Tescoland

A month in Tescoland

With 250,000 staff, 1,800 stores and the turnover of a medium-sized country, Tesco now collects one in every eight retail pounds we spend. So how is it affecting the way we live? To find out, Lucy Mangan spent a month shopping for everything - from clothes to pet insurance - at the company's stores or websites

Guardian October 7, 2005

When I was 10 my favourite book was The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. It pressed British place names into service as words to describe hitherto unmonickered feelings that commonly arise in the human breast. Ely, for example, meant "that first tiny inkling you get that something, somewhere has gone terribly wrong".
I had an Ely moment in the poultry aisle of Elmer's End Tesco. I'm not now, nor will I ever be, a vegetarian, but the doomed and melancholy air that hangs around pallid rows of naked, trussed and oh-so-very-dead chickens is an inescapable reminder of the fundamental futility of existence. But when they are being piled high and selling for less than £1 a pound, it's hard not to intuit that something, somewhere has indeed gone terribly wrong.
Until then, I'd been quite enjoying myself. I was just over halfway through an experiment to find out what a month spent living entirely on Tesco goods and services would be like. Why, you wonder? Well, not a week seems to pass without some new evidence of the company's creeping colonisation of every corner of British life. Food, clothes, books, CDs, appliances, mobile phones, diets, banking - even pet insurance; one in every £8 spent in the British high street goes into a Tesco till. I wanted to find out what it would be like when Tesco takes the other seven, too.
Week 1 I've paid my farewell visit to my usual supermarket, Waitrose. Although, truth be told, Waitrose is barely a supermarket at all. It is simply the place John Lewis kindly provides to keep the gentlefolk in olive oil and pancetta so that they can refuel between trips to spend more money on bathtowels and bespoke curtains. The biggest deprivation I anticipate is forfeiting my fortnightly visit to the local farmers' market. I will be denied the twice-monthly treat of meandering round, tasting cheeses, buying three quid hand-reared loaves and organic duck eggs that cost as much as a Fabergé version but are limned in faeces instead of glittering jewels. I could go and not buy anything, I suppose, but that seems to be obeying the letter rather than the spirit of the rules. Oh well, maybe with the money I'll save I can start a pension or something.
And there's a lot to be said for supermarkets. Duck eggs notwithstanding, I'm hardly a dedicated foodie. I go to the market largely for a walk in the sun and to pretend I live in the 50s. Or that I am in my 50s, I'm not sure which - I just know that either would suit me better. Not for me a life spent in endless pursuit of the most succulent pork chop, the freshest coriander, the earthiest bushel of organic vegetable matter. As a non-driver, I appreciate the ease and convenience of the one-stop shops strung along major bus routes like beads on a necklace. I like the cavernous anonymity of the bigger places and the welter of choices on offer.
The first thing to do, as Mrs Beeton would undoubtedly intone, is find your Tesco. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the chain's 1,800 UK stores (with another 7,500 planned to open in the next six months), there are two big supermarkets within easy bussing distance - Elmer's End and Catford - and a hypermarket a bit further away in Purley. There's also one of the country's 589 Tesco Express "convenience stores" at Penge and another on Perry Hill, for when I just need to pop out for the odd pint of milk and packet of biscuits.
The location of these five stores gives some indication of the tentacular reach, the sheer bloody size of the Tesco leviathan. Even so, I am still taken aback by the raw statistics: the UK stores employ more than 250,000 people (the 600 stores overseas employ a further 100,000). Online sales alone are worth £800m a year and Tesco in its entirety passed the £2bn profit mark this April. Its annual turnover of around £37bn would rank it about 53rd in the World Bank's listing of 84 national economies. It has a 30.5% share of the grocery market. It is gi - and I can't stress this enough - gantic.
It occurs to me that if I am going to assume citizenship of Tescoland, I will need to read up on my adopted country, so I equip myself with a mini-library of books about the supermarket business. Foremost amongst them are Felicity Lawrence's Not on the Label, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (for its excoriation of the world's uber-supermarket, Wal-Mart in the US) and Tim Lang and Michael Heasman's Food Wars.
Right, time to enter the brave new world. I decide Catford should be the scene of my inaugural visit. Catford shopping centre was the scene of my formative retail experiences (I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who doesn't want to go through life burdened by high consumer expectations) and the Tesco at the end of it has been there for as long as I can remember. It was a prime shoplifting ground for the cooler girls at school and also the place where my best friend's mum bought her daughter's non-school outfits, giving rise to the immortal playground couplet, "Tesco's, Tesco's, where Sally gets her best clo'es."
Little has changed since then. It's still Fritz Lang with strip lighting. Hemmed in on all sides by the shopping centre and car park, it has evidently been one of the few not to fall to Tesco's rapacious desires for expansion. The decor is slightly brighter and, as I must dress as well as eat entirely out of Tesco, I am delighted to note that the clothes have improved too. I must tell Sally.
I buy a blue top, a pink top, some vest tops, bras, tights and knickers, a stripy jumper, and a big black jackety-cardigany thing (stop me if I'm confusing you with these technical terms), a pair of trousers and a pair of the infamous £3 jeans that garnered headlines a few years ago when Tesco was first seeking to attract attention to its forays into fashion. Jeans and underwear excepted, however, for someone used to prowling round Primark, the prices are a shock: £18 for a jumper! A tenner for a T-shirt! I go from happy anticipation of a massive wardrobe renovation on the Guardian's dime to parton-faced disapproval, muttering, "£25 for a skirt! Rip-off Britain, I tell you!" Which only goes to show what a slippery concept value for money is. A £25 skirt would barely register on a label-freak's spectrum of desirable clothing. It is only a lot when you've been duped by various high-street outlets into believing that clothes should be mass produced in the shadowy sweatshops of developing countries and shipped over thrice-weekly to cater to your ever-changing tastes without hurting your wallet. Still, it's a concept on which Tesco's success heavily depends. The shop is littered with signs that give a product's price here, in Sainsbury's and in Asda. It's only ever a difference of a few pence but, as the ads say, every little helps - in this case to brand Tesco as the place where you get just that bit more bang for your buck.
Although I can't help but regard them slightly more suspiciously once I discover that in the Competition Commission's 2000 inquiry into whether supermarkets were engaging in anti-competitive practices, it identified 27 practices by the (then) biggest five (Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda/Wal-Mart, Safeway and Somerfield) that operated against the public interest. Many involved manipulating the consumer's notion of good value. All five retailers were discovered to be regularly selling "Known Value Items" (the basic products that most consumers buy and by whose prices they tend to judge the value-for-moneyness of the supermarket's whole range) below cost, and three of them (including Tesco) to be engaging in "price-flexing", which means selling the same product at different prices depending on the store's location.
Anyway, it's no surprise that the final bill comes to a few pounds less than it would in Sainsbury's and a few more pounds less than it would in Waitrose. What does surprise me is just how disorientating it is to be in a strange supermarket. The tracing and retracing of steps up and down the aisle to find basic items makes me realise the bovine levels of passivity with which I usually carry out the weekly shop. I think I may spend most of my time in Waitrose in a faint stupor, only rousing myself to hand over my credit card when I find myself at the checkout, somehow with a trolley full of goods. No wonder there is an entire industry built around the science of getting shoppers through the door and laying out the goods in such a way as to get them moving inexorably further in. Note to self: do try to be less of a mindless puppet in the future.
At the till I am disproportionately pleased to be the recipient of 100 bonus points for becoming a new member of the Clubcard loyalty scheme. Later on at home, I fill in the form to get my permanent, laminated card instead of the flimsy stopgap version as I envisage it getting some heavy use over the coming weeks. It arrives a few days later and I take it shopping when I realised that Tesco should be fulfilling my entertainment as well as nutritional needs. This turns out to be trickier than I thought. DVDs are no problem - I buy Mean Girls, Shaun of the Dead and Vera Drake for £19, all films I missed at the cinema. I skip past the CDs, as my taste is what I call eclectic and I doubt they are going to have much in the way of Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt. Instead, I head gaily for the books section, and come to a screeching halt. The books are cheap - often almost half the cover price. Tesco's purchasing power and the end of the late, much-lamented Net Book Agreement have seen to that. But the need for a profit after such price-slashing also ensures that the vast majority are middle-of-the-road bestsellers, which means I've either read them (Life of Pi, Eve Green, Dan Brown's growing oeuvre) or would rather suffocate myself with my bag of Tesco Value instant mashed potato mix than do so (My Leprous Stepdad Used My Childish Buttocks as Timpani, by Dave Pelzer, I'm 33, Single and Vomiting Bile and Desperation on to Every Page, by everyone else). Eventually, I plump for Being Jordan (a fine example of what can be achieved if you sit a hundred PR assistants at a hundred typewriters for a hundred minutes), The Ivy Chronicles (which is mad) and Piers Morgan's memoirs (even madder).
So much for my literary tastes. What's there to say about the food? Well, I wasn't really expecting any vast differences between Tesco and Waitrose fare, though I am interested to note that I regard the former with an unexpected degree of suspicion. I can't shift the idea that everything from Tesco is pumped full of all manner of nasties (additives, E-numbers, antibiotics, toxins, dioxins, carcinogens, you name it). Now this may or may not be justified - I alas have no access to a forensic laboratory in which to confirm or dismiss my fears. The point is that my prejudice arises purely from brand snobbery and it is chastening to realise how deeply it is ingrained.
But at a practical level, my (admittedly undiscerning) palate registers no complaints as I chomp through pork chops, potatoes, baked beans and the rest, and suck down soup, milk and orange squash. The cats are more discriminating. Accustomed to Sainsbury's pouches of kitten food, they respond to Tesco's tinned equivalent by excreting dark green matter with an unholy smell that pervades the entire house. So they revert to the opposition's product, supplemented by Tesco biscuits. Animals have no respect for journalistic integrity.
Week 2 Did you know that there are 12 million Clubcard holders out there? I am adhering to Tesco's capitalisation of the card to reflect the fact that over the month it assumes the role of a minor deity in my life as I become a Clubcard points obsessive. The system combines perfect simplicity at the introductory level (the basic deal is you get a point per £1 you spend in-store and a £1.50 voucher for every 150 points accumulated) and fiendish complexity once you are registered. Extra points for paying by Tesco credit cards, extra points with certain Clubcard partners and not with others, possible conversions into Clubcard deals (on hotel stays, magazine subscriptions and so on) which quadruple a point's value ... My head starts bleeding when I try to work out the consequences of paying a Clubcard partner with a Tesco credit card and a Clubcard deal. National fiscal meltdown and an overnight reversion to a barter economy, I suspect. Supermarket loyalty card schemes are the main reason that the anonymity of the shopper is an illusion. They allow retailers to compile profiles of shoppers - their likes, dislikes, whether they are impulsive or habit-forming buyers - and target them more effectively with appropriate promotions and suggestions for further purchases. In some this might induce the first stirrings of paranoia. I, on the other hand, don't care - free money wins over invasion of privacy, any time.
I do the weekly shop and Tesco painlessly yields up all the odds and sods I need in addition to groceries - a cheap fountain pen, batteries, a toilet brush, a washing-up bowl, an oven dish to replace the one I smashed tripping over a fleeing cat, and even a printer cartridge. My friend Pete rings halfway through and I tell him where I am and why. "It's a Tesco world," he sighs. "We just live in it. Can you get me some of their Crazy Caramel bars? They're brilliant."
I pay a disappointing trip to Purley (is there another kind, I hear all you throbbingly metropolitan types cry) to avail myself of the hypermarket delights therein. This store is being expanded and renovated, so the clothes section is (temporarily) no bigger than Catford's and I acquire only a pair of pajamas, a blue sequinned skirt, a blue handbag and, from the homewares section, a wastepaper basket, mug and plate. And 100 daffodil bulbs and some viola plant plugs on my way to the till, because I'm still very excited about having a house with a garden.
I buy a Tesco phone and become one of the 750,000 users of the Tesco mobile network, which works without a hitch unless you count its sudden prima donna-ish refusal to let me top up its funds with two of my three cards. For some reason, this is enough to induce the first stirrings of paranoia - is this Tesco's way of forcing customers into the waiting arms of its financial services operatives?
My finances are, in fact, the next thing to be folded under Tesco's wing. I become one of the five million Tesco personal finance customers by opening an instant access savings account (with, after a charming call two days later from "Marion" who thoroughly recommends it, telephone banking). When I try to pay with the accompanying cashcard on my next store visit, they tell me I haven't activated the card properly and hand me the customer services phone to let me do so. Are they smiling like helpful assistants or assassins?
I apply for a credit card, but the fact that I have so recently moved house apparently flags me up on a computer deep in the bowels of Tesco's financial headquarters as a potential drug-running, international terrorising, arms dealing puppy killer and delays things, so this may take some time to resolve.
Tesco offers a range of insurance polices, but I have no car and its online quote for house and contents is almost twice what I'm paying at the moment (although I am fleetingly, cretinously tempted because of the Clubcard points that would accrue), so I decide to insure the cats instead - £7.80 a month for the pair.
Week 3 A depressing number of people have failed to notice my all-Tesco outfits. An even more depressing number have commented on the improvement. I think this is mostly due to the new bras. They may be cheap but they are remarkably sturdy. I have gone from breasts-not-visible-to-the-naked-eye to Nurse Gladys Emmanuel.
I must stop checking my points account online, as if it's going to increase between one shop visit and the next. I'm wasting enough time on buses and on wandering round unfamiliar aisles as it is.
There are two stories in the press about Tesco this week - one national, one local. The national one is about the Clubcard scheme. One of Tesco's subsidiary companies has compiled a database (called Crucible) comprising the house addresses and social, demographic, economic and lifestyle information of every consumer in the UK. Even I find this quite unsettling. It says it has superseded previous efforts by combining multiple sources of data, including Clubcard information, though Tesco claims that it uses the latter anonymously rather than attached to individual addresses. Tesco sells access to Crucible to companies such as Sky, Gillette and Orange. There's no such thing as a free lunch, or magazine subscription, it seems - you must pay in information, international coin of the cyber-realm.
The local story is about the Elmers End store. It illustrates another facet of the Tesco empire - its ceaseless quest for physical as well as market expansion. The chain is estimated to have about 185 sites in its "landbank", enough to give it 4.5m square feet of new retail space if it builds on all of it. Tesco wants to extend the Elmer's End store and add a deck to the car park, in the face of furious local opposition to the increased traffic and potential detriment to the high streets nearby. I give the councillor named in the article, Rod Reed, a call. "The whole [government planning] policy is going the wrong way," he says. " Getting into hypermarket scale is wrong. It's important to keep the high street and the community going, not roll over and give Tesco the green light. But of course it's going on all over Britain." From Tim Lang's book, Food Wars, I discover that we have gone from being a nation of shopkeepers to a population which gets half of its food from just 1,000 stores controlled by the four dominant retail players. In addition, these players are making it harder for independent outlets to compete by wiping out the wholesaling infrastructure on which the smaller guys depend.
I am just beginning to appreciate how much this matters. It wasn't until I couldn't go in them any more that I realised how often I do pop into the Wednesday antiques/old tat stalls in the public hall, the local cafes for a coffee, the charity shops for a secondhand book to read while I'm caffeinating, the delicatessen for the odd samosa-instead-of-boring-sandwich. And I miss the ladies in the Methodist church tea shop who sell oddly shaped homemade cakes and let me set my laptop up there occasionally when I'm going stir-crazy at home.
Week 4 Perhaps it is my supermarket-unfriendly reading list, but as I slope round the Elmers End store this week, the compare-and-contrast-with-our-rivals price signs increasingly strike me as bullish and off-putting. Suddenly they seem to encapsulate the aggression that characterises Tesco's approach to the whole retail business.
My epiphanic chicken moment comes shortly after that. As with the books, such cheap produce is the sign of enormous purchasing power. But even if this is, superficially at least, good news for consumers, it is generally quite the opposite for supermarket suppliers. A huge retailer can dictate prices, contractual terms, the amount of display space in store - anything, in short, it wants to. So it is hardly surprising that the Competition Commission's 2000 report found that the average supplier's operating margin was just 4.3%. Many were even lower at around 2% and some were actually operating on negative margins. But suppliers must comply or risk losing contracts without which they frequently cannot survive. And of course, when the disparity in resources between the two sides is so great, supermarkets are effectively free to break contracts whenever they like, without fear of any real comeback. It is this concentration of purchasing power into the hands of four or five retailers that makes the choice apparently offered by Tesco and its fellows illusory - especially when it results in suppliers consolidating too in order to survive. When a handful of entities dominate production, supply and distribution (and don't let's get started on the environmental impact), it makes a mockery of the idea of consumer choice. The commission recommended that the supermarkets adopt a voluntary code of conduct to govern treatment of suppliers, which they duly did. So far, however, suppliers have shown little inclination to use the complaints procedure. The main reason for this, according to 73% of those questioned as part of an OFT review of the code's effectiveness, was fear among suppliers.
But what can you do? I buy an organic chicken, a packet of Fairtrade biscuits and sling them into my basket with the rest of my now-slightly-less-appetising stuff. Oh, and I buy a Mystic River DVD because - well, because I'm here and it's virtually the same price as hiring them from the video store. Yes, I despise myself, but listen, at least I resisted the temptation in Purley a fortnight ago to hurl a microwave into my trolley simply because it was £25.
I now know, too, that the remaining independent outlets' difficulties are being aggravated by the rise of internet shopping, which makes me feel even worse about my various forays into tesco.com. But because I'm getting desperate to read a book I actually want to read, I succumb yet again and order Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which arrive two days later like manna from heaven. A few clicks on, I find I have also been led painlessly into signing up for Tesco's eDiets (which sends me a weekly eating plan of vile meals and detailed shopping lists), ordered a slow cooker (because I've been thinking about it for a while and Tesco's is £10 cheaper than anywhere else I've seen) and two wooden garden planters (because I've run out of bulb and viola space). The project has begun to feed itself.
The Tesco legal store is also online. Dim memories surface of yet more headlines past - something about being able to plan your funeral with Tesco? A keyword search reveals only that the page I want does not exist. Reluctantly abandoning the idea that this is Tesco's idea of a metajoke, I ring the helpline. "That service has been discontinued," says a female voice in monotone. Did not enough people want a supermarket funeral? She does not rise to the bait. "It was a long time ago. Our products are always changing." But I really wanted to be buried with my Clubcard. "As I say, the service has been discontinued."
I settle for the Last Will and Testament pack, the pensions kit and the Tax at a Glance Handbook, in the hope of dispersing my assets and various areas of financial ignorance in one easy order. When the will forms arrive I become depressed when I can't think of anyone I would trust to be my executor (assuming my parents predecease me) or love enough to bequeath my books to (my sister uses them as barbecue fuel). I am getting quite fed up with Tesco prompting so many stark moments of self-revelation.
By the time my bulbs are planted, the project is over. My credit card has still not arrived, but at the end of the month Tesco is supplying my food, my drink, my clothes, my accessories, my toiletries, my entertainment, my bank account, my insurance, my household goods (I've got a Tesco toilet brush, for God's sake), it is dictating my very shopping list and emailing me with special offers in an attempt to enmesh me further in its web.
I've spent £454, accumulated 711 points, experienced crises of conscience and more than a few dark moments of the soul, but the really terrifying thing has been how easy it all was. I haven't had to do without anything, not for the house, for the garden, for my stomach (and I don't really think we can), or for my money.
The only thing more terrifying is thinking where it might go next. Tesco small arms aisles? Tesco cosmetic surgeries? Tesco surrogacy agencies? Tesco mail-order brides? Tesco cryogenics banks? And knowing that, although I think I have emerged from the project a more enlightened and ethical shopper, if it offered me enough points to have my head frozen, I still might sign up.