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Getting the overwhelming impression that Tesco are on a slow spiral downwards. Low quality, expensive food (most fresh food now has a use-by date only a day or two in the future); confusing store layouts; non-grocery goods of truly terrible quality; and fuel that's 3p/litre more expensive than the BP garage down the road.
People scathe about Asda and Lidl / Aldi etc, but shopping there is a breath of fresh air compared to Tesco. It's also interesting that Tesco is rarely on sites like HotUKDeals, and when they are the deals are rarely national.
I believe they've suffered quite a large drop in profits this year - well, these are probably some of the reasons why.
Thoughts?
Caveat: They also knocked down my local pub and changed it into a Tesco Express, where the security guard follows me around despite me using it several times a week for over a year, which doesn't help my opinion of them.
Sainsburys will go a long time before the Tesco empire, due to overpricing food, poor quality cleaning, and just looks run down,or the ones i go into occasionly.
But then aldi and lidl look at times as if theyve had a food riot, stuff just thrown around, but then again the mangers do man the tills, and the staff are extremely fast.
Caveat: They also knocked down my local pub and changed it into a Tesco Express where the security guard follows me around despite me using it several times a week for over a year which doesn't help my opinion of them.
Just stop wearing lycra when shopping
I believe they've suffered quite a large drop in profits this year
couldnt cut it in the US.
They have pulled in the purse strings massively this year, hardly any new stores being built, maint.costs cut dramatically and they have had two massive distribtions centres built down south last year that they are not occuping.
I believe they've suffered quite a large drop in profits this year
....but still made a quite handsome amount of money. They're not gonna disappear anytime soon.
Shareholders etc may not like the drop in profit/dividend, but tesco are still a cash rich company.
Whole Trout in Tesco with guts over £3.40 in Asda whole trout gutted £1.60 so Tesco's are ripping us off big time. Hate the place, and I hate how they are one of the biggest supermarket responsible for all the unhealthy processed food thats passed on to us consumers thats full of salt sugar and water among lots more crap.
I hope they go bust. They have ridden rough shod over everyone from local high streets, communities, smaller retailers, suppliers (esp farmers, planning authorities and contributed sod all to society. All their actions were justified by Terry Leahy as they were 'helping consumers' but IMO that is just self serving tosh. It deserves to fold I think.
Sainsburys and Waitrose have a much better attitude to the rest of us.
Will Comet be still here in 20 years - I wonder if anyone asked that in 1992?
But if you don't like Tesco's, why shop there? 🙄
They'll die a death.... well maybe not a death but there popularity is on the wane and that can only be a good thing , every store/chain has it cycles of economic relevance to the public and Tesco is on the downward slope, bout bloody time.
In my small rural town we only have a Tesco express and i'm constantly getting on the managers tits by opening up the pre-packaged fruit n' veg (no other veg store/shop in the town) and only buying what i want by weight or amount alone, why should i have to pay extra for prepackaged stuff just so Tesco can make more profit?, they used to offer loose fruit n' veg but recently moved over to prepackaged only and i also shop using my crumpler messenger bag as when it feels quite full or heavy i know that's enough for this trip and i can cope wi it on my bike for the journey home rather than hang carrier bags on my handlebars - this really ****s them off as they consider i am stealing stuff all the time as i place it in my bag and close the lid, the first few times i did it the manager/store detectives asked to see inside my bag and i allowed them as they have to learn that not everyone should be placed under suspicion, now if i'm asked i tell them to "f-off, i'm just doing my shopping", My gran used to shop in exactly the same way when i helped her as a kid and she was never approached or treated like a thief so why should i be?.
Perhaps i should have scored higher than 12 in the "are you a psychopath thread"?
Have I told you about the French ladies underwear ad's I get on STW!
Oh! Tesco, in 20 years? I doubt I'll be around to worry about that!
However, Tesco do a great order online and deliver to France service. Great for Marmite, Brown Sauce, tea bags, and the like.
SB 🙂
New store opened in Windes not long before Christmas and competing with existing Morrisons and Asda. My OH went and would not stop telling me how rubbish it was which I couldn't understand. I went just before Christmas to get a few last bits with her and was shocked how utterly sh1te it is considering the land it has used and the huge number of parking spaces.
Poor selection of everything compared to Asda and Morrisons, hardly any beer, crap meat selection below par fresh produce section, no bakery, no deli and considering it was literally before Christmas no Quality Street or chocky bickies.
Sainsburys will go a long time before the Tesco empire, due to overpricing food, poor quality cleaning, and just looks run down,or the ones i go into occasionly.
Went to a Sainsburys for the first time in ages this week. I was a bit suprised at how slightly grotty it was, and the pretty poor selection of fresh veg - though saw some nice looking sausages. Certainly didn't seem the step up the ladder compared to Tescos that I imagine a section of Sainsburys demographic believe it to be.
You gran had a crumpler messenger bag somafunk? Respect 😀
Whilst the likes of Tesco put temptation in front of the shopper by building their stores everywhere, the demise of smaller 'High Street' stores is purely down to us, the shopper, not using them in favour of the supermarket chains 😥
Yeah...her 1970's crumpler style messages bag had wheels on the bottom, grab handle on the top and a mock tan leather exterior with a rather fetching tarten interior, quite a boxy construction but all the hipsters will be using them next year once i carry out my faux marketing campaign.
😀
[b]opening up the pre-packaged fruit n' veg (no other veg store/shop in the town) and only buying what i want by weight or amount alone[/b], why should i have to pay extra for prepackaged stuff just so Tesco can make more profit?, [b]they used to offer loose fruit n' veg but recently moved over to prepackaged only[/b]
Is that a made up anecdote?
Because if they don't sell loose fruit and veg anymore, how do they manage to price it up when you take 12 sprouts out of a bag ?
When I was a nipper Tesco was budget/down market, to the extent that if you wanted to take pish out off someone you would infer that their trainers were Tesco specials.
Hope not , it does my head in
Too much crap not enough shop
When you go to the usa and see walmart you realise that shops in the uk need to stick to getting the grocerys right first.
I use aldi for my shopping , least the fruit and veg are fresh
There is still weigh scales on the 3 checkouts, small galloway town - very small old store, lived here pretty much all my adult life and yeah it does annoy them but i'm not the only person to do this since the managers experiment started a few weeks ago and the till operators are folk i've known for 20+years and it was Carol (someone i know on checkout) who mentioned to me about them still receiving the price cards and updates for loose fruit n' veg so i thought why not?.
Will Tesco be about in 20 years- probably, will they be as profitable as they have been in the last 20 years- no never, although getting rid of Fresh and Easy is a step in the right direction.
how do they manage to price it up when you take 12 sprouts out of a bag
Self service? I doubt they bother to customise the options menu for each store?
The one near me is a grotty whole, but then it was under the previous brand/owner as its a student store basically. I generally shop at co-op, or sainsbury as when you can only carry a small amount in your pannier going all the way out to Asda etc. dosnt save any money, all the deals are for multi-buys so big id have to take the trailer and just eat crisps for a month etc.
Thats the main thing that annoys me about supermarkets, you need to be buying massive amounts of food/stuff just to get a deal. Im only 1 person and have a tiny kitchen! i cant store that much meat/crisps/toilet roll etc. discrimination it is i tell thee!!
"f-off, i'm just doing my shopping"
So where are you going to shop when they ban you? Sounds like you are trying to shoot yourself in the foot.
Whole Trout in Tesco with guts over £3.40 in Asda whole trout gutted £1.60
Depends on the Trout, Asda stuff might just be in need of shifting quick.
Prefer Morrisons these days, cant stand ASDA. The local one is a scuzzy cathedral of tink.
I miss Waitrose
I use aldi for my shopping , least the fruit and veg are fresh
This.
Sainsbury and aldi right next to each other in my town, I get most stuff from aldi, which is brilliant.
3rd largest retailer in the world, historically best margins of any uk operator, massive growth potential in SE Asia.
The us investment was a bit unlucky in it's timing but generally a well run business. I reckon they are here for the duration.
Buffett seems to think so as well, he has a pretty big investment.
If a fish is twice as much in Tesco as in Asda, that probably just means Asda got a good deal on a particular batch of fish. Or they are running a loss leader.
It's a lot more complicated than you think.
Anyway - all supermarket stores vary a lot. I know scruffy Tescos and nice ones, I know scruffy Sainsburys and nice ones. I only know scruffy Asdas though, and I only know nice Waitroses 🙂
Every time I've been our Lidl it's been like going back in time to Saverite when I was a kid. Piles of cardboard boxes containing nasty fizzy drinks, crappy clothing and odd household items, a tiny fridge at one with no milk in it, a few crates of moldy veg at the front and one utterly demoralised checkout person serving a queue of 10 people. Grim.
Having moaned about Asda though, it has some good points. The fruit and veg is decent and there's more local produce there than most places.
IT depends where you live you twonks. In the Portsmouth area the Tescos are great. Sainsburys is run by overzealous stuck up floor managers, is dirty and generally has poor quality food. The asdas are okay but very busy with chavs and generally sell poor quality stuff that i want...occasionally have good fruit/veg though. A new morrisons opened near me which is fantastic, the old one though is shit.
Tescos are going nowhere. Their business is evolving, just look at the acquisitions they've made in the digital sector. In 20 years their model will be very different from what it is today.
My local Tesco Extra is great. My Sainsbury's, however, has kept diligently to it's apparent plan of a a slow and steady decline.
Nah, i don't consider it shooting myself in the foot, i consider it a common courtesy that i should be allowed to shop at my leisure without needless harassment and with a suitable goods carrier that works for my self and my situation, i see retired folk doing their shopping with the use of their own shopping basket or granny trolley and they don't get abused?, why should i or anyone else under retirement age get abused just because they do not use the provided and sanctioned receptacle?.
He wouldn't dare ban me or ask me to leave anyway, i'd drop him wi a head butt to his nose if he ever tried....Dammit!....there goes my psychopathic tendencies again....... 😉
Stoke, sainsburys, cafe ran out of some of the menu items in the cafe, so i offered to get it from the shop floor, told i couldnt do that as the cafe food was diferent from the storefood, and was delivered by a man in a van from another store.
Sainsburys, near here, they refused to take my dads saving stamps for food, because he wasnt with me, and i didnt look the sort of person to use saving stamps.
Sainsburys again, charge me 60 quid on my card for fuel instead of a tenner, due to the dozy girl being more intrested in chatting about their night out , than actually being able to press the correct buttons.
our local coop have people who really shouldn't be serving food 😯
asda's further away & alreet but full a chavs. luckily its 24hr & a dina sleep much 🙂
That wasn't my point, if you only have one shop in your town then making a nuisance of yourself probably isn't a good idea. If you told me or any of my staff to f-off then you would be banned even if you had been shopping there everyday for fifty years. Shop staff shouldn't have to put up with people like you.
But then I doubt any of your story is actually true anyway so whatever.
I hope so. I think Tesco is great. Always clean, tidy, full shelf's. The food's is fine, but then I'm not a foodie.
Petrol prices changes with location and the competition, but that's capitalism.
I cant stand tesco so dont shop there, its like asda but with just 20% less scruffy special people getting in the way.
Sainsburys is a nicer shopping exerience IMO but not worth the extra and the overall winner is Aldi for ease and quality. I still stand by the fact that a supermarket that feeds over 30% of the population cannot hold the highest standards, it CANT, FACT!
Aldi on the otherhand uses the same manufacturers as other supermarkets but choses one good item that is the best they can produce for a competitive price and sells that, who needs an aisle of baked beans when they supply one type what works!
The one benefit with Tesco/Sains et al is that the self scan checkouts still dont recognise weights from items from the deli counter, so 1kg of fillet steak can easily be mistaken as one slice of corned beef!
Such a shame the meat in supermarkets is crap compared to the local butchers!
Nae worries brodie, you don't know me, i don't know you - whatever....it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
Like i said the shop staff are great, but new store manager who's dropped in is a little weegie prick who's pissed everyone off wi his ideas and how he thinks the store/staff should work, staff hate him and carol's nicknamed him "ballsack", he'll not last long anyway as we've had a succession of store managers over the past few years and then we can all get back to normal duty as before.
M&S in Dumfries don't mind me using my Crumpler bag at all, even got a "good idea" from the security guard on the door when i asked him if he minded.
most fresh food now has a use-by date only a day or two in the future.
That's because people want out of season food which is fresh, but don't want any pesticides or preservatives involved. What's the alternative here? Can't shink-wrap it remember, people complain about the packaging.
Is that a made up anecdote?
Yeah, it's mostly made up by Rhod Gilbert.
Sainsburys again, charge me 60 quid on my card for fuel instead of a tenner, due to the dozy girl being more intrested in chatting about their night out , than actually being able to press the correct buttons.
Yet you were paying rapt attention and failed to notice the amount was wrong before entering your PIN?
I feel for you all.
We've got a corner shop called 'Morrisons' or something, a farm shop 500 yards away that sells proper (& I mean proper) fresh produce cheaper than the corner shop, a proper butchers & a proper greengrocer/deli. Neither Morrisons, Asda, Tesco or Sainsburys come close to our local stuff which TBH isn't much (if any) dearer.
Anyone remember safeway or kwiksave ?? Or even somerfield!!!!! Most will go under imo i used to work for the uks biggest and most profitable social housing partnership, they went belly and had a few billion quid order book on the go!!! Nowt is safe, n for the record asda n lidil ftw!!! Or farmfoods if i cba!!!!
M&S in Dumfries don't mind me using my Crumpler bag at all, even got a "good idea" from the security guard on the door [b]when i asked him if he minded.[/b]
If you did that in M&S why didn't you do the same in Tesco ?
Unless of course you actually wanted them to think you were stealing and follow you around so you could play the victim and moan about it 🙄
(Or unless bits of the story are made up of course)
I thought all you IT boys complained about locally owned shops ripping people off and constantly said that tescos was the only righteous place to shop?
I'm confused. Have you suddenly changed your minds?
I do like a good supermarket thread. It's a great barometer of social snobbery! People are just people y'know?
Was watching Bladerunner (again!) earlier, which is set in 2019 but made in 1982, and some of the big contemporary brands at the time that are on display in future Los Angeles are Atari (remember them!) and TDK (of cassette and video tape fame!) so I guess anything can happen. The business model of being the cheapest, lowest common denominator is always going to work though, be it Tesco or someone else no?
safeway and quicksave were swallowed up by bigger retailers - I'd love to know who is going to swallow tesco....
I'd bet they'll be here in 20 yrs time, I think we have a socio-efficient set of food retailers a bit like we do with uk high street banks, not too many, not too few
Sigh......ill be quick, sometimes I wonder why the **** I bother?. I've shopped there for the past 10 years using my bag, never an issue, new manager comes in, jumped up little prick, tells me that im not allowed to use my bag and to use a basket, continue to use bag and allow him to look inside it one time only at the checkout as the girls say " kenny always uses his bag" end of story. goodnight, sleep tite
one of the lowest common denominators on council TV is also loads of bloody cooking/chef type programmes, that all people seem to love. And they all bang on about quality ingredients/local produce though and how evil cheap processed stuff is. It's all about perception. You can cook a brilliant meal from tesco value peppers and cheapo value frozen sweetcorn etc that'll taste and look just the same as the perfectly formed expensive stuff! The supermarkets are well on top of that though and adjust accordingly. I love the tier system of food branding in supermarkets. Value - standard - special -extra special. I wonder if this is extra special to Britain though? The class system is alive and well in yer local supermarket. Their marketing bods probably peruse sites like STW to guage opinion!
Somafunk - you wouldn't have a problem in our local ASDA, it's pretty good at looking after the special needs of local customers 😀
My local Tesco has its own hairdressers. I reckon it'll still be about in 20 years.
I real good mate of mine owns a apple (and pear) farm in Kent and supplies Tesco with royal gala apples and all sorts of pears...
We where chatting over Christmas about the poor crop of apples this year , and he mentioned that when Tesco offer buy one get one free on apples ( his gala apples) they play hard ball and the FREE apples (usually bagged for convenience) are paid for by HIM! ! Not by Tesco , they pay his company half the agreed price per kg / tonne and when there questioned tell the poor old farmer they are running a offer !
For that reason I actively avoid Tesco, can I say ****3rs on here ?!
to the guy dissin lidl. first the fruit and veg is delivered fresh every morning and overnight to the rdc the day before so it's never sat there till it's rotten. they are audited more than any other supermarket and 3 rotten pieces of fruit and veg is a fail and can cost you your job. the range is continental so you have antipasti and quail at regular prices you'd pay 3 Times the prices for the same product in waitrose. 99% of all the fruit and veg is pesticide free so is as good as organic for regular prices.
Meat and poultry is supplied by the best UK supplier. asda used to use the Same one 10years ago before they got cheap and sell you nasty Irish shit.
oh and Tescos is number 1 in the UK and has been for years, not going anywhere.
Yeah, it's mostly made up by Rhod Gilbert.
Ah, I thought it sounded familiar 😉
That's one of the reasons the company i work for as a chocolatier will not supply Tescos with any produce at all, as well as the owner having a healthy disregard of them since they refused to open up a till for her trolley load of shopping very late at night in the larger local(ish) Tesco as they're was no-one available, her reasoning was that if you want me to scan and bag my own trolley full of goods and charge me the same price whilst removing one person from a paying job on the shop floor then i'm not shopping here again, true to her word she's not been back, Tescos can and do screw the supplier with regard to bogof offers all the time.
Speaking of FRESH fruit n veg, is anyone going to mention HOW LONG the stuff can be (and is) kept "on hold" for in massive cold stores, before it hits the shops ?
Sorry my personal stalkers, never owned a TV in my life, nor seen rhod gilbert - although i did watch "up" at my parents at New Year, thought it was ok, nowt special though.
Anyone remember safeway or kwiksave
Where I grew up, the Safeway became Morrisons, the little Kwiksave became a Somerfield and then a Co-Operative Food, the big Kwiksave became a Tesco, and the Lo-Cost also became a Co-Operative Food.
I used to work for Tesco when I was at uni, this thread has reminded me that I need to get around to selling my shares! 😛
interesting stuff pitchpro, I get 10% discount at Asda, but still get half my shopping from Aldi/Lidl cos I have to watch the pennies and like fairly decent quality food. I don't care about brands. I'll try something that's cheaper, and if it's as good, I'll continue to buy that from that place. A lot of people are thinking like this now and the big four have to catch up. I thought the Aldi ad campaign was so true. I guess there is a point where stuff becomes cheap/good quality where people out of your general picture are suffering to produce it though and they don't tell you this in the ads. Even ****ing shopping is a moral quagmire! I'm waiting forr the day when high street charity shops sell food! 😀
As i remember 35yrs ago our supermarket (large shop wi parking for 10 cars) started of with a "Templetons", then it was a "Safeway", then a "Somerfield", then a "Morrisons", now we have a "Tesco" and by this rate we should have a "Sainsbury's" next year, 4 yrs later a "M&S Food Hall" and in 10 or so years a "Waitrose".
I'm looking forward to a "Waitrose", never even seen a Waitrose store never mind shopped in one....from what i read on here they are mythical places populated by investment bankers and rich dentists, with the occasional yummy mummy looking to pick a pre lunchtime fumble round the back of the fresh food aisle.
It's all very exciting 😯
I have noticed a steady decline in tesco over the past year or so
The fruit and veg is hit and miss at best
Tesco own brand stuff all seems full of sugar and salt
In the last month they have really pissed me off by stopping stocking lindt 90%
only trouble is, tesco is the only supermarket around here
If a fish is twice as much in Tesco as in Asda, that probably just means Asda got a good deal on a particular batch of fish. Or they are running a loss leader.
That's an assumption and looking other produce compared to Asda Tescos are poor in quality and high in price and they are always ending lines there unlike Asda. So it's not complicated to see the difference, supermarkets though like to confuse matters with their misleading special offers and two for ones and such like.
Serious question for all the supermarket shoppers - are there no butchers, bakers, grocers etc near you?
I can just about tolerate getting some stuff from a big chain but not the basics. Maybe I'm lucky where I am but I can get locally grown fruit and veg, locally reared meat and locally caught fish, local cheese and local bread without having to set foot in a supermarket. I can get it in the quantity I want and I can get special offers that don't just impact the supplier.
Is this unusual? I was under the impression that most people were able to get hold of decent local stuff these days but I might be wrong.
My whole career has revolved around building supermarkets. I shop at Sainsbury's. 8)
Yossarian, I think for people with little money and time constraints - most people - it's a really easy, simple option. Like I say, supermarkets offer the lowest common denominator. All in one place with parking. It's as simple as that. I do sort of remember what a proper carrot tastes like though.
wallop - Member
My whole career has revolved around building supermarkets. I shop at Sainsbury's.
Burn him, Post reported 😉
I have mentioned on other threads that i work for a super market as a deputy manager. But never said where,I work for Aldi, and can tell you that there fruit and veg is very fresh, delivered to head office warehouse then to stores within 24 hours orders made 2 days in advance on predicted sales.
I could go into the many ways they keep prices down other than limited branding, small staff teams and the other obvious stuff but other than that it is in our contracts not to discuss the workings of the company.
But i Will tell you they defiantly arn't struggling, and have NO debt
NIce one Rescott. don't think stw realise us supermarket workers actually graft our asses off and follow all sorts of criteria just so they can bitch and moan! If you aren't happy with the service, Go straight to customer service and slag off person/availablity/freshness or whatever that pished you off. It's a form of quality control, by customers. If enough customers make noises, things change.
Tesco provide a service, everything a family could need to survive and then a few luxuries.
They even have fairly competent butchers and fishmongers on the payroll.
Sure, you can go to the other specialist shops, and yes you can pick up some things like oxtail, or potatoes with real mud on them, but for a lot of people they don't want that, they want it as quick and simple as possible.
I reckon with a bit of research almost anything can be found for a cheaper price, so what if you can save a couple of quid on a trout, hardly the staple diet of this country is it and besides who has the time to spend hours checking prices eh? And if you have, please consider doing something more useful with it.
That said, I'll shop at the butchers locally when I drop my daughter off for her Saturday morning ballet class, but really, if I'm honest, because it's convenient to do so.
I do also buy a sack of local, muddy, potatoes from the local greengrocer, when he has them anyway, because they taste nice.
Oh and I've yet to find proper mozzarella in a supermarket, beggars belief how they get away with selling the rubber muck they do.
But apart from that they do ok 🙂
Aldi are the ones to watch - they will grow massively in the next few years. 200 more stores on the way?
Tesco have lost market share for the last few quarters.
I'd love to avoid tesco/co-op if I could but its just not always practical, I work pretty much 6 days/week from early to late at two different but both mimimum paying jobs and there is no other choice for food shopping in my rural Galloway town, no grocers as that shut down years ago, we do have a bakers that is open to 9pm on a Friday night with fresh baked bread and I buy my fresh bread from there for the following week. Being a vegi I don't eat packaged meals/ plastic food etc and I generally make a dose of meals or a pot of something on a Sunday for the coming week and either freeze portions or chill them, i get my cheese n coffee beans n treats from a friends small deli (size of a large cupboard really). Buy my veg n fruit and staples from tescos as its open when I finish work, I'd love something like a farmers market or proper farm veg shop but the nearest one is over 35 miles away and that'd cost me near enough £20 in fuel for a round trip. I buy as little as possible from tescos which is quite easy when u live on your own so I guess I prob spend only £25/30 a week on food there but given the choice I'd rather not spend anything with them, That's not possible though.
There are a lot of people who use supermarkets but still make out they are the cause of all the worlds problems 🙂
I use supermarkets for stuff like tinned goods, non perishable stuff etc. I go once every couple of months and buy a proper load. Stick to the deals where I can (from big companies not local growers etc) and stock up on stuff.
For fresh stuff I buy locally in the butchers/grocers etc, meat (don't buy much) fruit and Veg (buy loads) bread (not often)
Doing it that way, I buy stuff when I need it, and hardly ever waste any food. Plus it really does seem that the Fruit and Veg tastes so much nicer !!
I probably shop more at Aldi than any other supermarket otherwise I will buy from a farm shop or local butcher who doesn't pump the meat full of water.
the best place I've lived for cheap, varied, fresh fruit and veg, straight off a boat, open 24hrs, was when I lived in Dalston, London. If those Turkish boys opened up a shop here in Llandudno I'd be all over it!
Just buy your salad from a kebab shop then 😆
The future is Turkish!
I do wonder about the placebo effect on the taste difference between the veg from supermarkets and local greengrocers etc.
I've eaten veg from my own garden, from greengrocers and from Tescos.
Can't say I've noticed a big difference. Maybe my palate isn't as refined as some on here.
The thing that made me start to notice it more, was after years of cooking with standard white onions from the supermarket, I bought some of the same from the local farm shop and remembered that chopping onions is supposed to make your eyes water, and these buggers really did ! but the supermarket ones haven't done for ages.
I started to taste the veggies raw and the farm shop stuff just tastes better, well I suppose its not a "better" taste, just more taste.
maybe it's childhood memories as well? When I was a little kid in mid wales my dad used to take us to a farm to get all our veg. I remember popping peapods and eating carrots in a field and them being really sweet and tasty (I wouldn't eat 'em otherwise). So is it my childhood nostalgia influencing my tastebuds? (old man hat) what do kids percieve as natural and tasty now? is supermarket food bland? is the process of getting the food too simple and monotonous? are my tastebuds killed by booze? I'm going on wikipedia!...
I must admit to enjoying broccoli (wierdo!) wi a good balsamic vinegar over it but i got given a fair amount of purple sprouting broccoli last year from a local gardener i did a favour for rather than bought from a supermarket and it had so much flavour that i didn't need to use any dressing apart from a knob of butter and a touch of ground pepper, t'was luscious and i'd would love a wee veg plot out the back but one of the neighbours has 9 cats and they destroyed my raised herb bed wi turds so i imagine they'd just love it if i built them a veg plot so it's not worth it.
I only shop in Waitrose when I'm in the UK. Tesco's is full of fat smelly people in tracksuits from what I remember.
Atari (remember them!) and TDK
Atari got bought up iirc but still operate
TDK - the internet says $10.55 billion in revenue for 2011, wiki so pinch of salt required
On that basis they'll probably be fine
I'd have picked the British domestic car industry as an example
I only shop in Waitrose when I'm in the UK. Tesco's is full of fat smelly people in tracksuits from what I remember.
Yes, that's about right. Although we don't have a Waitrose here so there usual customers are mixed in with the fat smellys looking somewhat disgruntled.
My experiance of tescos here is a high proportion of self important get out of my way im better than you types marching round at hi speed mobiles glued to their ears.
Doesnt make for a stress free shopping trip.
I only shop in Waitrose when I'm in the UK. Tesco's is full of fat smelly people in tracksuits from what I remember.
At least say hello, next time!
*dons tracksuit*
Re; Gala Apple story above...
A local farmers got approached by Tescos to produce more spuds than he would've preferred so he bought new equipment and geared his whole farm up to go spud crazy. They squeezed his margins over the next couple of years and then pulled out completely leaving him in debt.
I avoid Tescos like the plague. Apart from their shoddy ethics, I find visiting the local store an unpleasant experience. Checkout chicks that converse about their Friday night antics and have a '1000yd stare' expression when you ask them a simple customer service question leave me cold and unimpressed. The local Asda is marginally worse and both are populated by the sort of people who I feel the need to put soap in their trollies.
Our local butcher is amazing but I go to Waitrose for most other things - a much more pleasant shopping experience.