Why I Hate Supermarkets

Lots of people dislike supermarkets, with very legitimate reasons involving local traders, big piles of money, and poor produce. Not me, though. I just hate the whole supermarket experience. Almost everything about them could have been designed to irritate me. In Netto, for example, you have to pick up a basket before you go through the mono-directional turnstyle, or else you are left stood between the dog food and the detergent feeling slightly like the player at the end of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game who neglected to pick up the toothbrush in the very first room and consequently cannot complete the gmae. Most supermarkets place the fresh produce near the entrance to give a nicer feeling, but Netto, for reasons known only to themselves, choose to stock bleach and plastic garden furniture here. You are then doomed to wander around the aisles for much longer than you thought you would have to, because they have arbitrarily rearranged everything. This, I have been reliably informed, is to force you to spend longer wandering the aisles and therefore more likely to spot something else to buy you didn’t know you wanted (frequently because you didn’t). When you actually find the product you are looking for – say, butter – you are faced with a wall of hundreds of near-identical brands of essentially the same product. (In the case of washing powders, they are frequently literally the same product, with several different brandings.) You will find several brands of butter, several more of margarine, and more still of low-fat fake butter. (In fact, they are still mostly made of fat, but it’s all relative.) These will range from the gramattically apalling but nonetheless catchy Utterly Butterly, to the overly verbose I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and that’s not including the ‘own-brands’. All supermarkets now have their own form of these products, and the irony of mass-producing fake I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter has not escaped me. Genuine names of supermarket brand butter substitutes include You’d Butter Believe It, and the almost libelous Better By Far. In fact, the only thing I find hard to believe about any of these products is that they are on the shelves at all, and not in a courtroom marked ‘Exhibit B’.

Asda, of course, were actually sued by McVitie’s over the chocolate and wafer Puffin Bars, which McVitie’s quite rightly pointed out were the approximate confectionary equivalent of a fake Rolex. This means that legally there is now a precedent against the supermarkets, and any further cases ought to me more or less open and shut. What I fail to understand, though, is that after that case, not only did supermarkets continue to churn out products which look identical to other, superior products from well known brands (such as Doctor Pop, whose logo is strikingly similar to that of another popular soft drink, namely, perhaps suprisingly, Cherry Coke), but the manufacturers of said products did not sue them. I would. Personally, if I manufactured a yoghurt with a folding corner full of fruity sweetness, and a supermarket made a cheaper version which looked much the same, I would be upset. I wouldn’t like the idea that I had gone to the effort of establishing my brand and they were parasitically stealing what ought to be my profits. I particularly wouldn’t like them to then place large billboards in their supermarket with a picture of our respective products, and adorn theirs with a large tick and the phrase “The Obvious Choice”. This is a trick I have seen Morison’s use before now.

In theory, of course, having a wider selection of products is a good thing, but it often makes me feel like statistically there is now almost no chance that I will select the best one available, and I don’t like that. I also don’t like the brightly-coloured artificial geniality of the whole experience. For example, there uis a notice above the exit in the Morison’s in Leeds city centre bearing the legend “Polite Notice: Please do not take your shopping out of the supermarket without first remembering to pay for it”.

And then the pain starts. You have to somehow get your new belongings home. If you own a car, this is not too traumatic an experience, but otherwise, you will probably lose most of the blood vessels in your hands to the bunched up plastic handles, regardless of how short a walk it is.