Have you
ever wondered whilst you are wandering round the local town/city centre why it
is all so similar? Is the local character diminishing? I’ll tell you what I
think is to blame: the rise of supermarkets.
Once upon a
time there were family businesses: butchers, bakers, family owned travel agents,
wool/knitting shops, toy shops, sweet shops and so on. However more and more of
these small family concerns are disappearing. Adam Smith, the “godfather” of
free market economic thought believed that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers
(no, it wasn’t Napoleon that first said it). He wrote his pro capitalist pap
supporting individual greed as being good for the nation in 1776. I wonder if
he would recognise the United Kingdom now, as the result of individual greed
has been the impoverishment of 90% of the population and the disappearance of
individual traders.
Supermarkets
want to own everything. They may have started out as organizations that bought
food in bulk to offer cheap prices but they weren’t content to stop there. Now
they have opticians, travel agents, hairdressers, they even sell cars and
insurance, mobile phones, you name it, they have it. Is this good for the
economy? No it is not. Pretty soon our choices will be between one supermarket
or another. They always choose a site out of town so that they can get you to
buy petrol from them and the duplicitous tossers agree amongst themselves not
to compete by setting up in different areas, therefore restricting choice.
When I go
to my town centre in Corby, at least a third of the shop units are empty. The
others are all national chains: Jane Norman, W.H. Smith, McDonalds, Burger
King, Wilko and so on plus a lot of discount and pound shops. The nearest thing
to a supermarket is the COOP extra, not the cheapest place to shop. If I go to
Kettering, Wellingborough or Northampton they largely have the same choice of
shops, although as Towns that have been established longer than our new town
they still have some vestige of a traditional town, but they are rapidly losing
that as the big boys buy everything up. Everywhere is becoming homogenous,
there is little of the local character of places left.
We have a
Tory government at the moment and they are pushing the same policies that they
always do: restricting spending on the public sector, promoting big business
interests and giving no help to anyone. Likewise the banks are following suit
and are not lending money to prospective small business owners and they are
squeezing everything out of existing small businesses. In my opinion both the
banks and the government work to protect the big supermarkets because they have
a lot of money and economic power.
Supermarkets
are evil. They force down our farmers prices, they tell them what to grow, they
exploit the third world and they limit choice. On top of all that they have
caused the death of small businesses and destroyed the character of our town
and city centers.
I wish that
there was something we could do about it. The only thing we can do is boycott
them, but most of the sheeple will never go for that.
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