But I admit to a wry smile when I recently read the findings of the excellent New Economics Foundation report.
This suggested considerable public unhappiness with the supermarket grip on food shopping.
Half of a national sample stated they think supermarkets' size and strength should be controlled to stop them putting local independent retailers out of business. Seventy per cent would prefer to shop locally, rather than at the out of town supermarket. About half of those questioned wanted more local foods and more to be grown in the UK.
All rhetoric? Whatever the attitudes, scoff the realists, consumer behaviour shows that people are inexorably increasing their supermarket shopping.
And yet.something is definitely shifting. There are stirrings on a diversity of fronts. Recently, I attended an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conference to review the rich world's food supply chain.
Far from applauding the rise of supermarkets, concern was expressed there about whether concentration has gone too far. A Cap Gemini study suggested that in Europe just 110 buying desks act as gatekeepers between 3.2 million farmers and 250 million consumers. Retailers are the funnel point, and declining in numbers.
This wasn't a gathering of anti-retail campaigners but governments and advisors. Notionally, it is governments who set rules for competition policy.
But what impressed me more was that this concentration of power now worries even hard-nosed economists and business analysts. This is not a market as Adam Smith meant markets to be.
There was a time when a big chain coming to your area was said to boost house prices and symbolise modernity. I remember in the 1970s, when farming in the north-west, friends being nearly ecstatic that a well-known south-eastern supermarket chain was "coming to Preston". Its arrival heralded middle class purchasing possibilities and food tastes being available outside the affluent south.
Now, a quarter of a century later, is the era of adulation of hypermarketisation drawing to a close, just as we consumers are locked into shopping from the big players?
As the New Economics Foundation report indicates, the proposition that supermarket shopping is inevitable and desirable is no longer holding true. Even as people get in their cars to go shopping, they think it need not be like this.
But what alternative? Farmers markets? Hmmm. Still very marginal. But something else is stirring among the middle classes.
A few weeks ago, we gave a 90th birthday lunch party for my mother at our house. A proper job; four courses, good wines, choice, sit-down tables.
We made a point of only purchasing from independent shops down Battersea's Northcote Road, fast becoming a beacon for the new food culture.
We had nothing but good service, interest in the event, high quality food and drink, and more importantly follow-up. For weeks, the staff at these shops have been asking us how the party went.
That wouldn't happen with a superstore. After the card is swiped, that's it. No more human attention.
Service versus self-service? That's the kind of real battleground that will sort out the contradictions between consumer attitudes and behaviour.
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This suggested considerable public unhappiness with the supermarket grip on food shopping.
Half of a national sample stated they think supermarkets' size and strength should be controlled to stop them putting local independent retailers out of business. Seventy per cent would prefer to shop locally, rather than at the out of town supermarket. About half of those questioned wanted more local foods and more to be grown in the UK.
All rhetoric? Whatever the attitudes, scoff the realists, consumer behaviour shows that people are inexorably increasing their supermarket shopping.
And yet.something is definitely shifting. There are stirrings on a diversity of fronts. Recently, I attended an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conference to review the rich world's food supply chain.
Far from applauding the rise of supermarkets, concern was expressed there about whether concentration has gone too far. A Cap Gemini study suggested that in Europe just 110 buying desks act as gatekeepers between 3.2 million farmers and 250 million consumers. Retailers are the funnel point, and declining in numbers.
This wasn't a gathering of anti-retail campaigners but governments and advisors. Notionally, it is governments who set rules for competition policy.
But what impressed me more was that this concentration of power now worries even hard-nosed economists and business analysts. This is not a market as Adam Smith meant markets to be.
There was a time when a big chain coming to your area was said to boost house prices and symbolise modernity. I remember in the 1970s, when farming in the north-west, friends being nearly ecstatic that a well-known south-eastern supermarket chain was "coming to Preston". Its arrival heralded middle class purchasing possibilities and food tastes being available outside the affluent south.
Now, a quarter of a century later, is the era of adulation of hypermarketisation drawing to a close, just as we consumers are locked into shopping from the big players?
As the New Economics Foundation report indicates, the proposition that supermarket shopping is inevitable and desirable is no longer holding true. Even as people get in their cars to go shopping, they think it need not be like this.
But what alternative? Farmers markets? Hmmm. Still very marginal. But something else is stirring among the middle classes.
A few weeks ago, we gave a 90th birthday lunch party for my mother at our house. A proper job; four courses, good wines, choice, sit-down tables.
We made a point of only purchasing from independent shops down Battersea's Northcote Road, fast becoming a beacon for the new food culture.
We had nothing but good service, interest in the event, high quality food and drink, and more importantly follow-up. For weeks, the staff at these shops have been asking us how the party went.
That wouldn't happen with a superstore. After the card is swiped, that's it. No more human attention.
Service versus self-service? That's the kind of real battleground that will sort out the contradictions between consumer attitudes and behaviour.
{{COMMENT - GUEST }}
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