Sunday at the supermarket – 20/11/06

Sunday mornings, my wife takes the three year-old swimming, and after sitting on my arse for half an hour, a rare opportunity gladly taken, I put the baby in the pram and stroll along the Grand Union Canal to Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys.

It’s just been through a major refit and what a palace of plenty it is! They've got everything from virgin olive oil made of real organic virgins to a kit for gluing my wayward crown back into my gob.

We take these temples of consumerism for granted now, but with the thirtieth anniversary of my 21st birthday just round the corner, I can remember when shopping was a completely different and much more miserable experience.

Now we’ve got the widest choice (eight different kinds of mushrooms for god’s sake), the cheapest prices and the highest quality of food ever, ever in recorded history. I mean, I didn't see an avocado until I was 23 and that was on a French-owned oil rig in the North Sea. Halved and served with a dollop of prawn cocktail in the little hole. Delicious.

Of course the Greens hate them, mainly because they’re popular and successful I suppose. But they should try living in an undeveloped country with no supermarkets for a while. I have. It’s shit.

Then again, I’ve got no reason to love the supermarkets; they put my Dad out of business back in the 1980s. He was an independent grocer in a small Scottish town, and for many years a very successful one. He sent me to Fettes College, an Edinburgh secondary school, on the back of it.

But once a supermarket hit town, he just could not compete on price or choice even although he changed his business so that it was more of a delicatessen.

And that’s the point; the supermarkets bulldozed all the small grocers into the black hole of bankruptcy because they gave shoppers what they wanted and they still do. My Dad was lucky. He owned his shop, occupying arguably the best retail site in town, and sold up; it's a Victoria Wine now.

Tescos, Asda, Sainsburys and the rest still have to compete hard and sometimes they completely fuck up. For example, Ladbroke Grove Sainsburys has started to sell womenswear. A friend of my wife’s said, ‘If I was sleepwalking and I woke up naked in Sainsburys, I would buy something to wear. Otherwise, I can't imagine buying any of that stuff.’ Admittedly she’s Italian, but you get the point.