Supermarkets have instituted a range of measures to cater for a wide range of customers of different abilities and attributes. A large supermarket car park will contain both wide disabled and mother and child spaces, with special toy-car trolleys for toddlers. Inside the supermarket, there are quick purchase facilities for the time-pressed, disabled toilets, baby-changing facilities, electric scooters for the disabled and a taxi call point for those with no car. There may even be facilities for dog owners to tie their dogs and give them water. They may also sell disabled-friendly household equipment, such as cutlery and tin openers designed for the arthritic. Less visible, but still crucial for some customers, many supermarkets have a web of free bus routes spanning out across town, hearing induction loops at checkouts, and staff trained to cope with disabled needs. On the surface, supermarkets represent a much more disabled-friendly shopping environment than many corner shops do, with their narrow doors, often a step up to enter (as they were once residential properties), aisles too narrow for a walking frame and lack of wide tills for wheelchairs. In Britain, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was supposed to make all shops, along with other public areas, accessible to the disabled by 2004 where practicable. However, many inner city ‘corner’ shops are former 19th-century terraced houses located in hilly suburban areas, with steep steps to the door. The work would simply be so expensive that the shop would close down, and it is exempted. The disabled access issues in these small shops are similar to those also faced by mothers with pushchairs. However, some small shopkeepers can cater to their regular disabled customers’ needs in a less visible way, by establishing a personal relationship with them, but this is always going to be dependent on the same shopkeeper continuing in trade. A large supermarket is always going to have the resources to make special adaptations for a wide range of disabilities, and some retailers have gone even further and made special arrangements for certain customers with particular needs, as detailed next.
Coles supermarket, Australia, 2017, has started a ‘quiet hour’, or ‘low sensory environment’, to help customers on the autistic spectrum do their weekly shop. Every Tuesday, from 10.30–11.30 am, normally a quiet hour for shopping with less distracting crowds, the lights are dimmed by 50% and the store radio turned down to the lowest volume. The store has trained staff members on how to assist if any issues arise, such as stock being moved from its customary place in the aisles. Research suggested that autistic people, or their carers, tended to shop on Tuesday mornings, also that bright lights, music, cash registers beeping and queuing were difficult for autistic people. Similarly, Lidl, Northern Ireland, from October 2017, has trialled ‘autism friendly’ shopping hours from 6 till 8 pm on Tuesdays, again with dimmed lighting and no store announcements or music, and specially trained staff.
The elderly, even the infirm elderly, have received less attention than the younger disabled. Perhaps this is because they often suffer not one major disability but a range of chronic disadvantages, physical, mental and social; poverty may also be a major role in their condition. Older people may be lonely and isolated; they may not drive, bus services may be cut, they may have no partner or no family or their families live a long way away. Physically, they are slower and prone to falls if their balance and agility is impaired. Mentally, they may be slower at everyday tasks, such as paying at the till and being unfamiliar and averse to newer technology, such as automatic tills. Depression may set in and can also be a symptom of early Alzheimer’s disease; this exacerbates their isolation and mobility issues. This combination of factors makes it harder for them to both get to the shops and to cope with a possibly fast and crowded environment within the store. In extreme cases, pensioners have starved at home not because they couldn’t afford food but because they couldn’t get out to buy it. Social services, whilst they attend to falls and other medical issues, do not want to take on the further responsibility of ensuring that there is adequate food, or even any food at all, in the home.
Supermarkets have to cope with impatient customers; many people don’t want to spend too long on buying food any more than they want to spend more time than necessary cooking it. They don’t want to be held up even for a few seconds behind someone much slower than they are and certainly not behind someone slowly counting out change at the till as they queue behind. Supermarkets also face a ‘litigious society’ where if a pensioner falls over and breaks a leg (they may have osteoporosis and fragile bones), and then if the pensioner doesn’t want to sue, the family, now greatly inconvenienced by extra visiting and suddenly greatly increased responsibilities, may well seek legal advice. This has resulted in some supermarkets banning pensioners who have fallen over in the store (this diverts scarce staff time too), exacerbating their problems of accessing food; the frail pensioner is probably not going to be ordering online. There are an estimated 1.3 million infirm pensioners who are malnourished at home, and this malnourishment may be what precipitates a hospital stay, which may be extended due to further lack of mobility whilst in a hospital bed. Such malnutrition is estimated to cost the NHS £12 billion a year.
In 2016, Katherine Vero of Newcastle on Tyne, UK, launched the idea of ‘Slow Shopping’ (rather like the idea of citta lente, slow cities, where life is supposed to be lived at a less frenetic pace for everyone). Local supermarkets such as Sainsbury Gosforth have ‘slow shopping hours’, akin to the ‘quiet hours’ for autistic customers noted earlier; on Tuesdays between 1 and 3 pm, the store puts chairs out (some elderly like to be able to rest a bit mid-shopping, and most supermarkets have nowhere for them to sit except the café, which is not convenient to get to in mid-shopping trip), also they have staff to assist the inform and even a stand with tea and cake put out. By encouraging the elderly to get out, this performs a valuable social function, avoiding isolation and helping them make new friends. Waitrose Bath has a similar initiative, between 10 and 12 on Tuesday mornings. The store also avoids loudspeaker announcements during that period (not good for those with poor hearing) and ensures that there are no crates left in the aisles, which could be a trip hazard and obstruct disabled-scooter users. Tuesday mid-morning or mid-afternoon is usually a quieter shopping period. Slow checkout lanes have also been proposed, similar to the quick ‘ten items or less’ checkouts, where pensioners and others can feel comfortable about paying by cash and even having a chat with the till operator. Like the provision of free supermarket buses, which improve access in some areas that are ‘food deserts’, there is both a CSR and a commercial profit aspect here.
If old age is a ‘Cinderella condition’ then loneliness is even more so. It’s a failure to be lonely, even a bit ‘odd’. Yet loneliness has been shown to be as physiologically as damaging as smoking, and as noted earlier, it is a significant part of the array of problems afflicting many pensioners. In the UK, the Waitrose chain has become well-known for its cafés and customer coffees, although other large supermarket branches frequently have cafés as well. Waitrose, in 2017, began a ‘community table’ initiative in all its cafés with more than 40 seats, allocating 20% of tables as ‘community tables’, with invites to sit together with a stranger and cards encouraging ‘conversation starters’. Waitrose Newbury branch has linked up with Coffee Companions to provide café tables with ‘chat mats’, green side up for “come and have a talk with me”, red side up for ‘not today please’. This scheme is running across a range of locations in southern England, mainly independent coffee shops. However, supermarket cafés could also be a good venue to connect the isolated and encourage social interactions in a society that sometimes moves too fast to care for its slower members.
The list of the world’s largest companies is dominated by a few sectors: minerals, automobiles, utilities and electronics. These corporations have the resources to help the world’s charitable causes, but, generally, they are very remote, in physical terms, from the actual points of need. The large supermarkets are in a unique position here because, although they are large (Walmart remains the world’s largest company by revenue), they also have numerous local neighbourhood points of contact, by definition, their business model; supermarkets requires access by local residents. Supermarket managers may even have a better picture of local needs than central government does, and if not, they can, and do, ask their customers who live around the retail premises. Asda has adopted the ‘Asda mile’ or ‘your square mile’ as a means of focussing on local community issues. This is essentially an urban initiative in large cities, such as London or Birmingham, where each supermarket will serve an area of about one square mile. Not only will the supermarket staff, or their customers, have a good idea of what local causes could benefit from supermarket largesse but also the logistics of delivering such assistance will be easier from a local supermarket than from a corporate head office many kilometres away. Supermarkets can provide one of the most basic needs of the destitute and homeless: food; the donations of large retailers to food banks are discussed next. The supermarket may ask its customers directly what charities they would like supported. In 2008, Waitrose began the Community Matters scheme, which allowed customers to vote on what proportion of a total sum of a few thousand pounds every few weeks should go to each one of three charities. The charities were chosen by each store branch, every one or two months, and were local to it. Customers received a token at the till which they could deposit in one of three clear Perspex boxes, one for each good cause. Over time, each box would gain more or less tokens, the final supermarket donations being divided according to the number of tokens deposited in each box. This Waitrose scheme has now been copied by many other UK supermarkets, such as Tesco and Asda.
Customers can feel good about choosing their own good cause (at least from a set of three) and from seeing afterwards how large a donation their voting has resulted in. They may seldom consider the obverse side of this. Why are supermarkets donating to homeless charities, medical causes, animal charities and so on? Perhaps, according to Feminist Ire(Lord, 2014), because the government has cut funding for such organizations whilst the global corporations have cut wages to the bare legal minimum? Writing from a feminist perspective, Stephanie Lord queries, “If women were paid a little bit better, they would have more options other than underfunded domestic violence shelters when leaving abusive relationships”. There are two replies one could make to this argument. Firstly, Tesco is just one corporation, albeit a large one, and can scarcely be expected to change the entire neoliberal privatized global governance system on its own, and secondly, given this, at least it’s better if Tesco or some other corporation donates than if nobody does. In fact, the danger of passing charitable support from the government on to private hands is that governments are accountable democracies; corporations are not. Not quite, anyway; customers do ‘vote’ with their money, by choosing Tesco over Sainsbury’s, say, but the mix of charitable donations supported will be an infinitesimal part of this choice, lost amongst all the other considerations of price, location, choice, convenience and so on. However, a government in power can always be influenced by pressure groups, even outside of election time. As Lord (ibid) points out, “Which children’s charity will criticize Tesco for making it cheaper to feed children rubbish high-sugar food when it could potentially one day be Tesco’s charity of the year?” Charities may also face, or at least perceive, curbs on their activities if these are over-critical of governments that fund them, but it is more feasible for popular pressure to turn (or overturn) a government than to force a large corporation that people more or less have to patronize for their food to change direction. Ultimately, any social pressure arising from ‘charity censorship’ by the large retail companies is best directed, not at the company itself but at the government to step in and provide support. At best, these local initiatives provide funds for small causes that might otherwise never get off the ground and never afford the publicity they need to get going. At worst, they are a sort of local greenwash, ameliorating the (also local and often largely unnoticed) effects of supermarkets on local independent retailer economies. A small butcher closing is scarcely local news, let alone national, especially when such local shops frequently struggle on for a few years after the supermarket that is going to put them out of business has already opened and the fanfare of its arrival has died away. Hopefully, these independent shop owners will not be using the food banks, another popular donation point for CSR-conscious supermarkets.
In the past few years, many UK supermarkets have installed a food bank box, usually in the so-called dwell zone. This is the entrance area to the supermarket—a sort of transition zone where arriving consumers make the psychological transition into ‘shoppers’. It is called the ‘dwell zone’, as the function of this zone is not to sell anything directly, but to increase the dwell time: the total time the shopper spends inside the store retail area itself. The dwell zone often contains information on special offers in-store, recipe cards and the customer information desk. This zone also contains the fast-visit sales area, the newspapers, tobacco, lottery and sandwiches sales area, where visitors who only want these convenience goods can purchase them without being delayed by long queues; this builds a favourable impression of the store in their minds for future major shopping trips. As an extension of this idea, pet food boxes have appeared where cat or dog food may be deposited for local animal charities. Food bank deposit boxes create a feel-good mood in charitable-minded shoppers, who can also dispose of food items they no longer want to consume in a socially responsible manner. Ocado, the online grocer, has adopted a version of this idea, where customers can make a credit card online donation to the food bank, and Ocado promises to match it with the equivalent sum in groceries. However, some of these charity deposit boxes have been removed because, at some Asda supermarkets, for example, people were taking food items from them; this deterred depositors, who could not then be sure their donation was going to charity.
The supermarkets may be criticized for some aspects of their charity donations, such as insufficient security, or for having some profit element also incorporated. However, some schemes may be unfairly castigated; the well-known Tesco Computers for Schools initiative may be one such programme.
In 2003, Tesco ran its Computers for Schools scheme, where shoppers got vouchers which when enough were collected could be exchanged for ICT and sports equipment for local schools. But the scheme was much derided because to get enough vouchers for an office scanner, which Tesco itself sold for £80, you had to spend £44,900 in Tesco. A set of three tennis balls that retailed for £1.25 required a Tesco spend of £1,140 and a trampoline required a spend of £1,000,000 (Blythman, 2004: 246; Simms, 2007: 291). Furthermore, Tesco was encouraging schools to design promotional material for this offer, effectively outsourcing its advertising campaigns for free. To be fair, however, supermarkets operate on very small percentage profit margins; this is the whole basis of their huge economies of scale, which enables such small margins to generate still-large returns. In 2003/4, Tesco’s UK sales were £24,760 million, and its operating profit was £1,526 million, a margin of 6.16%. Now assume that 4% of profits could be given to charity, a reasonable ballpark figure for large retail corporations (Moneybox, 2013). We can now calculate in Table 6.1 for the two items where the retail cost and the contemporaneous required spend in Tesco to purchase the items are both known.
|
Item |
Scanner |
3 tennis balls |
|---|---|---|
|
1) Required spend in Tesco |
£44,900 |
£1,140 |
|
2) Retail cost of item |
£80 |
£1.25 |
|
3) Percentage of profit on spend at Tesco (6.16%) |
£2,765.84 |
£70.22 |
|
4) Four percent of profit for charity |
£110.63 |
£2.81 |
|
5) Percentage of ‘expected donation’—i.e. (2) as % of (4) |
72.3% |
44.5% |
Thus table suggests that Tesco was being a little stingy, but not so much as the Blythman and Simms figures suggest. Remembering that Tesco is a low-margin company, it is giving around half to three-quarters of what the ‘benchmark 4%’ figure would suggest. Although one could argue that the wholesale price to Tesco of these items is well below the retail price (2), that retail price represents the opportunity cost to the company; in other words, what it could have sold those articles for. As an aside, Mullerat (2013: 7) quotes a much lower figure of 0.5% to 1.0% of pre-tax corporate profits given to charity, which would make Tesco’s scheme rather generous indeed.
In some cases, supermarkets may be forced into charitable CSR initiatives because of bad publicity about their corporate policies—a sort of flip side to the manner in which supermarkets like Iceland and Tesco have become trendsetters, forcing rival chains to follow suit in the area of reducing plastics pollution. In 2017, the Ilford (London) branch of M&S attracted negative publicity for deterring rough sleepers bedding down in its doorways by sounding an alarm at intervals. This came against a background of rising homelessness and rough sleeping in Britain, as stagnant wages, austerity and government services cutbacks coexisted with continued high housing prices. Other companies had resorted to installing sprinkler systems to deter doorway rough sleeping. Further concern about street sleeping in the UK was aroused by the protracted cold winter of 2017/8. In 2018, M&S has liaised with local councils to provide ‘pop-up’ hostels for the homeless, made from old shipping containers and sited on council land in Redbridge, East London. A range of other organizations, including the retail chains, Debenhams, Metro Bank and the charities Salvation Army and the Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex are also involved in an initiative called Redbridge Together.
Besides their financial assets and their food, supermarkets can use other assets to assist in charitable causes. Mobile scanners for common cancers, such as lung and prostate, can be hosted in the supermarket car park, which is seldom completely full anyway. The NHS benefits from earlier diagnosis of such ailments, and people may be more willing to visit such facilities whilst out shopping, rather than the inconvenience of a special visit to a doctor. Men especially may be reluctant to visit a doctor until perhaps it is too late for effective treatment. The supermarket car park may also make a convenient location for a weekly Farmer’s Market, which many towns now hold in their main High Street periodically. High Street–based street markets can cause inconvenience for local people and shoppers. Car parking becomes scarce, and stalls and crowds may block narrow pavements, forcing the disabled in wheelchairs into the road. Traders’ vans which remain parked all day may also cause a nuisance, and the regular High Street shops may complain that they lose trade because people cannot access them or even see them behind the street stalls. All of these issues, crowding and parking, can be resolved by utilizing a far corner of the car park; the supermarket, of course, receives more visitors and may gain a ‘halo effect’ of association with healthy organic food as well.
Members of parliament and local councillors may also hold a different type of ‘surgery’ in the supermarket foyer. Waitrose Hull has a small police interview room just off the café area. This is a useful feature for people wishing to pass information to the police in a city where someone emerging from a real police station can be regarded with great suspicion and may be rather forcefully asked exactly what information they gave. Many supermarkets provide a free small personal adverts noticeboard and have a book exchange where people can bring surplus books, and others can pick them up and make a voluntary donation to charity. Supermarkets are then becoming community hubs, well beyond their original remit of selling food; in a similar manner to the Mediaeval church, which over time became a community meeting place, information exchange and even marketplace. Of course, just as religious purists lamented this secularization of a holy place of worship, some may see it as sinister rather than good that the supermarkets are adopting this overarching role within the community.
In other CSR initiatives, Woolworths Australia will provide barbeque equipment and a gazebo so people can run charity fundraising events. The actual barbeque food must be ordered from the store, so they make extra sales this way. Woolworths Australia also supports agricultural shows and scholarships to study agriculture and food production. Perhaps those students, when they have graduated and are making a career in the food and agriculture industry, will look more favourably on Woolworths when negotiating food contracts. In Greece, the Flora supermarket in Mykonos, a popular tourist area, hosts a short history of the island and a guide to the tourists sights on its website (Flora Supermarkets, 2018). Since few people will choose their holiday destination on the basis of a local supermarket website, and tourists tend not to buy supermarket food (unless going self-catering, of course), this cultural contribution to the island’s heritage probably provides little material gain to the supermarket itself, other than good publicity.
Lidl intervened to assist in Romania when the state educational system pulled out of teaching children about road safety. Store car parks were converted into mini replicas of city streets, with buildings, road crossings and traffic signs. In the first eight months of 2014, 30 children died and a further 261 were seriously injured in a country with a total population of 20 million. This is the equivalent in the UK of 140 child traffic deaths and 1,200 serious child injuries every year, and even this was an improvement from 2013, the year Lidl Romania began its educational programme. The payoff for Lidl was huge publicity in the national media, and it was estimated that 10 million Romanians, half the population, had read about the initiative. Also, in Romania, Lidl pioneered the construction of stores with ‘green’ (vegetation-covered) roofs, which create a whole range of environmental benefits. Besides absorbing pollution and converting CO2 into oxygen, the store is cooled in hot summers, reducing the need for air conditioning, and rainwater is absorbed, lessening the danger of urban flooding. The store roof also makes a space for insect wildlife and creates an attractive area, especially for apartment dwellers and office workers in tower blocks seeing it from above (Sempergreen, 2017).
In various guises, the supermarkets not only manage to sell virtually everything we need, including not just food but clothing and even housing too; they are becoming the protectors and benefactors of the homeless, the environment and even mediators of road safety. There is yet one more role they have adopted, a far less well-publicized one: custodians of our data, even our most confidential and private information.
In return for our shopping, we hand over more than just money to the main supermarket chains. We also almost inevitably, unless we always pay with cash, never order online or never have a home delivery from them and hold no loyalty card, give them something even more valuable: information. Even then, there is a technology waiting in the wings that will prove to be a huge mine of data for these corporations: Radio Frequency Identification tags, or RFID for short. Meanwhile, for the majority of us who do pay by credit card and use loyalty cards, we may ask who else can buy, or illicitly access, this information. Supermarket data collection and its analysis for personalized marketing initiatives has become very sophisticated. Supermarkets track the weather forecast by the hour and by the town, because they need sophisticated models of consumer behaviour to track and facilitate their ‘just-in-time’ ordering system. An obvious example is that if the day is sunny, people buy more beer and ice cream, whereas if it is wet and cloudy, soup and pudding sales rise. It all becomes a little more sinister when such consumer behaviour is linked to the individual shopper through the abundant electronic trail that modern shopping leaves. Furthermore, what has not kept pace with this sophisticated ‘collection’ and ‘analysis’ is ‘security’, as the experience of Facebook in March 2018 mentioned next illustrates. Data about your shopping can give away details of your personal life that even the most dedicated user of social media might hesitate to post. The range of goods sold by supermarkets is now very large and all under one roof, so is the likelihood of doing a single one-stop shopping that sums up your entire life. Add in the data provided by usage of a loyalty card, and one is virtually making one’s house, one’s life and one’s personal habits and illnesses a public space, as Table 6.2 illustrates.
|
Supermarket data on your shopping |
Information about the shopper |
|---|---|
|
Data generally supplied by the customer when registering for a loyalty card |
Your name, address, email and phone contact; probable income level (from your postcode); perhaps family size; home tenure; and any other details asked for, either at time of application or in later questionnaires. |
|
Time and place you shopped |
What times you are often away from home (many households have a regular shopping routine). Where and when you went on day trips, commuting, holidays. Do you like rural holidays, city breaks and walking holidays, and in what locations and how often (related to income and personality)? |
|
Foods you bought |
Your probable income level, your general fitness and obesity level and your likelihood of contracting a range of illnesses, including diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, liver disease (from alcohol purchases), lung cancer (do you buy cigarettes?). Any older people in your family? Presence of young children in the household. Probable number of people in your household. |
|
Toys and books you bought |
Presence of children in the household. Your personality preferences (cooking books, gardening, fiction, puzzle books). Might you fear Alzheimer’s disease? Colouring books, for adults or children—are you an artistic dreamy sort of person? |
|
Clothes and jewellery you bought |
Age, personality, wealth, sexual orientation. |
|
What periodicals you buy. What magazines you buy |
Your political views (the Guardian or the Daily Mail?). Your hobbies. Your social class and income level (Yachting or Real Ale periodical, football, golf, dog-racing, darts or angling magazines? Car maintenance magazines; holiday magazines—in various destinations, safe or adventurous). |
|
Do you buy microwave meals, other convenience foods, freezer food, fresh/organic food, electronic goods, eco-friendly goods or cheaper goods? |
Food as fuel or food gourmet fanatic, ecologically concerned or not. Cash rich, time poor or vice versa. Luddite or techie. Health concerned or hedonistic, future focussed or present oriented. |
|
Petrol purchases |
Your income level (car or no car), also indications as to your ecological views and fitness commitment (how far you live from the supermarket and do/don’t drive there). |
|
Health-related goods, vitamin pills, laxatives, headache pills, shampoo types, skin creams |
What illnesses you have now, or fear you may have. What illnesses run in your family. |
|
Condoms, pregnancy test kits, the ‘morning-after-pill’, Viagra (all available from UK supermarkets) |
Your sexual activity and concerns. |
|
Financial services |
Your financial standing, credit rating and housing tenure. |
|
Tesco office equipment and stationery |
Do you run your own business (insecure income? Untaxed side income?) |
|
Your response, or not, to advertising initiatives |
Personality: gullible or obstinate? Greedy or simple life? What needs do you have, or perceive you have, and how do these change over time as you age, health changes, finances change, family changes? |
|
Music and film CDs |
What music and film tastes do you have. Country folk of heavy metal rock? Musical tastes may be linked to white supremacism, or sympathies with some ethnic minority conflicts worldwide. |
|
Tesco Clubcard also asks for, or can potentially gather, (Tesco Clubcard, 2017) links to online data, which of necessity is made via a credit card; browsing information (Tesco and other sites); your personal contacts (if accessed via a mobile device). Charities you may donate to |
Your income level (what sort of device you use). Ultimately, Total Information Awareness—a US intelligence term for linking all available electronic data about a person, from health records and facial recognition data to employment history and previous convictions. Your religious beliefs (any donations), also concerns about animal rights, poverty and other international issues. |
Naturally, Tesco assures us that it would never dig so deeply or intrusively into your personal life. But can it guarantee the integrity of its data on you from third-party hackers, either criminals or state snoopers? On 19 March 2018, Facebook shares fell 7% in one day, wiping US$40 billion (UK£ 28.5 billion) from the company’s value, because of breaking news that Cambridge Analytica, a consumer research company, might have gained access to and misused personal data from Facebook. In further fallout from this incident, Cambridge Analytica went insolvent in May 2018 as the episode left it with mounting legal fees and disappearing clients. One can only imagine the fall in value a major supermarket would suffer if they experienced the same data breach. It is also amazing what data we would never put on our social media page, but will divulge, directly or indirectly, for the sake of 1% off our shopping bill.
If the potential of supermarket loyalty card data gives one the uneasy feelings of ghostly creaking in the attic, then RFID is equivalent to full-blown supernatural possession. RFID technology has the potential to transform the supermarket retail system more comprehensively than out-of-town supermarkets have transformed the original High Street shopping routine. RFID essentially consists of a tiny printed circuit containing a 96-bit code, an antenna to pick up an external radio ‘beacon’ and software to garner energy from the radio beam and transmit back the code embedded in the circuit. RFID, therefore, can be read passively, with no input, knowledge or consent necessary from the owner of the article being ‘read’. Ninety-six bits sounds small, but this gives a possible total of 2 power 96 different codes, or, approximately, one million, million, million, million, million (10 power 30) individual product codes. Given that our planet will almost certainly never have more than 0.1 million million (10 power 11) people, corporations, administrative agencies and NGOs, that is a lot of codes, or individually identified products, per person, agent or company.
RFID has been used by supermarket delivery systems to label entire trucks of goods and to track their progress from factory to supermarket delivery door. However, RFID is also already in use to identify individual objects. When you use an automatic book return at the library, RFID is how the machine knows what books are being returned—and who the borrower was. It can identify individual animals, with a link to their history, feeding, medical history and so on, or, presumably, individual people, a few of us who have already opted to have microchips implanted in our arms to speed up entry to clubs, for example. RFID is tiny, about the size and thickness of a full stop in normal type font. The radio signal that powers it and sends the return signal can penetrate brick walls, just as you can listen to a radio indoors. RFID chips could be invisibly and permanently implanted in almost anything: clothes, books, banknotes, credit cards, food packaging, automobiles and even your arm. The main reason it has not yet been widely adopted in your local supermarket is that bar codes are even cheaper, as are the wages for the bar code scanning operatives. In fact, such wages fall to zero when you scan your own shopping. However, if RFID was adopted, perhaps because the RFID chips became even cheaper, and the information they could provide became more valuable, or consumer resistance to self-scanning continued and shop till staff wages rose, what CSR issues would an RFID-based supermarket raise?
Shopping at such an RFID-enabled supermarket might be a rather eerie experience, especially if you visit at a slack time, because the shop floor could be virtually staff-less, apart from a couple of security guards maybe and someone at customer service for when the RFID has given you the wrong price because someone forgot to programme in that week’s BOGOF, or the end of the offer date had been wrongly entered, assuming that you notice the missing offer discount, of course. Essentially, you would load up your trolley and exit through an airport security-style gate, within which would be embedded the RFID radio beacon and reader. There would be no checkout staff, just a gate which you could only open using your credit card (so the machine knows who to charge for the shopping). Or maybe you would wave your arm in front of it, with your personal RFID chip implanted just under the skin. The security guards are there to ensure nobody leaps the barrier, as they might do when arriving ticketless at a railway station. People are already accustomed to automatic payment, sometimes with prior insertion of a loyalty card, at supermarket petrol pumps, railway stations and a host of other retail outlets; biometric machine readable passports also promote this technology. The first CSR issue would then be massive job losses. Although checkout staff could be redeployed to shelf stacking or moving goods in the warehouse, experience suggests the opposite will happen; jobs will be lost here to automation, just as has happened at Amazon’s warehouses. Shelf restacking by robots could take place at night, facilitated by the trend away from 24-hour opening in recent years, because customers might not interact too well with shelf restacking robots.
RFID would raise the same privacy issues as credit cards plus loyalty cards, initially, but the privacy concerns of RFID go a lot further. Essentially, one could be tracked wherever one went, without consent or even knowledge. Buy a pair of jeans or some shoes in a supermarket with a credit card, and assuming they are for your own wearing (most items of apparel, especially shoes, are bought by the intended wearer, or someone close to them), any RFID machine behind any brick wall could gather data on who goes where, when and even how fast or how long you loiter there, and this is without any facial recognition or gait analysis software, in the dark, with your face covered. You may be wearing a coat your aunt bought you, but the majority of RFID tags in your shoes, socks, underwear and shirt will have been paid for on one credit card account: your own. There’s an app for sorting that RFID crisis out.
Finally, without straying too far from the realms of CSR into science fiction, RFID could have significant implications for personal privacy and freedom of choice. Once the supermarket food is at home in your fridge, an RFID reader embedded there would know if you have food that is nearing its sell-by date and should be eaten first, or if you haven’t bought milk for a couple of days and might be running out. It would also know if you have too much sugary processed food in there and not enough vegetables; fresh produce might all be in environmentally friendly biodegradable packages by then, no loose items or perhaps the loose produce scales will have a capability to programme a blank RFID tag inbuilt within the price sticker the scales spit out. You are eating your way to diabetes, risking blindness and amputations? That’s expensive for society, in medical care and lost work capability. Maybe you have too much alcohol in your home; a smart meter could scan for that as well as measure your power consumption. Now we have the ‘Internet of Things’ (Shaw & Shaw, 2015: 249), where you can tell your cooker to preheat the ready meal you left there this morning; why shouldn’t your fridge tell the supermarket not to sell you any more chocolate? Try and that security gate barrier will fail to let you through until you have removed the calorifically offending items from your trolley. All for your own good, of course. The major supermarket chains would then have reached their ultimate destiny as not just commanders of our diet but overlords of our lifestyles, health and morals too. Perhaps this is the ultimate supermarket CSR. Perhaps the Luddites who hate using automated checkouts should start using them now to reduce the incentive of supermarkets to go down the full RFID route. It is possible for any such future privacy concerns to be allayed by removable tags, products where the location of the RFID chip is made obvious and can be removed after purchase. RFID chips can be programmed to self-kill after a set period of time; on food, this could coincide with the use-by date of the food, ensuring that it is unsaleable after that. A second or two inside a microwave oven will also disable current RFID tags. But such privacy issues, the demand for tags that self-kill or could be removed in the first place, would depend not on the corporations but on continued public vigilance. In a world where people are willing to chip their own arms to save a minute or so at a nightclub door, how strong might such vigilance be?
No supermarket wants a reputation for selling obesogenic food, even if its customers, by their food choices, tend to go for the unhealthier options: ready meals and sugary desserts rather than the fresh produce. In a mirror image of the societal contradiction of fashion demanding slimness in a food world that promotes obesity (Shaw, 2014: 81), the supermarkets generally have their fresh fruit and vegetable selections towards the customer entrance, creating an impression of naturalness and wholesomeness, whilst the vast majority of aisles contain more sugary, fatty, salty fare. However, in certain specific food categories, those with a high public profile, the supermarket chains make an effort to appear ‘responsible’ and in touch with social and environmental concerns. Iceland, for example, whom we saw in Chapter 4 to be rather pioneering in the areas of palm oil and plastic pollution, has also been one of the first supermarket chains to remove genetically modified ingredients from its own brand foods back in 1998; again, this influenced other major supermarket chains to follow suit (Smith, 2004: 218). Most supermarkets have also been swift to cater for the ethnic minorities that have settled in their catchment areas, especially since 2000. In Britain, Polish, Halal and Chinese aisles are common, also Kosher sections in some areas, with Japanese and Hispanic food aisles similarly prevalent in US supermarkets. Other minority food consumers are similarly catered for, with vegetarian, vegan and gluten free food shelves in most large food superstores.
The presence of sweets at supermarket checkouts has been a particular irritant to parents. It is almost inevitable that a child, bored after half an hour or an hour’s shopping, will exert ‘pester power’ on their stressed parent, who does not feel up to a fight to stop the child from just taking the sweet, which then has to be paid for, adding financial stress to the entire experience. In fact, it is not good for business to have the parent’s last impression of a supermarket as angry and stressful. After a long campaign by UK parent’s groups, “Chuck Sweets Off the Check-Out”, supermarket chains began removing them, pioneered by Aldi in 2014 (Daneshku, 2014). In fact, impulse checkout buys may be quite rare. In an experiment in the Bronx, New York, USA, it was observed that just 4% of supermarket customers bought anything from the checkout (Adjoian et al, 2017), but for those who did, a checkout containing just healthy items caused those in it to purchase in future shopping trips healthy items twice as much and unhealthy ones 60% less than shoppers at standard checkouts.
Away from the checkout, supermarkets make efforts to ensure that they are attractive places for children. This starts before they even enter the building, with mother and child spaces, little trolleys and plastic ‘cars’ for toddlers, and continues inside with the larger hypermarkets always stocking a range of children’s clothes, toys, colouring books and crayons, along with specific foods aimed at young children, from yoghurts to chocolate bars. Unfortunately, these ‘children’s foods’ are often high in sugar, also brightly coloured and heavily oriented towards the ‘dessert’ range rather than the ‘savoury’ end. Babies are born with a very simple sense of taste, sweet versus sour, which was a crucial survival mechanism thousands of years ago. Toddlers will put anything, even dirt, in their mouths, which is how they train their immune system and pick up some of the beneficial bacteria which are vital for biological functioning of the adult body. In nature, poisonous things are bitter, whereas nothing sweet is hazardous, so this sweet/sour taste mechanism protects children from poisoning themselves in their early years (Shaw, 2014: 51). Children then develop more sophisticated taste preferences, being predisposed to like the foods they come across in their family settings, again a useful adaptation to ensure that they eat well and thrive on the foods most readily available to them.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of sugary sweetness in foods has crept up the age range, as sugar has become cheaper in real terms, and processed foods create more profit for supermarkets and food manufacturers than fresh vegetables do. Concerning healthier foods, supermarkets have historically tended to shift the burden of responsibility from themselves to parents (Colls & Evans, 2008). However, the increasing alarm at growing child obesity rates has forced the supermarkets to take a more proactive role here. From Autumn 2015, Tesco began giving free fruit to children, bananas, apples and oranges could be taken free from a box in the fruit and vegetable section; Woolworths Australia operates a similar scheme. Critics might question why the fresh produce initiative is fruit (sweet) based rather than savoury vegetables. The Tesco initiative was not only to appear to be combatting child obesity but also aimed at reversing a falling market share and rising customer complaints about poor service, tackling increasing price competition from Aldi and Lidl, and counteracting the bad publicity from an accounting scandal in which profits were overstated. Of course, if the free offer was pieces of carrot or broccoli, this would have to be cooked and then kept heated, with additional costs and health and safety implications, but this does not stop supermarkets from selling fresh chicken on the spit to flood the store with an appetite-stimulating aroma to make shoppers hungry and to buy more food.
In 2014, Tesco began its Eat Happy Project, aiming to invite all UK primary school children for an open day to a UK farm that supplies Tesco to reconnect children with where food comes from; one child on the accompanying video (Tesco, 2014) seemed to have previously believed that potatoes grew on trees. Children get to see cows, chickens and mushrooms being grown and much else. Tesco pays for everything, the staff to supervise the children, even the bus to transport them, and the trip will free up considerable staff time at participating schools for other tasks. A more cynical viewpoint on these trips was provided by the Food Assembly (Turns, 2017). This commentary emphasizes the huge marketing boost that Tesco gets out of these trips, which are almost irresistible to schools in the current climate of education funding constraints, with the children even wearing yellow tabards with the message “I’m Learning Where My Food Comes From—Farm to Fork—Part of the Tesco Eat Happy Project”. The ‘free’ aspect of the Tesco school trips attracts opprobrium, as it appears to be ‘a cute marketing trick’ to take more market share from small High Street butchers and from local farm shops, who have to charge for small-scale, one-off school trips. Urban farms, like the ones in Hackney, London, offer free entry to school parties, but the school must still pay for transport and teacher time; a similar situation applies to any Scottish school trips to the Royal Highland Education Trust (RHET), although they can arrange free visits to schools by farmers who volunteer to give their time for this. In England, LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming) and Farming and Countryside Education run the same initiatives.
Critics of the Tesco Eat Happy Project accuse Tesco of imprinting itself on young minds to convince them that Tesco is the only contact point between farmers and consumers. Of course, it is far too early to know if children who have been on these trips are more likely to use a Tesco supermarket when they grow up rather than a Sainsbury or Asda, or even if they will buy a lower percentage of their groceries from independent shops overall. Like most supermarket CSR schemes, Eat Happy will probably be replaced by something else, and if anyone tried to follow through on the cohort of children who have participated to check their food diaries as adults, there would be far too many confounding factors—income, place of residence, accessibility of supermarkets and independent retailers, use of a car, tastes, acquired cooking skills, preference of spouse—to arrive at any meaningful correlations. The Sustainable Food Trust, another online critic of Eat Happy (Miller, 2014), pointed out that Tesco failed to indicate that none of the fruit and vegetable or bakery items the children were enjoying seeing in the supermarket, and had been given samples of to take home, were locally produced. As for price, although Tesco’s ‘ordinary’ produce was considerably cheaper than that of local organic farmers, Tesco’s organic produce was of similar cost to the farm shop gate prices. Meanwhile, the local farmers were using much less chemical-intensive, more sustainable, farming practices compared to the huge agri-businesses that supply Tesco.
Should Tesco run its Eat Happy Project? Not running it could leave many children with less contact with the food chain, since not all schools are near a city farm or can afford the teacher time to visit a farm with RHET or LEAF. Tesco is a business, not a charity. Its huge size and massive profits, which mean it can fund a CSR initiative that in turn may increase its sales yet more, has undoubtedly come at the expense of others, from suppliers and the small shops sector to the environment and arguably the taxpayer, if one believes that large global corporations pay ‘too little’ tax. Therefore, the critics of Eat Happy are really saying that the government should tax Tesco more to pay for the negative externalities it causes and plough some of this extra tax back into funding schools to organize food and farming trips, such as Tesco does now. But that is akin to saying that a centralized government should have more control of our food system, not a private corporation. Who is right? Is a government, elected once every five years, more accountable than an oligopoly of a few large food retail companies, which most consumers are free to choose between ‘voting for’ with their purchases once a week or more (Shaw, 2007)? The answer to ‘should Tesco run Eat Happy?’ is then beyond simply CSR; it is a fundamental political question as to where society and the economy should place itself on the spectrum between a neo-liberal unfettered free market on the one hand and a statist centrally directed system on the other. What we have now is very much at the neo-liberal end of that choice, and without revolutionary changes, it may be best to encourage large corporations to give as much as possible back to society in CSR programmes, even if that CSR also creates some profit for the corporation too.
In early 2018, a specific sugar-related food retail issue hit the headlines with the news that young children were consuming energy drinks. These are drinks, such as Red Bull, that contain high concentrations of caffeine along with large amounts of sugar. The concept of ‘energy drinks’ as in drinks that perk you up can be traced right back to Lucozade, marketed as a recovery drink for the ill in the 1920s. By the 1980s, these drinks were being used by joggers and sportspeople for an extra boost. However, by the 1990s, this ‘energy boost’ was also being sought by people who were just too busy to have breakfast before rushing out to their sedentary jobs and wanted something to combat the morning tiredness resulting from going to work on an empty stomach; this was scarcely healthy, of course. Somehow, by the 1990s, we were becoming too busy to have a traditional breakfast before leaving for work or school. The Cardiffian reported (Clements, 2018) on one 16-year-old who said, “I usually pick up a bag of crisps and a drink like Red Bull or Lucozade. It keeps me going until break time”, he said. When asked if he had eaten breakfast, he said, “I had a bit of toast before I left the house but I need something else and this gives me energy to concentrate”.
In 2018, Waitrose became the first UK supermarket to ban sales of energy drinks, with over 150mg caffeine per litre, such as Red Bull, to people under 18, effectively treating these beverages as if they were alcoholic drinks (Musaddique, 2018). This was in response to concerns about children being hyperactive and teachers having to deal with the bad behaviour resulting from this in school, also the long-term health effects of drinking so much caffeine. This might include sleepless nights, raised heart rate and even seizures. A small energy drink can may contain as much caffeine as two cups of strong filter coffee, but any bitterness is overlaid by the sugar content, which can amount to as much as 20 teaspoons of sugar per can. By April 2018, all the main UK supermarket chains had a stated policy of not selling these drinks to those under 16. However, there is some way to go here, as on 6 May 2018, the Mail on Sunday reported (Narain & Powell, 2018) on a 12-year-old girl who was sent to a branch of all the main supermarkets in the Brighton area and succeeded in buying, without question, a can of Red Bull at Aldi, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. She was refused at the Co-op, Iceland, Lidl, Morrison and Tesco. The ‘guilty’ supermarkets were rather non-committal when challenged afterwards, saying they were sorry; they would investigate, and we have reiterated our policy to all staff.
Energy drinks can be made to appeal to the cost-conscious consumer, and be normalized as part of an everyday diet, by their inclusion in meal deals. These meal deals, where various choices of food items, usually comprising one of several starters, main courses, drinks and desserts are bundled into a discount deal priced well below the separate cost of these items, seem a good value, unless as with most bundling one would not normally be buying some of the items. Frequently, less-healthy items are included, such as sandwiches, crisps and fizzy sugary drinks. Yet the phrase ‘meal deal’ makes it seem as a ‘square’, nutritionally balanced’ meal is on offer.
One function of supermarket labelling is to enable shoppers to make healthier choices; whether this is true or not, and if so, which labelling system works best, is another topic (Shaw, 2014: 145–6). What would be of concern is if these labels were misleading; tests by Which magazine have found 4g fat in a Young’s Fisherman Pie, where the label said 2.4g / 100g, and 6g of fat in a Vesta Chow Mein from Premier Foods, where the label stated 4g / 100g. (Devlin, 2014). The law allows for variation, because some foods are, for example, sprinkled with cheese topping by hand. EU rules allow a margin of error of 1.6g in products with under 10g fat / 100g and 20% margin if over 10g fat / 100g. However, the food packaging can be carefully and prominently worded to give a ‘healthier’ impression than the smaller nutrition label says. For example, Asda Premium beef mince has a stated (nutritional label) content of 9.2g fat / 100g, in which was found 12.8g, but the food package can be labelled as ‘typically under 12% fat’. Another ploy is to label foods as ‘low fat’ or ‘less than 1% fat’ when they would never be high in fat anyway (e.g. sugary fruit-flavoured desserts), but they may be high in sugar. The term ‘sugar’ itself can be disguised by using its chemical names, dextrose, sucrose or fructose. Meanwhile, the salt content of children’s meals can be made to appear lower by using a smaller bowl than a normal serving for calculation, or using adult salt guidelines on meals mostly eaten by, and targeted at, children. Conversely, yoghurt single-size pots, often aimed at the child consumer, tend to be high in sugar, and some are too large for a child single portion. Because the actual yoghurt inside is only a small proportion of the total cost of the pot, food marketers are tempted to raise the size of the portion to make it more attractive to adult consumers too.
Besides nutritional information that may make some food products seem ‘healthier’ (i.e. lower in fat, sugar or salt) than they really are, supermarkets have a range of other labelling and packaging techniques that make food products seem better value, sometimes whilst actually raising the price. Most products are accurately labelled and presented, but since UK shoppers spent (2015) £115 billion on groceries and toiletries, of which 40% was on promotions, even if 1% of those offers were misleading, that is a £20 loss per household per year. A common tactic since the rise in food inflation soon after 2000 was to reduce the product size without a price reduction, a practice known as shrinkflation. In fact, a size reduction may even be accompanied by a price rise, as when McVities dark chocolate digestive biscuits fell in size from 332g to 300g, but the price rose from £1.59 to £1.69 (Bennett, 2016). Customers often complain that they find the packaging is the same size they are used to, but the packet is now only half full. The weight may be accurately stated, and the customer can feel the weight as he or she picks the product off the shelf, but we overwhelmingly assess products by eye. Supermarkets know that people may judge visually by apparent size but are poor at judging by weight, so a lighter-weight packet does not generally alert people to shrinkflation. Deceptive packaging does not stop at half-filled bags. A common ploy is to have the product in a clear plastic sachet with a large central sleeve label, which typically covers the middle third of the packet. Then the product is presented in two halves, each pushed to the far ends of the container, but the section under the sleeve is largely an empty void. This tactic is frequently used with shrink-wrapped meat and fish slabs, where the close-fitting plastic ensures that the product stays at the ends. Rings of prawns may be packaged with a large central label, again covering a void; it is logical that the product is in a ring, but hurried shoppers have a psychological impression of a much bulkier product. A further deception is to have the product looking much more attractive on the packet than it ever is in reality. Pizza pictures with more cheese or salami than they ever have in the real product is a common occurrence. Of course, the shopper may eventually become aware of this and even start to boycott the product, but by then, the packaging or food range will have changed, leaving customers no wiser than before. Supermarkets may also utilize misleading price comparisons with other supermarkets, or use higher prices for a short time to give a false impression of price cuts. Other tactics include banners with “Two for £2” (when the product is on sale for £1 each), encouraging overbuying and possibly causing food waste (Nicholson & Young, 2012: 16). Food retailers may deploy a whole arsenal of confusing price changes, size changes, special offers, multipacks, larger packs at higher pence-per-weight price than smaller packs, along with a riot of bright garish colours, especially colours associated with ‘bargains’ (red, white, yellow combinations). Brands and package size ranges change frequently, along with product location within the store. The aim is to prevent time-pressed shoppers ever forming a comprehensive mental picture of what is in the store, where it is and at what price per kilogram. Even milk, a well-known KVI (see Chapter 5) can be obfuscated into a panoply of numerous sizes, types, brands and subvariants—for example, semi-skimmed, skimmed, full fat, organic, chocolate milk, almond milk, soya and so on. Retailers do not want consumers to have a reliable and dependable ‘price anchor’. Supermarkets are generally safe in these methods because this area of product promotion and confusion straddles a grey area between social irresponsibility and accepted sales tactics, and it is something the average shopper has become inured to and usually just puts up with. With all retailers using similar tactics, they have little choice anyway.
We have seen how a large range of other agencies both impact on healthy eating and may affect the CSR policies of the major supermarkets. The next chapter reviews the role some of these agencies, including the media and hospitals, as well as other locales where the state serves food, such as schools, prisons and the military, can play in promoting healthy food. By having these other agencies promoting a better national diet, the supermarkets might also be nudged into a more meaningful and healthier range of CSR initiatives.