LAST YEAR, THE residents of Stokes Croft in Bristol had a bit of a riot over proposed plans to build a Tesco Express on their patch. According Kerry McCarthy, riot-loving MP for the constituency next door, said: “It was an anti-establishment protest: against capitalism and corporations, similar to what we saw in the march against the cuts in London where Starbucks and banks were targeted.” I don’t need to tell you which party Ms McCarthy represents.
Well, the residents afterwards set up their own non-capitalist shop, the People’s Supermarket. It was supposed to be a “commercially sustainable, co-operative social enterprise”, one that responded “to the needs of the local community” to provide “local, healthy food at reasonable prices”.
However, it is an unwritten law that anything with the word “people’s” in its name has nothing to do with the people and is either a front for totalitarian nastiness or a PR ploy by unscrupulous politicians. Or, in the case of Stokes Croft, a patently doomed foray into the real world by a bunch of well-meaning but naïve folk.
The People’s Supermarket didn’t last, of course, and folded. This what the group said:
With finances being squeezed, more and more people are forced to rely on cheap food, and the supermarkets are driving a race to the bottom to fulfil this need. In this environment, setting up a shop whereby the prices are more realistic, in that they reflect the real value of food that is produced in a sustainable and just way, is extremely difficult.
They learned the hard way that in a free market what counts is not the good intentions of the seller but the desire of the buyer – and the buyer’s ability to purchase at a price they find acceptable. People on low incomes want cheap food because that’s what they can afford. Those are the “realistic prices”, not some communitarian “real value that is produced in a sustainable and just way”. Consumers vote with their money, and their money goes to those awful supermarkets “who are driving a race to the bottom to fulfil” their need.
Since then Tesco have set up their shop and the local area is doing well, contrary to the prognostications of those who regard themselves the Keepers of the People’s Purses and Morals. The irony is that in this case the straightforward selfishness of the capitalist free market succeeds because it provides what people want, whereas the ideological correctness of the left doesn’t.
