Shop and save / Beneath the western Sun

[cybermule]

The Dark Mountain Manifesto set to the words and music of Thee Silver Mt Zion. Probably.



Part 1 - Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation.



This is the picture of the new temporary Tesco in Yate. It will fill the gap between the old, end-block-on-a-precinct Tesco (which I never really went to because Morrisons was better and closer) and some new super Megacity-T hypermarket on stilts which will scan our retinas and assimilate us into the heaving database of Clubcard details before we are allowed to buy small, brown Soviet style cubes of rations. I imagine them as somewhat larger than Oxo cubes, and less tasty. As a two decade old veggie, the flavour will probably be the least of my issues.

I don't have any particular beef (arf arf) with Tesco per se. Yes, I'm aware that their marketing strategy is down the poorly ethical end of the spectrum, along with Asda, but I'm going to make a possibly controversial claim here that all fucking supermarkets are a bunch of cunts who's sole aim is to extract as much money as possible from shafting producers and sticking it to consumers who have to try and buy reasonably priced, nutritionally balanced food that pleases their kids, satisfies their aspirations and fits into the narrow slice of life left over from desperately trundling round the treadmill of applying those two things to every other aspect of their poor fraught existences.

Yes, once more, in its own paragraph for emphasis. All fucking supermarkets are a bunch of cunts, however they spin their cuntishness to attract a particular brand of victimcustomer.

Yes, I would buy from Waitrose if I were fucking loaded with cash. It's nicer. Yes, I would probably prefer Sainsburys if there were one near enough to walk to (that's more important for me). Yes, if I have spare cash and can make a difference to actual real poor people, I will (**). I go with Morrisons, but I cheerfully shop at the Tesco Express if I need to, because hey, it offers a good range of reasonably priced food out of normal shopping hours, and like everyone else, I experience #organisationalfail from time to time.

I'm not a joiner, but I am for ever looking for a cause. For a while I hearted the Permaculture people because they were into growing sustainable food, creating community gardens, and teaching kids about growing healthy food. All causes dear to my heart. They did piss me off a little with their insistence on the concept of Bristol being a happy little conurbation of St Werbs, Montpelier and Easton. I believe strongly in a Greater Bristol. But hey, like I said, not a joiner and perfectly capable of organising my own shit anyway. Then they had a complete and total spazz-out about the Tesco in Stokes Croft. It would kill the beautiful little artisan bakeries, independent llamawool hat retailers, and vibrant community of bent fucking spoon repairers that Gloucester Road is known and loved for. And yeah, if you like that sort of thing, Gloucester Road is very lovely, but here I have to state, in it's own paragraph, and emboldened for emphasis:

Poor people have the right to accessible, cheap and varied food too, you stuck up, middle-class, up-your-own-arse tossers!

Yes, there are poor people out there in the liberal republic of inner Bristol. Poor people want to buy decent foodz shockz! And not have to trail up and down a whole street buying handcrafted baked beans that look like pixies and have little knitted hats to save the ozone layer from their own generated farts. And they might want to shop out of normal 9-5 hours. Some poor people even have jobs or no cars!

Hmph. I feel that this might well have been documented elsewhere in my blog, anyhow. It did severely turn me off the Permies, even to the extent of wanting to apply for the job of NO-TO-Tesco web manager, writing wanketywankwankwank all over the website, changing the passwords and running away. But not quite as I just have better things to do with my life. So the point was, Tesco is not always bad, m'kay.

As it happens, I think Tesco will be bad for Yate, and I'm surprised and aghast at how Yate just rolled over and took it from them, unopposed (*) The nice thing about Yate (in my mind, anyway) is that I can buy pretty much everything I want from a compact pedestrianised central precinct, and is the closest I've ever come to a pleasant shopping experience. And I'm aware that I'm in a small minority who want to walk into town, and that nobody really cares about the rest of my companions in that particular slice of society, but as well as standing up for them, I am actually standing up for the rest of the gas-guzzling fuckers who are going to be completely and utterly screwed when petrol is 500 billion quid per ml and their legs have atrophied or been removed to repay the HP payments on their monster trucks.

A hypermarket style Tesco will kill off even more of the town centre. I mean, the bits that haven't been fucked over by the recession, and I probably don't mean the mobile phone shops who will still be there in pernicious crappy little clusters to service the ants when the whole precinct turns into Ground Zero. Everyone will just roll up in their people-carriers, chuck 8 million carrier bags of miscellaneous ill-chosen and over-marketed lifestyle accoutrements into the boot and drive off. I'll no longer be able to buy nose-studs and cheap fruit and veg from the market stalls, and my choice of pant purveyors will be reduced from several to just one brand of bum-coverer. Hey, unless I choose to use my car to drive the half mile or so to the shops, I'll probably only be able to gaze in longingly with the few other scraps of marginalised carless plebs, cordoned off by the ever-circling fence of traffic endlessly pounding round the dual-carriagewayed stretch of impenetrable tarmac that will probably be christened "Tesco Way" by some gurning mayor with a bottle of organic Fairtrade cava. From South Africa, just to show we're all friends now and wonderfully liberal with it.

Thank fuck the hardware store will be on my side of the fence, along with the happy clappy church to supply me with an endless stream of willing-ish martyrs to supply the gaping sacrificial maw of the Tesco monolith.


* - actually, there were two oppositions. One said it might be ugly (Tesco have now been "forced" to plant trees. Lots of them. Thumbs up!) and one from my household complaining about the utter clusterfuck that it will make of the the traffic - to get to town from about a third of Yate, you have to cross a really crappy road with no organised crossing. But hey, it's the poorest third of town and every drives, so who cares?
** - I'm a bitch. I don't care that Tesco sell turtles or some other shit in China. Sorry. If you eat dead things, get over yourself. Eat humans for sustainability. Cod's endangered too.

Comments

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

Poor people have the right to accessible, cheap and varied food too, you stuck up, middle-class, up-your-own-arse tossers!

Thank you from the bottom of my black heart! I used to live in that area and shopping without a car was a freakin' nightmare. Had to go all the way to Eastville.

(here's my own contribution (http://badnewswade.livejournal.com/107155.html))

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

No problem. I would even call it that particular chunk of written catharis a personal pleasure. You can say fuck, by the way. I do. Frequently. I've been piss poor. I'm not now, and that's awesome for me. But if it ever causes me to bleat on about my bleeding little liberal heart or forget that there are people who aren't, feel free to be first in the line to pass me the sharp instrument to finish reaming out my soul.

Seriously, though, that sort of hippy twaddle thinking pisses me off to the depths of my little heart at the moment.

So busy judging me for not buying fucking organic bogroll, when our society is ripping itself up and flushing itself down the toilet. People like that are happy to gas on about doing things for the good of the mentally ill or the terminally multi-generationally unemployed, when really it's just treating *them* like toilet paper. Even the supposedly hard-working ideal people are just being crapped on and flushed away now.

Bleating on about supporting the nepalese hankie weavers and wearing sustainable handmade shoes, when the bottom tier of our society is sinking without a trace into the mud. Organising their little bloody protest websites when huge chunks of ppl living on piss poor sink estates - or even supposedly well-off rural towns - can't even access a library without a car, let alone afford a bloody Iphone or netbook to twitter on endlessly about various fluffy little liberal ethical consumerism choices.

Organic food is a non-sustainable waste of time unless someone takes the gritty but fucking real decision to eliminate large chunks of the world's population. Maybe the hippies could start by not having flocks of ludicrously name offspring? I have just got to the stage now where although I think it is obviously admirable to buy fairtrade, the economy is so fucking screwed that we are better off just husbanding our finances the thriftiest way possible, learning not to rely on having certain luxuries that we take for granted (like cars - cycling city, my arse) and equipping ourselves for whatever complete shitstormclusterfuck is heading our way.

I would say that the good news is there is no fucking good news, but the probably pathetically naive and idealistic little optimist in me actually believes that the end of civilisation doesn't mean the end of the world. But we are just going to have to make our own good news when it comes, and it won't be by buying organic artisan croissants from a charming little shop down the road.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Oh, and sorry you got the unintentional post-script to the blog there, mate. Didn't realise how long it was until I hit submit and saw it on the screen 8-)

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

That was fucking brilliant. More!

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Cheers m'dear *blushes and bows*

Think that particular tsunami of bile has broken, but at least one more on the horizon, once I've grokked the implications to my comfort zones.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I've been piss poor. I'm not now, and that's awesome for me. But if it ever causes me to bleat on about my bleeding little liberal heart or forget that there are people who aren't, feel free to be first in the line to pass me the sharp instrument to finish reaming out my soul.

Goes double for me.

I do persist with organic/fair trade, mainly because it usually tastes better. I get a veg box delivered from the farm as a way of taking revenue away from the supermarkets & giving it to the producer. And it tastes a lot better. I'm 100% aware that I can only do this because I'm no longer piss poor. I'd grow my own, but I'm lazy.

I also shop in Aldi. I'm a demographer's worst nightmare.

I've never taken having a car for granted, because I've spent most of my adult life without one, and I try to use the one I have as little as possible. However, public transport out our way is so bad if you want to go anywhere except the city centre or Kingswood (which incidentally has a good town centre where you can buy just about everything even though it's grim & concrete), you have to drive. I feel like an arse driving to the gym but outside of 9-5, Monday-Friday, I could wait half an hour for the bus. Each way. Yesterday's FirstBus fail meant I almost didn't get to the health centre in time to pick up my prescription.

Of course, making everything accessible only by car is another way of trapping people in a consumerist catch-22 of having to pay for the car in order to do *anything* and never having money for anything else because you're paying for the car. People at work keep asking why I don't have my own car and try to convince me how much more *convenient* my life would be if I did. A) I don't care about convenient. B) I live in the city for a reason C) Speaking of dirt-poor, that's where I'd be if I had to maintain a car.

gritty but fucking real decision to eliminate large chunks of the world's population.

I'm doing my bit. Overopulation is the elephant in the room. I *heart* David Attenborough because he's vocal about it.

[0ct0pus.livejournal.com]

This post reads like Charlie Brooker paraphrasing JG Ballard. I approve!

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I was thinking JH-R on a good day, but then telling those two apart would always be a tough call.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Mmm. High praise indeed.

Telling which two apart? There are too many people now.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

And best of all, it all came from my own fluffy ickle brain ;P

Brooker, yes. Ballard I've not really read, bar Crash which was more awesome than the film had led me to believe might be the case. You forgot the inspirational dictionary of Malcom Tucker. I need to score me some of that Thick of It shit.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I have to say that were I to agree with your post any more, it would be somewhat creepy.

It's... On one hand, before the Kwik-e-Tesco opened next to the HSS shop on the Causeway, you could buy Happy Shopper sliced loaves, Happy Shopper coffee, nasty bogroll, cheap Stella, cheap Blackthorn or cheap Natch. It was like being in the Eighties before the invention of stonewash denim.

Now one can buy Hoegaarden and pain-au-chocolate before joining the queue for the lottery. It's certainly a close facsimile of civilization.

Of course I should probably stop being a middle-class ponce and drink shit lager in some self-hating attempt at proletarian solidarity, but, y'know, fuck that.

On the other hand, the stuff that comes from Tesco certainly looks like food, but it's uniform and graded and almost entirely tasteless and nutrition-free. And I didn't realise that until I went and grew my own grub as an experiment.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Growing your own grub is awesome - one thing I am (was?) very into with the whole Bristol Permaculture Group thing was the work they were doing with community gardens and in schools to help people grow their own food when they didn't have space to do it at home. It's awesome, and I'd probably like to go into that area of work one day.

Of course I should probably stop being a middle-class ponce and drink shit lager in some self-hating attempt at proletarian solidarity, but, y'know, fuck that.

Nah - if you choose to sacrifice x cans of cheap lager for one bottle of Hoegaarden, then that's your choice and just the sort of financial husbandry I was on about in another comment. I like nice-ish gin, so I eat an awful lot of vegetable stew and pasta with canned tomatoes. I don't know many people who are rich enough to not have to make those decisions on some level, and nice things are cheering to the soul.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

We're in the odd position of being in a town (Caldicot) that's no Montpelier or Clifton, yet our old medium Somerfield + small Co-op combo turned into a Waitrose and Co-op combo after those two merged. So a town that doesn't even run to a Lidl now has a Waitrose.

Supposedly Waitrose wanted the plum target of Chepstow (which isn't as posh as you'd think, but it's near the Wye valley pony set), but couldn't get the site and so went for the next best opportunity.

We love it. It's not really expensive, bean per bean, it's just that they sell more of the expensive good stuff and they don't sell the cheap grotties at all. A tin of Heinz though, it's the same price. Mostly though, we just buy the Red Label Diet 8-)

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Waitrose are nice, I grant. They seem less expensive now that other supermarkets are jacking up their prices for miscellaneous sundry reasons. I can see that the bottom end of the Wye valley would be a good place to be for Waitrose, as nobody that shops there minds driving.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

Hey, unless I choose to use my car to drive the half mile or so to the shops, I'll probably only be able to gaze in longingly with the few other scraps of marginalised carless plebs, cordoned off by the ever-circling fence of traffic endlessly pounding round the dual-carriagewayed stretch of impenetrable tarmac

You are describing a good portion of suburban USA. I really hate the endless strip malls with huge parking lots and pray that this blight never takes over the UK.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

It can't, it wouldn't fit.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

It might if the Tories sell off all the forests...
;P

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Oh dear sweet mother of all that is good, don't get me started on the forests. I grew up in the lushly wooded Stroud valleys, hirez hails from a similar area, we could mutate into some horrible two-headed vitriolic behemoth and smite the world.

Privatising forests. Nothing that can't be solved with enough people, bolt-cutters and a can of petrol. I rest my case until another blog post.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Hey - the Tories are getting rid of multi-culturalism in the UK. Maybe they're making us into a multi-dimensional hypercube instead? That I could live with. But probably only if it meant I had a large expanse of dimension to myself, rather than trying to cram strip malls into it instead.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

We have Cribbs Causeway, our own personal circle of car-bound hell, to give us a taster. Have you ever tried to negotiate that pit of Satan on foot? You take your life into your hands.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I have. For a while there I'd actually got quite good at it. It has better bus service than an awful lot of more important things in Bristol. (Frenchay Hospital I'm thinking about you here!)

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

We used to have a stupidly disproportionate number of buses that went to Frenchay. Then they got axed to fund the new service that links up all the council offices.

Mostly in Cribbs Causweway I get stuck at PC World. There seems to be no pedestrian way out of there.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

And they might want to shop out of normal 9-5 hours

I know I bring a Canadian perspective to this, but that's a large-ish issue for me. UK society is still largely built on the assumption that there's someone in every household who is not employed and runs all the little household errands during the day.

The alternatives are Big Supermarkets, and spending yer whole fricking weekend doing annoying but necessary shit.

I'm not advocating 24-hour everything, but stuff open till at least 7 or 8 pm, or open early in the morning, would be helpful.

For instance, last night's transport fail wouldn't have been an issue if pharmacies were open late like they are back home (where it's generally accepted that people, like, work, and medication and toiletries are necessities).

[mallt.livejournal.com]

As a Brit transplanted to Canada... I'd have to be a helluva lot more organized on weekends otherwise We'd starve... we often pop out to the Co-op in the evening to buy dinner.

If all I did was within Calgary I probably wouldn't need a car, our transit system (for that we complain about it) is pretty good... I have friends who manage... but as soon as you want to do anything outside the city you're hooped... it's either the Greyhound or flying & if the Greyhound doesn't stop there...

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

I know - I would have thought between-city transport would have been a lot better in the US and Canada than it actually seems to have been the coupla times I've been there. I could manage without a car where I live, just about, but couldn't do all of my gardening work. SOme of that's too far away and there are no transport links timed for a working day. Shame really - I'd love to bag up my tools and take a bus to work.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

I know - we're sold the sort of aspirational lifestyle that requires two workers to fund it, then tripped up by the basic fact that facilities don't support it. Sometimes in my darker and more paranoid moments, I suspect "they" do it on purpose so we're all in a constant fuddle of stress and can't see what "they" are up to. Although, saying that, there is a late night pharmacy in Yate. I'm starting to think I'm actually better off out here in the exurbs than you are in the suburbs.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

The system also doesn't take into account single people. Perhaps we're supposed to have a mommy who lives next door & does all our Stuff for us. Or, in your paranoid paradigm, it's to make single people feel like they're missing out and need to pair up and produce more little consumers. (Yeah, I think that way too).

I'm starting to think I'm actually better off out here in the exurbs than you are in the suburbs.

Technically, I live in the inner city. A particularly badly served by amenities part of the city, which is why our house was so cheap (we were both on low incomes & got priced out of the rental market at the time).

The problem is that I work in fucking Downend. Which I refer to as Stepford. It's miles from anywhere the the transport is awful. When I started working there the bus service from here was really reliable; otherwise I wouldn't have taken the job. But First want to get rid of the 7 route and are thus trying to show that there is no need for it by making it so flaky that everyone gives up.

I always worked in the city centre before, which worked from both the "doing shit in your lunch hour" and public transport points of view, and when I get myself another job there I will be in a position to stop ranting about how shit outer Bristol is.

[r-is-for-rachel.livejournal.com]

great rant. I wonder whether the hippies would have gotten so uptight and put up a big fuss if it had been a Co-op instead of Tescos wanting to open there?

[r-is-for-rachel.livejournal.com]

however, this isn't putting Tesco in much of a good light

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1355525/Woman-took-thrown-Tesco-food-handcuffed-arrested.html

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

God, they're a bunch of twats. I remember when all the local supermarkets started pouring disinfectant on their skips so the travellers wouldn't take the thrown out food. Pathetic bastards.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Thanks. And probably not. I think co-op is cool with the cool crowd.

[toxicpixie.livejournal.com]

I was highly amused that Asda-Walmart tried to get Tescos done by the Monopolies people for, well, Walmart'ing better than Walmart :D

Nathan, the Toxic Pixie

[belladonna-9.livejournal.com]

I dont have a car so I shop on line... I alternate between Waitrose and Sainsburys.... they run at about the same price like for like......