped going into the big supermarkets today, and I mean all of them, they wouldn’t last much longer. They would collapse, as they have made so many smaller businesses, farms and supply companies collapse.
There has to be a way to press the STOP button.
