Spare us a bunfight over baked beans!

Stelios Haji-ioannou opened his first easyfood store in north-West london this week. everything was priced at 25p and proved so popular that the shelves were ransacked within hours, forcing it to close early.

When one customer found the easy cupboard was bare, he complained: ‘Get your act together, Stelios!’

Shopping rage brought on by lack of cut-price baked beans? i’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragic. Shoppers queued up like locusts to strip the place bare, then struggled to their cars with enough tinned goods to see them through a nuclear siege.

Stelios had hoped the shop would cater for the poor, the unemployed and the minimum-waged — but they barely got a look in. Most of the customers looked nicely upholstered, well- dressed and well-fed as they crammed packets of biscuits and tins of peaches into their jumbo bags.

it wasn’t gratifying to see the blatant greed, reminiscent of those overnight queues for product launches at apple stores and last year’s supermarket fights over cheap meat.

there also appeared to be lots of people with plenty of money to spend, giving rise to the suspicion that there were more than a few corner shop owners rucking down in the aisles, primed to make a killing and gleeful that they would not even have to pay Vat, like they do when they stock up in a cash-and-carry. the Happy Shopper brand was prominent, a corner shop favourite anyway.

it reminded me a little of the sharp practices that flourish in the refugee camp in Calais.

For if you’re vulnerable and down on your luck, if you are the last link in the food chain and almost all hope has gone, the people you most have to fear are not the ones at the top of the economic ladder.

it’s not the benighted, hated tories or the posh boys or the management who are the problem. it is usually the person right next to you — the one who is doing just slightly better than you and can’t wait to take advantage of your misfortune to get ahead.

in 2016, that is what Stelios’s bleak new shop says to me.