Tesco
From Frikipedia
Food retailer in direct competition with Google for World Domination.
Overview
Tesco are now the biggest supermarket chain in England by some clear distance. Researchers say that for every £10 a UK resident spends on shopping, £12 of that will go to Tesco.
The flip side of this is that it is reaching the limit of its popularity. Most people, especially residents of the UK, hate a success story. Be it Smiley Tony, Tim Henman, Chelsea or Jenson Button, any type of success in any field is simply quietly ignored until the glorious tipping point when the public can rise up and laugh as a media backlash clips the wings of the once-successful fools.
Right now, any problem associated with the production of cheap food for the great unwashed, be it environmentally-unfriendly packaging, exploitation of the third world or obesity produces an immediate volley of angry newspaper articles and protests about Tesco. Never mind that every other supermarket is guilty of the same crime, Tesco is the biggest and therefore must be driven away with pitchforks and burning pyres.
The other arguement levelled at Tesco (again, it is not not necessary to point out that they aren't the only ones doing it) is that small, local businesses are being priced out of the marketplace by Tesco's range of value products, which the giant behemoth can afford to make and sell at a loss because they're making such a huge profit elsewhere.
While this is largely true, it does cover the guilty secret of all of these "small businesses". Namely: they were all crap.
Friki Theory
Careful now, here comes the science part.
The high street marketplace has changed. People will no longer want to shop in some scabby series of local shops (the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker) to gather together their weekly shop. This can now be done more conveniently and cheaply in a big supermarket. Plus, modern man has a lot less time to do important stuff, like drink themselves into oblivion at weekends. Going food shopping is no longer a social activity and, if Friki is being honest, it never should have been. It's bloody boring and just needs to be got done in as short a time as possible.
However, what a lot of people now yearn for is a bit of quality. While getting tins of beans and soup en masse from a big supermarket is simply common sense, there are plenty of areas where a little bit of extra effort for a higher quality product would be worth it. For example, if there was a decent local bakers near where Friki lived, it would buy its bread from there, because freshly baked bread is the dog's knackers, and that is something that supermarkets never really get right.
So there are plenty of niches for local stores to make their mark, plus of course the humble corner shop will never die. Skanks will always want their can of Special Brew and 20 Rothmans, after all. It is only the businesses that can't be bothered to make the effort to provide a different competing service to the faceless supermarkets that will inevitably sink into bankrupcy.
Evolve or die is the message here. Or alternatively, just wait for the media backlash to start, and hope we regress back into a 1950's utopia where everyone cobbled together thruppence a week to buy some manky bread and cheese from the local family-owned rip-off merchants and then died of the lurgy.
