I’d like my shopping with a Lidl less silly snobbery
You used to be able to tell a lot from a shopping bag, but it’s a little harder since the arrival of the ‘bag for life’. Is yours a stout plastic number from Tesco? or organic cotton hand-made by a Gaelicspeaking co-operative?
Class used to be about jobs, accents, fee-paying schools and the house you lived in. Now it appears to be about your lifestyle and your shopper.
Last year, uS company Whole Foods Market closed down its only Scottish branch, depriving the Glasgow suburb of Giffnock of quinoa crisps and a trot around the bread department, hoovering up the free samples.
But it seems that while everyone admired Whole Foods’ hand-raised sea bass, cheese with birth certificates and school reports, and caviar-infused detergent, customers paused just long enough for a platinum-filtered coffee before breezing off to do their big shop elsewhere.
Now some locals are up in arms because a Lidl is positioned to take over the site.
For a brace of Hyacinth Buckets, this is the thin end of the wedge. Let Lidl through the hallowed portals of Giffnock and who knows what tattooed, knotted-hankie, high street vulgarisms might follow – someone pronouncing ‘jamón’ with a hard ‘j’, perhaps?
This is hypocrisy at its most teeth-achingly hip, because the middle classes have been quietly enjoying Lidl’s discount aftershaves, dinky biscuits and enormous bags of sweets throughout the recession.
In an interview, Harry Potter star Robbie Coltrane enthused about its cold meats, while Mumsnet has attached an imprimatur of approval to the Toujours nappies.
Admittedly, the premium end is not entirely convincing. Lidl lobster may be cheap but it is also the size of an emaciated guinea pig. There’s a £10.99 champagne, which has been touted as all sorts of marvellousness but it helps if you expect your champagne to taste as if it costs £10.99.
Lidl is the Peter Murrell of food shops in the sense that, like the SNP’s shy chief executive, it sparks a lot of conversations behind closed doors.
In elite Nationalist circles the chat could be: ‘My dear, you really should visit Cambridge Analytica about their ability to harvest data; they really do offer some very tempting deals, and if you don’t tell SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford, no one will be any the wiser.’
Similarly a neighbour might confide: ‘Darling, have you tried Lidl’s paprika potato chips? once you’ve hidden the tube they came in, no one will know where you got them.’
The only thing worse is the farmers’ market every fortnight at the end of my road.
ONE stall specialises in ‘heirloom’ vegetables: spuds, carrots and onions destined to be passed from father to son, because they were grown in the manner of the old days, before smartphones came along and ruined cauliflowers for ever.
Another vendor is hellbent on introducing kangaroo to the Scottish dinner table. It is a pointless form of particularity; a concern with food that ignores real issues over sustainability and embraces bespoke snobbery.
Here’s a thought for the miffed of Giffnock: Iceland, derided here for dedicating aisles to variations of frozen potato, now has branches in the Czech Republic. What’s more, it is seen as quite posh.