Sharpe's Opinion
Tuesday, 5th May, 2009
Where would we be without Thatcher?
Dizzy thinks about the 70s.
The idea that, before Thatcher came to power, a government committee decided how much a shop could charge for a loaf of bread, seems to me, complete insanity. Likewise I find it insane that until the privatisation of telecoms, it took months to provision a phone line, and you had to rent a handset, bakerlite or push button, from the GPO, and you had no choice.
I didn’t live in England until a month before Thatcher left office, so not only did I not experience life before her, I didn’t experience life under her rule, either. Of all of the posts and articles about Thatcher that have appeared over the last few days, though, this is the one that struck home the most for me.
Comments
But I want to shop for cheap popular goods in locations reachable only by car just like everyone else wants. I don’t want to live in f*cking village with the other peasants where the lord of the manor (which I guess would be you, AJS) setting the historic-romantic price of bread. I don’t need the state reminding me I’m human (on the cover of my ration book, most likely).
I wouldn’t go quite that far, DavidNcl, but the point is indeed that we now have a choice – the fact people want to go to a supermarket and buy cheap **** is their problem, not ours. (Incidentally, all the major supermarkets now have pretty decent bakeries…)
There are now exactly as many quality stores such as butchers and bakers about as are needed to service the people who desire them – that’s the free market at work.
Your reductio ad absurdum is just as easily applicable to the opposite outlook – and the bread lines and starvation of Soviet Russia and East Germany are a testament to that.
The core reason why these local shops close is that people choose to go elsewhere. No-one is marched to Tesco at gunpoint. So how would we choose which unpopular & unwanted shops to prop up? Would we do so openly, from the public purse, or covertly by prohibiting people from getting their shopping from where they want to?
One of Thatcher’s achievements was in making us notice the covert forms of subsidy as well as the overt forms.
Of course, local shops can and do survive – provided they stay on their toes and provide a shop that the locals actually want to go to. We just choose to report on and wring our hands about the ones that don’t.
[T]he point is indeed that we now have a choice – the fact people want to go to a supermarket and buy cheap **** is their problem, not ours.**** or shite is not a choice.
Incidentally, all the major supermarkets now have pretty decent bakeries…
Oh, sure, there’s nothing wrong with the bread. But a village bakery was never only about the bread! It was a place where you spoke to, interacted with, connected with your neighbours. The baker, and all the other customers, lived in the village with you. Also, in those days, it was acceptable for any adult to feed, discipline or commandeer the services of any child, and it would hardly be unusual to be asked to help someone else carry their shopping home. Everyone knew everyone else, and what was going on; and you quickly learned that it was all one big doorstep you shouldn’t dirty.
Example: In the village where I grew up, if the newsagent caught you stealing — and she would catch you; she had eyes in the back of her head — she would silently add the items to your parents’ paper bill. Shoplifting was something nobody ever tried twice.
You just don’t get that in a huge, impersonal supermarket. The staff, and all the other customers, are strangers. Your next-door neighbour could be in the same store, and you might not even notice them. It’s a recipe for alienation, paranoia, depression and suicide.
No-one is marched to Tesco at gunpoint.
You know, if you can say that with a straight face, you’d be dangerous at a card table.
Tesco’s lower prices and higher availability act as an Invisible Gun. People want to pay less for their groceries, and they want to pretend they have a wide range to choose from. It’s a manifestation of the hunter-gatherer instinct. Which, for most of our evolutionary history, has been incredibly useful ….. but the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions have changed things a lot since then.
We are no longer spending each day struggling to survive to see another dawn.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s a fantastic achievement; but it’s a fact that our natural instincts evolved in a world which was very different to that in which we live today, and the nature of those changes means that our instincts can actually work destructively. It is going to take a long time before our instincts change to catch up.
Also, for some people, choice exists only in theory. If there is some practical barrier that prevents them from exercising a full, free choice, then these people end up suffering when other people exercise their choice.
In the Bad Old Days, when you were told which school you should send your kids to, there were just as many ineducable little scrotes as there are today. (Well, maybe fewer. Some of them might have been educable by means of the then-not-banned cane. Yes, it teaches them that violence is a good way of solving their problems; but they already suspected that.) But without some parents having the option to remove their children to what they perceived as a “better” school, their negative influence was moderated by the better-behaved kids. Thus, they were less able to harm the most vulnerable children: the ones whose parents would never have been able to remove them in practice, even if the choice had been available.
That is a ‘left-wing conservative’ argument. Fascinating stuff, from a socio-political perspective.
We could argue the toss about this, but we’ll never agree. Community cohesion is a good thing which has been lost, and that’s sad – but I don’t see that as the fault of the free market.
There’s a whole range of contributing factors – including increased mobility (both geographical and social) which means that people rarely grow up where their parents did, and often live in unfamiliar neighbourhoods for a few years at a time before moving onwards to greener pastures; the effect of worldwide communication by television and internet meaning that geographical communities are facing increased irrelevance; the fall of the Church (yes, religion) as the focal point for a community; the cost and availability of cars arriving at a point where we can easily travel to a central supermarket; and an increase in our sensitivity to danger from strangers, partly propagated by a chaos-hungry press.
We could have all the butchers and bakers and small community shops we wanted – and the government could set the price for every item of produce sat on the shelves – but it wouldn’t bring back that lost sense of community.
Better, to my mind, to accept that the free market has delivered great things to us – such as the ability to choose, based on the balance of quality and price that we want, what bread we want to buy and where we want to buy it. Better to accept that rewarding success has brought innovation and increased people’s willingness to aspire to working hard and being able to buy better bread than they could before.
And then, to work to find structures and organisations which can replace the old communities and regain some social cohesion, without having everyone go back to queuing up for their loaves and rationing out their meat.
Tesco’s lower prices and higher availability act as an Invisible Gun. People want to…
…go to Tesco.
My point exactly. People want what Tesco provides. They go there voluntarily. Being good enough to tempt people in is not a invisible gun; it is an achievement to applaud.
Small shopkeepers can compete on factors other than price; quality and service count to enough people. But they still need to compete. I could reduce my shopping bill by going to Tesco, but I choose not to because there are others who provide a better service and higher quality goods, albeit at a slightly higher price. And they should be applauded, too.
The situation is that small shopkeepers who sell stale old **** at high prices will go out of business. I’m not persuaded that is a bad thing.
Patently, there’s a whiff of the naturalistic fallacy about your post there. It’s the nature of humans to want Tesco, therefore we should give it to them — even if that leads to communities falling apart, childhood asthma, rampant petty crime and the NHS treating more patients for depression than anything else?
Taken to its extreme, that line of reasoning says we shouldn’t treat disease because it’s the nature of germs to kill people.
Also, I’m not even sure that quality, service or anything but price does count to most people anymore. This is the country where people will gladly spend money on champagne limousine rides to nightclubs, but they won’t spend the extra for appliances with a 10-year MTBF — so they spend ten times as much in the end, buying the ones that break within two years.
No, it’s not a naturalistic fallacy that leads me to my opinion, merely an absence of paternalism.
There are probably places where we do have disintegrating communities, childhood asthma, crime problems and depression, but I think that laying the blame at the door of Tesco is a little rich. After all, Tesco are present in many places, and some of them seem to cope. In the areas with problems AND a Tesco store, perhaps some other factor is at work – other than affordable groceries?
And yes, the freedom to make your own choices includes the freedom to be stupid. If people are willing to spend their own money in ways that I would not, then they should be free to do so. After all, who am I to order them about? What I object to is other people choosing to spend my money in ways that I would not – for example by requiring me to prop up a business that is producing goods that I do not wish to buy.
No, it’s not a naturalistic fallacy that leads me to my opinion, merely an absence of paternalism.There’s a subtle difference between laissez-faire and laissez-tuer.
There are probably places where we do have disintegrating communities, childhood asthma, crime problems and depression, but I think that laying the blame at the door of Tesco is a little rich.
There is no “probably” about it. There are really places like that!
I actually understand your incredulity about it all being Tesco’s fault; because if you had said to me thirty years ago that all this would happen, I wouldn’t have believed you. (I’d probably have said “Mummy, who is that man and why is he using all those big words?” But you know what I mean.) And I’ll admit that there are other factors (such as a benefits system which actively discourages people from working; though I don’t think Thatcher was actually responsible for abolishing the Wages Councils, so I’ll let her off with that one) to blame for the loss of social cohesion. But Tescoisation was a necessary condition, if not a sufficient one.
It’s not the affordable groceries that are to blame (and anyway, groceries were never really unaffordable — that would have put the village stores out of business without Tesco’s help). Rather, it is the loss of a kind of social contact which is unobtainable outside of almost any context beside small, local shops where all the customers and the shopkeeper know one another intimately.
Living like that engenders a real sense of individual responsibility (something I can’t imagine you’re opposed to), through one of two mechanisms. If you’re lucky, you see what happens to someone else who misbehaves in front of their neighbours; or if you’re not so lucky, you find out first-hand.
In spite of however uncomfortable that may make us feel, we humans are still, biologically speaking, gregarious predators. The Agricultural Revolution was 400 generations ago; barely a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. And we still have pack instincts; which manifest as needs best met by belonging to a tribe larger than our immediate family.
And yes, the freedom to make your own choices includes the freedom to be stupid.Even when other people’s stupidity impacts negatively on you?
What I object to is other people choosing to spend my money in ways that I would not – for example by requiring me to prop up a business that is producing goods that I do not wish to buy.
But, you see, that’s the rub. Local shops were selling goods that people did wish to buy. They had naturally higher overheads measured strictly in pounds than a steel-frame building quickly thrown up on a piece of waste ground; but they had a social benefit that was only noticeable when it was lost.
And what’s a couple of pence on the price of a loaf of bread, really, compared to kids smiling at you as opposed to spitting at you? Can you put a figure on that?
Tesco et al also had deep enough pockets to pull a bait-and-switch: sell goods cheaply enough, just long enough to put small, independent local retailers out of business; then jack up prices once the competition were out of the way. There really are places where that has happened.
(My “probably” was partly rhetorical, and partly because I dislike speaking outside my own direct experience and like to make it clear when I am doing so….)
If Tesco bait and switch as you describe, they will open themselves up to new competitors. That does happen. People do compete with Tesco, and they do so successfully.
I live in a town with a huge Tesco right in the middle, with a Council-built car park literally on top of it. We buy nothing from it. Half our groceries come from a different major national grocer, and half come from local shops, of which there are plenty.
The fact that in some places, Tesco’s presence correlates with appaling conditions and the absence of competition, whereas in other places it does not, suggests to me that the problem is not Tesco; it is the people, and that they would be spitting at me even if Tesco had never arrived.
(Oh, and if you do in fact mean “laissez-tuer” rather than “laissez-mort”, then that is perhaps a little bit offensive 
)
Well, some people would find the idea of retailers setting their own prices complete insanity. It would lead to the big supermarkets selling popular items at a lower price than smaller, local shops could afford to; ultimately forcing the smaller shops out of business, whereupon the majors, now without competition, would simply increase their prices. It would be the public who would lose out. Without small, local shops staffed by people who knew their jobs and their customers, a vital community service would be lost.
A village bakery and a village butcher’s provide more than fresh bread and m**t cut exactly how you want it: They also provide, beside a few minutes’ gentle exercise a day, a focal point, a meeting place to exchange local gossip, and they humanise residents by reminding them that they all live together in one village. These are things that a faceless supermarket in a nondescript location reachable only by car can never provide.
Also, have you tried to contact your telephone company’s customer services lately?
AJS
May 6, 2009 at 7:14 am