The triumph of Tesco

Deborah Ross joins her mother on a trip down the aisles of Britain’s favourite food chain

When I was growing up, my mother always went to Sainsbury’s, the Sainsbury’s on Ballards Lane, Finchley. I must have accompanied her sometimes because I can remember the marble counters, the rotating saw of the ham-slicer, turned by hand, and, strangely, hairnets. What she most remembers is that ‘for £7 a week I fed four children, one dog and a husband’. (I have no idea, by the way, how my father will feel on reading that he always came after the dog, but imagine he won’t be too surprised.) My mother was thought to be Sainsbury’s through and through. Cut her and she’d bleed orange and blue. My mother was thought to be as unassailably a Sainsbury’s person just as Sainsbury’s must have thought back then — we’re talking late Sixties and the Seventies — that it was unassailable itself. My mother went to Sainsbury’s on the same day at the same time every week, and when my brother got married on that day, he said in his wedding speech that he’d had to phone the shop first thing to say she wouldn’t be in so they didn’t put out a missing person’s bulletin. Everyone laughed. They thought he was joking. Also — and this is absolutely true, too — when I graduated from university I got a congratulations card signed by the ladies who worked behind the delicatessen counter in Sainsbury’s, Ballards Lane. This is how Sainsbury’s we were. But now? Now? My mum shops at Tesco. Who doesn’t?

The facts and figures are scary. Tesco has just announced pre-tax profits of a staggering £1.7 billion (while Sainsbury’s recently warned that profits for the year would fall below last year’s figure of £695 million).