Imagining a world without supermarkets
In fact once you’ve passed the meat-vegetable aisle part of the store, there’s not much other food you really need except maybe milk and bread.
Ishop at supermarkets. I visit one every day on my way to my little cafe. Each morning I pick up the milk, cream, bananas and other stuff I need for my shop.
Most often I’m riding my special cargo bicycle, which can carry a small kitchen sink, albeit slowly, so half a dozen 2 litre bottles of milk and bread is a manageable load. However, sometimes the weather is so bad I have to drive – like everyone else – and park in the paved expanse that defines a supermarket car park.
A supermarket is a one-stop shop, where you can buy all the things you need at the one place, apples to zips, probably. Beetroot to yoghurt, certainly.
You don’t need to write a shopping list when you shop at a supermarket, you can just walk up and down the aisles and fill the trolley with things that clever marketing campaigns convince you that you need.
These days you can even refuel with an espresso and cake once you’ve checked out.
With their size and appetite for stocking just about everything a consumer needs, supermarkets are the pinnacle of our food chain. And being chains or franchises controlled by large publicly listed companies, these big boys hold all the cards when negotiating with suppliers. They have serious commercial grunt and, accordingly, political clout.
Maybe that’s why these places and their workers were considered ‘‘essential’’ during the lockdown when our local butchers, bakers and candlestick makers were hung out to dry.
But when you think about it, more than half the stuff a supermarket sells is not essential. In fact once you’ve passed the meat-vegetable aisle part of the store, there’s not much other food you really need except maybe milk and bread – and peanut butter, my favourite. Anything they sell that’s not food you can buy at the pharmacy or hardware store, or it’s not worth buying.
For example, soft drinks in various guises take up a whole aisle of your average supermarket. That’s maybe 10 per cent of the floorspace. Sugar-filled breakfast cereals and shampoo-conditioner-moisturisers are the same.
Then there’s the large alcohol section. These are all nice to haves, but not essential.
Anyhow, once you’ve done your weekly shop you need to carry it home. Cue the motor vehicle.
The bigger the supermarket, the more customers, and the bigger the car park. I’d be willing to wager a decent sum there is an algorithm, known only to supermarket designers, that tells you how big the car park has to be according to the eftpos turnover.
Over time supermarkets have become bigger as they’ve consumed the smaller retailers and taken over their traditional inventory. Accordingly, supermarket car parks have become so big that they have their own petrol bowsers, in case someone runs out of petrol while they’re cruising around looking for that parking spot closest to the front door.
And what would happen if we didn’t have cars, or we ran out of petrol?
Then we wouldn’t need supermarket car parks. And it follows that supermarkets wouldn’t exist.
Instead, you’d have a couple of hectares of city or suburban land you could use for a park, housing, or a collection of small shops selling truly essential items – butchers, bakers, green grocers, all with produce sold fresh or processed on the premises, not from where logistics and transport require chemical preservation and layer upon layer of packaging.
You’d pop into one of those little shops knowing you need their stuff because that’s what they specialised in, and maybe to have a chat with the owner, who you would see regularly.
There would be no duopolies in town either, but true competition – the shoppers’ paradise.
And if you really needed a coffee, you’d go to a proper cafe. You could walk to the shops,
ride, or catch a bus because you didn’t have to carry all that stuff you didn’t need. In fact, once upon a time that’s how it used to be, when our life didn’t revolve around cars.
But then they paved paradise, (and) put up a (supermarket) parking lot.
Steve Stannard is a Palmerston North business owner and former academic