CRASH DIETING

‘Two quid?!’ So cried Ray Langton in a 1971 episode of ‘Coronation Street’ when informed how much a haircut he’d agreed to pay for Irma Barlow would cost him. I know it sounds like a virtual free gift today, but a little online calculating revealed a trip to the nearest Weatherfield salon for a two quid haircut in 2023 would set Ray Langton back over £30, which still sounds a bit pricey. A storyline from the same year saw Irma’s parents Stan and Hilda Ogden rent a colour television set; naturally, Hilda made sure the entire street knew about this when it arrived, though wasn’t as keen to share the news with her neighbours when the shop repossessed it due to missed payments. At the time both BBC1 and ITV went over to colour at the end of 1969, a Pye colour TV set was advertised in the Radio Times as retailing between £232 and £346, which would be between £3,000 and £5,000 in today’s pounds, shillings and pence; no wonder people rented them, even if Stan and Hilda still found renting something of a financial strain. The average weekly wage in the UK at the beginning of the 1970s was £32, the equivalent of roughly £500 today, so one always has to take these things into account when making comparisons.

As many discovered during lockdown, it is possible to survive without a haircut; and I myself spend far more time on YT or watching DVDs than I do watching telly, so one can even live without that. When it comes to food, however, we all got to eat, and – energy and houses aside – nowhere does the much-trumpeted ‘cost-of-living-crisis’ appear more visible in terms of soaring prices than at the local supermarket. In fact, as other expensive contributors to the current state of the nation have actually decreased a little in price of late, food has kept making ever more aggressive demands on the household budget and is one of the main reasons why inflation remains high. The big established supermarkets have been engaged in a price war with each other ever since the arrival of the budget outlets like Aldi and Lidl, constantly undercutting one another in a bid to tempt shoppers away from the cheaper stores; but it would seem where certain items are concerned the process has abruptly gone into reverse.

According to new figures, the cost of foodstuffs has risen quicker over the past twelve months than at any time since 1977, back when the country was experiencing crippling rates of inflation aided and abetted by a spike in the global price of oil provoked by wars between oil producing nations. This time round, there are of course not-unrelated factors at play; not only did a post-pandemic demand for oil and gas push prices up, but there’s been that business in Ukraine cutting off the fuel supply from Russia; moreover, we have Tsar Vladimir’s military exercises to thank for the surge in the cost – and relative scarcity – of grains and vegetable oils. Bread, cereal and chocolate prices are also in the ascendancy, escalating the overall price of food; even though the pace of the rise began to slow a little as inflation fell from 10.4% in February to 10.1% in March, food prices still haven’t fallen along with inflation and are largely responsible for keeping inflation from falling further.

The Consumer Prices Index reveals the cost of food and soft drinks being the second biggest contributor to inflation at 19.1% (just behind housing and bills); the fastest rising price for an individual item over the past twelve months has been olive oil at 49.2%, with sugar at 42.1, milk at 40.0, cheese at 33.6, eggs at 32.0, and frozen vegetables at 30.2%. A sudden shortage of certain vegetables at the start of the year also played its part in the threadbare household menu. I can think of specific foodstuffs that are pretty much permanent fixtures on my own personal shopping list – eggs, milk, bread, butter etc. – and all have risen in price considerably over the past year or so; at the moment it almost feels as though each visit to the nearest Sainsbury’s – visits usually only separated by a couple of days – can see some of these items leap up in price in a manner that was unimaginable pre-lockdown. I do wonder where the Tory member for Ashfield, Lee Anderson, does his shopping; he’s the MP nicknamed ‘30p Lee’ after his claims that one only need spend that much for a nutritional meal. In the real world, you’d be lucky to get a tin of cat-food for 30p, and even then you’d be talking an own brand budget label that every cat I’ve ever known would turn its nose up at.

I’ve noticed some supermarkets cannily do their best to deceive the shopper by having some items on half-price special offer one day, giving the impression the general trend is being bucked; and then the next time one visits a day or two later, the same items will have suddenly not merely returned to the price they’d been prior to the special offer, but will have shot up another 50p. I guess the idea of the temporary special offer is to soften the blow of the imminent price hike, and in some cases will persuade the shopper who’s wised-up to the tactic to buy two or three of the item when it’s on special offer; in the process, of course, the shopper then spends more on the item than were it at its normal high price, convinced they’re getting a bargain. Much the same happens in pound shops, where shoppers end up buying a basket full of crap because ‘it’s only a pound’; one wonders if they’re so bedazzled by the thought of everything being ‘only a pound’ that they fail to notice they’ve just splashed out a tenner on stuff they don’t need. But, hey, when was the shopping experience not infected by a little psychological trickery on the part of the shop itself?

As happened in the 70s, wages are failing to keep up with rising prices, particularly food. A cursory online glance at any documentary about Britain in that decade will undoubtedly include archive footage of families being interviewed in supermarket car-parks bemoaning the fact their shopping bills are twice the price they were the year before. Half-a-century on, the average wage dropped 2.4% in the three months to January when compared to the same timescale last year whilst food prices have kept rising, mirroring the state of affairs in Three Day Week Britain. A snippet of vox-pops I heard on the news yesterday evening echoed the shoppers of 50 years ago, with the same complaints being aired all over again. Because I heard this report on the radio rather than saw it on television, it could well have been recorded in 1974, what with no contemporary fashions on show to give the game away. If you’ve lived long enough to remember 1974, there’s an undoubted sensation of déjà vu to a lot of the stories surrounding this issue at the moment.

In another ‘Coronation Street’ storyline from the same period as the one cited at the beginning of this post, Street pensioner Minnie Caldwell has no money to buy coal; fossil fuels were far more common for heating homes back then than they are today, of course, yet came with their own distinctive problems. Minnie is reduced to wearing an overcoat indoors and then goes up to bed early because it’s the one place in the house she figures she may be able to keep warm. In 2023, many people I know are adopting similar tactics because their energy bills are so expensive. As with the generation that still had fresh memories of the Great Depression musing on what they’d done to deserve the Three Day Week after everything they’d been through, many of a certain age today who are approaching the end of their working lives are wondering what all that hard work has actually done for them when they’re not even able to adequately heat their homes. Having said that, at least one can combat an absence of heating by wrapping-up; if one can’t afford much in the way of food, however – well, it could solve the obesity epidemic if nothing else. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

© The Editor

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STREET OF SHAME

When it suits some, the Brexit factor is certainly a convenient one. It’s surfaced as an excuse of late in a handy round of pass-the-buck that covers a few questionable tracks. Local councillors and business leaders in Staffordshire haven’t blamed the decline and fall of their high-streets on the sunshine, the moonlight, the good times or even the boogie, but on the Brexit. Unhelpful city centre parking facilities, extortionate rents for shop premises, out-of-town retail parks and internet shopping all pale next to the Brexit factor – at least according to the good burghers of Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent; there’s also the small issue of the demise of the town’s world-famous industry, one that enabled places like Burslem to thrive and prosper, and how it hasn’t been replaced. But blame it on the Brexit.

We’ve seen this before, of course. Britain’s traditional heavy industries – whether the mines, steelworks, or the potteries – employed the communities that sprang up around them; when the industries died, the communities died with them. What’s left behind is a sorry shadow of what once was, and Burslem is officially the country’s premier ghost town when it comes to commerce; the shop vacancy rate there is thrice the national average of 12.2%, standing at a dismal 31.5%. One in three empty shops does not a busy town centre make, and Burslem is home to 11,000 people who are being so poorly served that they drive to neighbouring Newcastle-under-Lyme or Stoke itself rather than circumnavigate the maze of double yellow lines or cough-up for an hour’s worth of parking if they actually find a space when they might only want a packet of fags.

The Local Data Company compiled their depressing survey by visiting 2,700 towns and cities and found a trail of abandonment that was hardly unique to Burslem; it just happened to be the worst. In fact, I have it on good authority (i.e. from someone who lives there) that our very own City of Culture – AKA Hull – has its fair share of boarded-up shop fronts that hardly exude the spirit of a bustling commercial hub, let alone a cultural one. This all predates Brexit, but Brexit will suffice as a reason when councillors are confronted by the casual neglect of town and city centres that stretches back years. There is now probably at least one generation that has never associated the shopping experience with the high-street; theirs has been shaped by the mall.

For the traditional high-street, the mall was a monster it couldn’t compete with. As the big name stores gradually vacated their cramped old premises and moved to expansive new locations in the mall, town centres slowly embarked upon an agonising descent into dereliction, losing the motorist as a customer and leaving the pedestrian shopper with an increasingly limited choice. The remaining high-street supermarkets resorted to desperate measures, expanding their value own-brands, loudly promoting the ‘Buy one, get one free’ special offers, and introducing the most contentious development of all – maximising the sale of cheap alcohol, something that helped fuel the craze for ‘binge-drinking’ and also undercut the already ailing local public house.

The cheap booze policy may have kept several supermarkets in business, but the high-street of the 21st Century, peppered with bargain basement pound-stores and charity shops, is a depressingly uninspiring location. Gone are many of the familiar old supermarkets and gone are the old all-purpose stores like Woolworth’s, whose once-unique selling points can now be found in a dozen different shops under the roof of the mall or in the retail park warehouse. At the dawn of the economic meltdown that the 2008 banking crisis spawned, dear old ‘Woolies’ went to the wall, the first in a series of high-street names to vanish from the landscape in a matter of weeks, including furniture giants MFI, bookstore chain Borders, and Zavvi, the short-lived record shop chain that had purchased the old Virgin stores – all of which left the high-street more decimated than ever. What replaced them hardly instilled the high-street shopper with confidence.

The multi-purpose nature of malls also dealt a blow to other long-standing town centre fixtures. Many old picture houses, having survived the popularity of television and home-video by the skin of their teeth, finally succumbed to the changing climate when massive multiplex cinemas began to establish themselves as key ingredients of the retail parks. These glaringly impersonal and aesthetically unappetising arenas of artifice were nevertheless the ideal environments to showcase the merchandise trailers masquerading as movies that Hollywood has invested in from the 90s onwards.

But throwing all retail eggs in one basket can have catastrophic consequences for the towns that gleefully discard their high-streets, as has already been shown across the Atlantic. There have been several cases in America where malls have actually closed their doors for good, becoming so-called ‘dead malls’, whether due to changes in the social demographic of the residential areas surrounding the mall or because the owners of the establishment have decided to relocate their operations elsewhere. When this occurs, a town that had allowed its former high-street to decay as all leading business had decamped to the mall is suddenly left without any notable shopping areas for its citizens; although this has yet to happen in the UK, the recession that descended upon Britain in the wake of 2008 suggests that such a devastating event is not beyond the realm of possibility, and looking at the ghost towns many British high-streets have become in recent years doesn’t auger well.

Perhaps hope for the high-street lies with those who have chosen to set-up shop in Britain from foreign climes; just as Asian immigrants saved the corner-shop from extinction in the 60s and 70s, maybe the migrants from Eastern Europe who have colonised some British high-streets with cafes and bistros that specialise in their own exotic cuisine point the way forward to a future in which the high-street can be reborn as a cornucopia of choice that even the mall can’t compete with. And why attempt to compete, anyway? Make the high-street a separate entity, a true alternative to the mall, and maybe it’ll build up a clientage unique to itself.

© The Editor

THE STATE OF THE MARKETS

A story related to me yesterday proved something of a belated realisation of how choice – that buzzword so beloved of the Thatcherite mindset – can actually kill competition rather than encourage it, narrowing the field as opposed to widening it. Supermarket staff collected the day’s newspapers into a bundle, ready for return to the distributor, and commented upon the fact that not a single copy had been sold all day. Now, one could view this as yet another sign of how Fleet Street’s physical produce is increasingly redundant in the face of online news-surfing, especially when a rapidly dominant generation have grown-up without the daily paper as part of the household furniture; or one could view it as a telling comment on the paucity of good, authoritative and expert journalism in an industry that has pensioned off its veteran scribes in favour of zero-hour interns who source their scoops from websites; or one could even suggest it was simply a quiet news day, wherein tiresome scaremongering over Brexit or freak weather conditions or the Duchess of Cambridge’s new dress just weren’t intriguing enough headlines to warrant a purchase.

However, perhaps context played its part as well. The supermarket as an emporium of everything can subconsciously place every item on the same uninspiring level, so that a newspaper is no more essential or important than a can of alcohol-free lager or a dishcloth or a Pot Noodle – all mass-produced packaged products on display in an indistinguishable parade of mediocrity. The illusion given – and one that was often regularly noted by those raised in Eastern Bloc Communist countries of old when they first shopped in the West – is a dazzling selection of choice that is done with the customer in mind. Every item is available in half-a-dozen different brands, for one thing. But it only takes a few cursory trips up and down the aisles for one’s senses to be battered into choice overload, so that each brand actually blurs into the next and the overall effect is counterproductive for the manufacturers.

The first supermarkets I remember were the old-school sort – Hillards, Fine Fair, Safeway – small, proto-convenience stores that essentially specialised in tinned food. If you wanted a newspaper, magazine or comic, you had to go to the newsagents; if you wanted to read something more substantial, you had to go to a bookshop; if you wanted something to listen to, you had to go to a record shop; if you wanted something to wear, you had to go to a department store; if you wanted booze, you had to go to the off-license; and if you wanted a pint of milk, you had to wait till the milkman deposited one on your doorstep in the morning.

By the 1970s, television advertising and the supermarket were established enough fixtures for a generation to have risen with precious little knowledge that their pre-eminence within the culture of the country was a relatively new development. A clear sign that the supermarket was going from strength-to-strength came when the high-street was regarded as an unfit environment for containing the ambition of newcomers to the brand, such as Asda, a company originating in Leeds. In the early 70s, Asda began to open a string of huge superstores or ‘hypermarkets’ away from the cramped clutter of the high-street and geographically isolated from the competition. Just as the high-street supermarkets had undercut the corner-shop, the new superstores undercut the high-street supermarkets by offering an even greater range of goods at even cheaper prices. The ‘hyper’ prefix to these awesome retail monoliths came from the fact that they combined the traditional food-based stock of the supermarket with the wider selection of a department store, creating venues that housed all of the average shopper’s needs – needs that had always necessitated a trip to numerous different shops in the past – within the confines of one huge multi-purpose establishment. They were effectively a king-size corner-shop.

Whereas shopping had once been a daily tour of the high-street for the housewife, the social changes that had taken place within British society in the 60s and 70s had spawned the need for a new kind of shopping that catered for these changes. The superstores being erected on out-of-town land some distance from the high-street meant many were only accessible by car, and as most cars were very much boy’s toys at the time, hubby’s participation was required. Thus was born the weekly family shop. A full week’s worth of shopping couldn’t be carted home on the bus in a couple of carrier bags as the daily shop had, so a car was necessary to transport the amount of goods back to where they could be consumed.

It took a while for the arrival of the British hypermarket to seriously damage the high-street; even in the 70s, car ownership was still relatively small, and those lower down the social scale remained dependent on a shopping trip that could be undertaken on foot or by public transport. For the time being, high-street supermarket chains retained their place at the heart of the community, the place they had stolen from the corner-shop. The deregulation that went hand-in-hand with privatisation in the second and third Thatcher Governments, however, had a beneficial effect on the high-street supermarkets in that it enabled them to remake and remodel themselves as small-scale versions of the hypermarkets, expanding the range of choice available so that even pedestrians or users of public transport could theoretically purchase the same variety of goods as the motorist.

What this sea-change in choice did for specialist shops that previously had a monopoly on goods that had been unavailable in accessible-on-foot supermarkets was nothing short of disastrous. There is one remaining newsagent in my neighbourhood, whereas I can list perhaps half-a-dozen supermarkets off the top of my head – everything from Proles paradise Aldi to the Snob’s retail Nirvana, Waitrose. And I cannot remember when I last saw a pint of milk on a doorstep.

By contrast with the friendly, chatty ambience of the sole surviving newsagents I use, the supermarkets I know have an impersonal, disorientating effect on me; standing in line for the check-out whilst a pensioner dithers over her lottery tickets can end up being an existential exercise in pondering the futility of life, the universe and everything; and while I appreciate that could just be me, I surely can’t be alone? The supermarkets are now so huge and so powerful that they can not only threaten dairy farmers with bankruptcy by demanding their produce be sold at such a low price that profit is minimal; they also contribute to the overall homogenisation of the physical shopping experience and minimise the opportunity to enjoy the personal touch that the specialist shop can still give the customer if they’re allowed to keep trading. But I realise the masses like the convenience; and if it’s convenient for them, it’s convenient for everyone. That’s choice.

© The Editor