Words you don’t want to hear
The phone rings. You pick it up.
“Hello?”
The voice at the other end of the line says, “Have you heard … Tesco are planning a superstore in [insert your town here]”.
If you live in a small town, as I do, then to hear that Tesco are planning on moving in is not dissimilar to hearing a loved one tell you they have been diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. The next time you visit your town’s centre, you try to imagine it with no bakery, no butcher, no greengrocer. In their place a charity shop, or a vacant shopfront with a ragged to-let sign and whitewashed windows.
“But”, I hear you say, “It doesn’t have to be like that, does it? Surely local shops can compete with Tesco. After all, they are all selling the same things, competing in the same market. And anyway, the local shops sell lots of things that Tesco never will. You can’t buy [speciality product] in Tesco, but my local Butcher/Baker/Greengrocer does. People will shop at the local shop to get the things they can’t get at Tesco.”
And this is true. People will still buy the speciality items from the small retailers who provide them. But the problem is, selling a handful of speciality items isn’t enough to keep those small shops open. The local baker, who bakes a special type of bread much adored by the few customers who love it, isn’t able to sustain his business if nobody buys his regular sliced white loaves. And when the majority of people who used to visit the town are now shopping at the new Tesco, positioned just far enough away to make a trip into town more bother than it’s worth, there is only one outcome: that family baker who has been in your town since your grandmother was a girl is going to close. Another victim of the retailer presently known as Tescopoly.
But relax, it’s not going to happen to you. There’s nowhere in your town they could build a superstore. Is there?
That’s what we in Newport Pagnell thought until a few weeks ago, when Tesco announced they intended to move in to the former Aston Martin Lagonda site on Tickford Street. Now we are looking forward to a couple of years of fighting the Tesco cancer; I hope we win; there’s certainly enough public opposition that it’ll not be an easy thing for the local council to give it the nod, but it’s early days.
If you are a resident of Newport Pagnell or the surrounding area and you’d like to help stop Tesco turning our beautiful town centre into a row of boarded up shops, then please join the campaign at http://NoTesco.org.uk.
Say NO to a Tesco Superstore at Aston Martin, Newport Pagnell.
Derek
