The supermarket wars are not my usual wheelhouse, but I consider myself something of a battle-hardened veteran with combat experience from foreign fields.
A student summer job embedded me in the head office of the British behemoth Sainsbury’s, where I was assigned to its elite fresh produce department. On day one, the chief lettuce buyer defected to Sainsbury’s arch rival, Tesco, and after watching him being marched from the premises, I was handed both his spreadsheets and the daily duty of ensuring every branch was stocked with icebergs, cos, little gems, Chinese leaf and wild rocket.
Illustration: Dionne Gain
Admittedly, there were aspects of the job that troubled my twenty-something conscience. Sainsbury’s awesome purchasing power, which clearly terrified farmers, was not a cudgel I enjoyed wielding. On the occasions when I pulled it from the corporate armoury, I expiated my guilt by handing out free salad items to bewildered homeless people along London’s South Bank.
For all that – and at the risk of sounding immodest – my lettuce buying was deemed a roaring success. A future in root vegetables beckoned, I was told. Carrots and leeks first, maybe, then potatoes. One day, I might even land the most coveted buying job of all: new world wines.
My fledging career even survived the morning I forgot to order lettuce for the entire East Midlands. Realising my mistake, we filled a taxi in Birmingham with enough iceberg to feed a small battalion and told the driver to thunder down the motorway to nearby Nottingham, where the managing director of Sainsbury’s was also en route to conduct a store visit. Alas, we lost the race, and soon the head of fresh produce was getting a mild rocket for failing to deliver enough wild rocket.
I never did get to tour the vineyards of Napa Valley or Stellenbosch, but I did leave Sainsbury’s at the end of that summer with a newfound regard for the British grocery trade. As that store inspection to Nottingham testified, the attention to detail was military in precision. Sainsbury’s thought of itself as the gold standard, a shining supermarket upon a hill.
Coles and Woolworths control 65 per cent of the Australian grocery market.Credit: Louie Douvis
The question, therefore, that I have found myself revisiting ever since ABC Four Corners ran its recent exposé of the Woolworths and Coles duopoly is why are the major Australian supermarkets so bad, especially given the scale of their profiteering? Certainly, they trail a long way behind Sainsbury’s or Tesco, and are not in the same league as, say, a Marks & Spencer Food Hall or a Waitrose, Britain’s middle-class supermarkets of choice. Just compare the quality of ready-made meals between the UK and Australia or the bounteousness of British deli counters, which resemble medieval all-you-can-eat buffets.
Nor does the best of Australia come close to the best of America. Whole Foods Market, the chain purchased by Amazon in 2017, deserves it nickname, “Whole Salary” because shopping there is so painfully expensive. But one only has to stroll though its cheese section, peruse its salad bars or cast an eye over its craft beer shelves to see why the chain has become a totem of what’s called “the experience economy”. Visits to Whole Food are seen as happy excursions rather than weekly chores: a form of retail therapy. Though some of Woolworths’ flagship stores now have sleek-looking chilled cheese rooms and chichi sushi counters, shopping there remains a more utilitarian undertaking.
Why our supermarkets are basket cases, according to a former chief lettuce officer
9
0
28.02.2024
The supermarket wars are not my usual wheelhouse, but I consider myself something of a battle-hardened veteran with combat experience from foreign fields.
A student summer job embedded me in the head office of the British behemoth Sainsbury’s, where I was assigned to its elite fresh produce department. On day one, the chief lettuce buyer defected to Sainsbury’s arch rival, Tesco, and after watching him being marched from the premises, I was handed both his spreadsheets and the daily duty of ensuring every branch was stocked with icebergs, cos, little gems, Chinese leaf and wild rocket.
Illustration: Dionne Gain
Admittedly, there were aspects of the job that troubled my twenty-something conscience. Sainsbury’s awesome purchasing power, which clearly terrified farmers, was not a cudgel I enjoyed wielding. On the occasions when I pulled it from the corporate armoury, I........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
