Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman

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 and 35 had heard of common cuts of meat such as brisket, fore rib, chump and loin. Those aged between 36 and 50 did better – 68 per cent knew what they were talking about – but they were eclipsed by 51–70-year-olds, who knew not only which was which but how to cook them. These results are not surprising when you consider that most younger people’s shopping experience is confined to supermarkets, where meat shelves are lined with a narrow selection of mainly prime cuts, and meat counters are often staffed by people who lack the training or experience that the traditional butcher had to explain various meat cuts and their uses.

      Safeway carried out a similar exercise in July 2002. It surveyed 1,000 people across the UK to find out how much the nation knew about when foods are in season. A yawning knowledge deficit was revealed: 88 per cent of respondents did not know when certain British favourites were in season. Safeway concluded that ‘the vast majority demonstrated a serious lack of knowledge about British food seasonality’. There was no mention that our supermarkets’ policy of stocking the same lines 365 days of the year might have been a contributory factor. Predictably, Safeway’s research found that 81 per cent of respondents ‘look to supermarkets for more education about seasonality’. However, this survey did not nudge Safeway into rethinking its own, self-styled ‘uni-seasonal’ stocking policy by cancelling standing orders for out-of-season exotica such as Kenyan green beans, Thai baby corn and Peruvian asparagus and then filling its shelves with seasonal British produce. Instead it used the survey to promote sales of its premium The Best range. This, it was at pains to point out, featured not only seasonal fruits and vegetables but also ‘prepared products such as recipe dishes’. ‘Hero products’ in this range included chocolate chip cookies, butter pains au chocolat, prawn selection with Thai dip and ready meals such as potato gratin with roasted garlic and chilli caramelised pork hock whose seasonality was less than apparent.

      When supermarkets aren’t implying that shoppers are ignorant, they are keen to make them out as stubbornly conservative, almost stupidly inflexible. On a 2002 Radio 4 Food Programme about grapes, Tesco’s lead technical manager for fruit was at pains to point out that Tesco and its suppliers had a very clear idea of what its shoppers expected in a grape which meant that Tesco stocked no more than six to eight varieties in a year, selected from some twenty commercial varieties available out of a total of 8,000 varieties. Asked why Tesco insisted on selling such a small number of varieties of grapes, which had been picked green and hence had less flavour and sweetness, its expert acknowledged that in grape-growing countries people knew that the yellower the grape, the sweeter. ‘But if we put yellow grapes on our shelves, our consumers would think those grapes were over-mature and leave them behind,’ he explained. You could almost hear listeners up and down the land murmuring, ‘How do you know that? Did you ever ask us?’ Might Tesco’s choice of grape variety and colour not have more to do with its own need for bulk supply, ease of sourcing and extended shelf life?

      A highly experienced fruit wholesaler gave me examples of how supermarkets do not give consumers a qualitative choice but just what they want to stock. ‘A prime example is French Golden Delicious apples. Because UK supermarket policy is to sell green Goldens, they mainly source their supplies