retailers out of business.
Even Jamie Oliver, the celebrity face of Sainsbury’s, seems to prefer shopping in any place other than a supermarket. Mr Oliver has said that working with Sainsbury’s has given him the opportunity to ‘influence the food choices of millions of people’. But opening up his personal food shopping address book for Observer Food Monthly, he enthusiastically reeled off a list of his favourite independent fishmongers, butchers, specialist food shops, farmgate suppliers and markets.
Supermarket shopping may not be top of many people’s favourite occupations, but it seems to be the way of the world. Most people don’t see any feasible alternative and the more we shop in supermarkets, the more we forget that such an alternative still might or ever could exist. And when we rely on one supermarket chain for almost all the food we buy, we can easily be manipulated to accept what they want to give us. As a consequence, supermarkets’ power to shape our shopping and eating habits is phenomenal, and they know it. The trick is to get us to think that they are responding to our needs and desires when actually we are responding to theirs. ‘Giving customers 0what they want’ is supermarket-speak for ‘selling what we want to sell’. Supermarkets use a number of strategies to pull off this brainwashing.
The number one supermarket ruse is, having created a problem, to present themselves as the solution to it. In countries with a healthy food culture where the population is generally thinner and healthier, people see food shopping as an indispensable, worthwhile and not necessarily disagreeable part of the process of feeding yourself well. In countries where there are still independent food shops and markets, shopping can still be a pleasurable, stimulating, diverse experience which involves interesting, even friendly interaction with other human beings. Food shopping in UK supermarkets, on the other hand, has become a dreary treadmill where increasingly overweight yet undernourished consumers are invited to stock up with food in the same anonymous, automatic way they fill up their tanks with petrol. It is no coincidence that supermarket shoppers regularly complain about spending large sums of money in their store yet being unable to think of anything to cook that night. Just thinking about supermarket shopping is enough to make most of us feel tired and uninspired. Supermarket shopping trips, for many people, are an exercise in extreme alienation. Nor is it just chance that we seem to be getting fatter yet getting less and less pleasure from feeding ourselves. Supermarket shopping makes us into robots, stopping off at pre-programmed points as we always do. Picking the same old stuff. Buying what supermarkets want us to buy. Terence Blacker, writing in the Independent, described the experience as follows:
Most people, in order to stay sane, close down their aesthetic sense and human curiosity while being fed through the production line of supermarket shopping. They ignore the other dead-eyed zombies shuffling their way down the aisles as if being led by the trolleys in front of them … moving in a tranquillised daze to the checkout queue. Here, confronted by an exhausted, hollow-eyed employee behind the till, a brief moment of human contact is experienced but anything more than a hurried ‘Hi’ or ‘Busy today?’ will mark you out as an eccentric timewaster.
Columnist Mimi Spencer summed up the supermarket shopping experience perfectly when she said that it had all the allure of going to the chiropodist:
I just got back from Tesco. Hellish. Personally, I’d rather eat my own liver than have to trolley off to the supermarket … I try to enter a state of suspended animation when I visit my local superstore, a bit like I did when I gave birth. My eyes glaze over. My shoulders slump over the wayward trolley, as it fills up with cos lettuces and cartons of soup – which, I know, I will ritualistically throw in the bin ten days later when the lettuce has turned into soup and the soup has turned into something like the stuff that shot from that girl’s mouth in The Exorcist.
Having made the whole experience of food shopping dehumanising, functional and boring, supermarkets portray themselves as white knights ‘lightening the load’, riding to the rescue of stressed working women to relieve them of the enormously oppressive burden of food shopping. They promise short checkout queues, a parking space and ways to help you whizz round getting this unpleasant business over and done with as fast as possible. Supermarket language reinforces the idea of supermarkets as the housewife’s helper and harassed working woman’s guardian angel over and over again in their language. ‘Every little helps.’ Every meal is a potential problem for which supermarkets have a ‘meal solution’. Supermarkets have fostered the stereotype of the ‘time-poor, cash-rich’ shopper because this gives them another business opportunity to sell lucrative value-added processed food to us. Supermarkets have made not having the time to either shop or cook – and hence living on a diet of processed food – into a sign of social status to which everyone aspires, whether or not they have the means.
Despite these ‘solutions’, having deprogrammed us as creative shoppers and convinced us that food shopping is necessarily a drag by making it a drag, supermarkets face the potential problem of having to motivate a passive, apathetic customer base. The knack then is to keep us just interested enough to take up their strategically placed special offers and lucrative value-added lines, but not so clued up on food that we realise that the store is devoid of real quality choices and so start looking elsewhere. They want to turn us into trusting customers who can be propelled round the store, following their secret retail map, picking up our masters’ ball and dropping it obediently at the checkout. In the overwhelmingly male realm of supermarketing, customers (women) are seen as rather dim subjects who can be programmed, through a series of gimmicks, to want almost anything, seeing a fake diversity and choice in every category shelf.
Safeway, for example, has helpfully colour-coded its bagged salads into ‘orange’ (sweet tasting), ‘green’ (mild) and ‘purple’ (more distinct flavour). Several chains grade their cheese numerically according to strength. Sainsbury’s Continental cheeses now come colour-coded: soft cheese is blue, hard is red, goat’s is green and blue cheese is aqua. These kindergarten classification schemes make no attempt to educate or really inform consumers about the tastes or properties of food. If supermarkets did genuinely educate consumers, we would soon see the dreary homogeneity of what’s on offer. Instead such schemes give chains the opportunity to sell very similar lines in multiple forms, so increasing the likelihood of a sale.
When apathy with a food category or product mounts, supermarkets get together with manufacturers to dream up new ways of selling the same thing to us. In 2003, for example, Safeway joined forces with Unilever and Birds Eye Walls to try out new ways of marketing frozen foods, an ailing part of the supermarket repertoire. ‘The aim of the trial,’ explained Safeway’s frozen category buyer, ‘is to create a warmer shopping environment with clearer sub-category segmentation in order to make shopping the category easier for our customers.’ He added that one of the main barriers to buying frozen was customers’ preference for fresh. ‘We have tackled this through food images displayed behind light boxes to convey strong food values along with the use of our new frozen strapline “Frozen For Freshness”,’ he said. A cynical translation might read: ‘Frozen sales are dropping because people prefer fresh so we’ll make the frozen stuff look more appealing by selling it beside attractively lit pictures of mouthwatering fresh food and the strapline will make it sound as though the frozen is as good, or even better than fresh.’
Deskilling shoppers by undermining our confidence is another supermarket ploy to make us more easily manipulated. Supermarket press offices regularly spew out carefully designed ‘Did you know that the customer doesn’t know?’ or ‘stupid shopper’ type of research that characterises the typical shopper as ignorant and desperately in need of the tutoring that only supermarkets can supply. (That supermarkets might be main contributors to this state of ignorance is never mentioned – they want to be seen as benevolent educators.) In 2003, for example, Tesco’s press relations office phoned food journalists asking them if they knew that many people use the wrong methods of cooking for joints of meat. Its research showed that only 17 per cent of consumers aged between 21
