Supermarket views out-dated (From Gazette & Herald)

Supermarket views out-dated

9:50am Wednesday 8th February 2012 in Letters

I, like so many others, enjoy good food and drink and the quality and variety on offer in the Milton Rooms a couple of months ago excelled: the damson gin and specialist soups I bought were delicious.

The good food markets are occasions to dig a little deeper for that special taste, as many appear willing to do, making them the success they are. Long may they flourish.

Yet, tragically but truthfully, only a very small minority can afford to live on such ambrosial offerings.

Indeed, a growing number probably now find it financially tough to consistently emulate the day-to-day meal-time quality we have become used to and, probably regretfully, are forced to resort to a more mundane diet.

So picking presumptuous and unnecessary quarrels with supermarkets is neither locally useful, nor, from various and very practical viewpoints, logical.

Summarily, the vast majority of ordinary people use the supermarket because, generally, they do not possess either the time or money to do otherwise.

In two-parent families, often both partners have to work to make ends meet and in the case of oneparent families, both time and money are even tighter.

To use both your over-stretched hours and income in the most economical and family-wise way you can is people’s over-riding concern when it comes to food and, in fact, shopping generally.

One can’t suddenly roll back an all-consuming flood-tide of what are now very fixed and necessary modern- day living patterns to accommodate the no-doubt sincere but, I’m afraid, misplaced and out-dated notions about how people should fulfill the often stressful task of making ends meet.

Diplomatically, someone from the charity concerned recently dispelled the no-doubt disconcerted puzzlement of a local supermarket’s management over the slightly presumptuous suggestion from one of your correspondents that they should donate to that charity £3,000. If every store in this particular chain was called on to undertake to do that, probably £3 million would be nearer the overall sum.

And another correspondent, in attacking the sale of the councilowned Wentworth Street car-park – whether that be for the site of another supermarket or not – seems to indicate that the £5 million raised would somehow be illgotten gains to be splurged by individual, democratically elected, members of that council on their own particular pet projects.

The money is, one way or another, simply from the public purse back into the public purse to be used multifariously for the benefit of council tax payers, of which I am one.

To suggest otherwise, I would submit, could well misrepresent the council’s intentions.

There also appears to be something a little misguided in this same correspondent’s idea that, while the sale of food from a new smaller and more exclusive supermarket would probably have little or no effect on Malton and Norton’s existing small food outlets, sales from a larger one most definitely would. Which is a trifle odd, because the local small food shops themselves are of an exceptionally high quality and might therefore expect to find it harder to attract customers away from a store seeking to rival their own high standards.

MR E RAINE, East Heslerton