A few weeks ago, the Tesco a playing field away from my house re-opened with a new look and a Costa café. The new look seems to be simply the re-situating of the booze section to the middle of the shop, so you now have to pass by the beer offers before getting at frozen foods or cleaning products. And the eggs have been put somewhere so unlikely – and of course miles from other staples like milk or bread – that the staff laugh or frown when you ask where, they have to answer so often.
Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.
But the Costa. That’s changed everything.
This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.
Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.
One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.
I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.
{ 33 comments }
P O'Neill 10.19.11 at 1:47 pm
Ireland’s ingenious scheme for bringing Costa to otherwise coffee-shop starved rural areas is to locate them near small towns, if by “near” you mean In The Tolled Motorway Service Station that Bypasses The Town. Thus, if you’re driving from Dublin to Galway, you can go to Costa when you seem to be in the middle of nowhere. If you actually live in the town, you can drive to the Costa but pay the toll and not expect to see any locals there … or just hope that the local non-Tesco market has a decent coffee for the coffee press and have it at home.
straightwood 10.19.11 at 2:08 pm
At some point, the cost of engineering highly realistic astroturf exceeds that of growing grass. The mega-corps have not yet grasped that it would be cheaper to subsidize the formation of intrinsically attractive urban environments around their properties than to synthesize attractive social environments inside big box stores.
In America we see the surreal phenomenon of upscale chain restaurants, elaborately costumed with aged facades, brick sidewalks, and antique decor, dropped randomly into mega-malls where their neighbors are vast parking lots and featureless warehouse stores. One has the sensation of walking through a bad dream, where comprehensible things are mingled with the nonsensical. This is not a psychologically healthy way to live.
ajay 10.19.11 at 2:15 pm
The mega-corps have not yet grasped that it would be cheaper to subsidize the formation of intrinsically attractive urban environments around their properties than to synthesize attractive social environments inside big box stores.
If you really think you could cause an attractive urban environment to form around an out-of-town supermarket for (estimate cost of Costa) £200,000, then be my guest…
straightwood 10.19.11 at 2:35 pm
If you really think you could cause an attractive urban environment to form around an out-of-town supermarket for (estimate cost of Costa) £200,000, then be my guest…
As long as all of the economic incentives have an 18-month horizon, of course this approach is infeasible. But if governments provide incentives for corporations to locate in “re-urbanization” zones and if the corporations subsidize the positioning of local independent businesses, this can be accomplished. Just as corporations can grow and distribute organic produce, they can catalyze and promote organic urban regeneration. It is all a matter of incentives.
ajay 10.19.11 at 2:54 pm
Oh, I’m sure it’s possible. Just not cheaper.
geo 10.19.11 at 3:11 pm
a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend
Depends on the human, of course.
J. Otto Pohl 10.19.11 at 4:11 pm
Well I suppose a Costa is better than nothing just as in American suburbs a Starbucks is better than nothing.
William Timberman 10.19.11 at 4:11 pm
For no particular reason, this story reminds me of Century City in LA, or stories I read decades ago reporting on the workers who built Brasilia but couldn’t afford either to live there or buy a bus ticket back home to the joblessness they’d left behind, and so built their favelas in a ring around the city, much to the dismay of the regime who’d brought them there.
People have a habit of avoiding giant graveyards studded with 50 story monuments spaced a quarter mile apart, lacking so much as a single angel or gargoyle, and connected only by high-speed motorways with off-ramps. Adding lots of grass just intensifies the effect. Ozymandian ruins the moment they’re completed, even if some of them do sport an occasional park bench and half-hearted fountain.
Urban planners talk a better game these days, of course, and some even manage to do more than talk — in the U.S. we have Portland, OR, or San Francisco’s decision to clear away the collapsed Embarcadero Freeway and build a park where it had been — but still…. Soulless environments may nurture the occasional alienated poet or filmmaker, but I’d guess that mostly they trigger suicides. (No, I can’t quote any statistics, but I’m sure somebody somewhere is collecting them — gents in the Propaganda Ministries, most likely.) Pfui, Teufel!
patrick 10.19.11 at 4:32 pm
The thing that kids complaining about identikit chain coffee stores like Costa don’t remember is just how awful most coffee was in Britain before they arrived (I’m leaving Starbucks out of this because I’ve always found their filter coffee has a weird aftertaste I don’t like).
Yes, some of the big cities had great coffee shops (I’m an Edinburgher, I still mourn the loss of Common Grounds) , but in your average small town, before Starbucks and Costa, there was a transport caff selling instant coffee in a styrofoam cup.
Watson Ladd 10.19.11 at 4:42 pm
Of course sprawl has everything to do with corporations, and nothing to do with where people want to live… If people want to live in the city they stay there. If they didn’t want to move to the suburbs, developers would have no one to sell houses to.
Charlie Stross 10.19.11 at 5:31 pm
Hyper-local question — where in Edinburgh is this unholy hybrid Tesco/Costa’s? (Enquiring Edinburgers want to know …)
Maria 10.19.11 at 5:41 pm
geo – as someone who’s spent the last 2 days buried in financial projections for a company that doesn’t exist yet in a market that doesn’t exist yet, my bar for acceptable human interaction is pretty low!
Charlie Stross – it’s in Colinton. I will happily shout you a coffee there any time.
straightwood 10.19.11 at 6:01 pm
Of course sprawl has everything to do with corporations, and nothing to do with where people want to live…
Right. Corporations had little to do with the depopulation and destruction of most American inner cities. They had little to do with tearing up the streetcar lines and burning the streetcars. They had little to say about constructing the US interstate highway system. They were simply responding to consumer preferences.
On a Sunday afternoon, you can stand on a sidewalk in downtown Lansing, Michigan and see what a small American city looks like after it has been struck by a neutron bomb. This is how corporations helped meet the needs of their delighted customers: they expedited the economic collapse of most of our cities.
Remember, a corporation cannot be evil, because it is a moral zombie, simply staggering along, seeking profit, indifferent to anything but making money by serving its customers. Thus the corporation can never be held accountable, because it is merely obeying the wishes of fallible people who should know better than to poison, bankrupt, and alienate themselves.
MPAVictoria 10.19.11 at 6:03 pm
“Of course sprawl has everything to do with corporations, and nothing to do with where people want to live… If people want to live in the city they stay there. If they didn’t want to move to the suburbs, developers would have no one to sell houses to.”
The reason I might have to move to the suburbs is because I can’t afford to buy house/condo in the city core because everyone else wants to live here as well. :-(
Daragh McDowell 10.19.11 at 6:04 pm
Reading this passage I can’t stop seeing a broken Winston Smith nursing a tumbler of victory gin…
Maria 10.19.11 at 6:34 pm
But I’m so much happier now!
Barry 10.19.11 at 8:22 pm
straightwood 10.19.11 at 2:08 pm
” At some point, the cost of engineering highly realistic astroturf exceeds that of growing grass. The mega-corps have not yet grasped that it would be cheaper to subsidize the formation of intrinsically attractive urban environments around their properties than to synthesize attractive social environments inside big box stores.”
Control.
TheSophist 10.19.11 at 9:15 pm
My sympathy for your formerly Costa-deprived existence, Maria, was greatly mitigated by the discovery that you live in Colinton. My godparents live there (Westgarth Ave, to be precise) and whenever I visit (not nearly as frequently as I would like, given that I eke out my living in Phoenix, AZ) I am struck by the genteel beauty of the place. It has hills, it has bullfinches in the back yard, there’s buses to the city centre every 10 minutes, and the view…the view from up by the reservoir…
And I, too, would willingly stand Charlie Stross a coffee at the Costa any time (or at Hava Java in Phoenix, if he ever comes that way)
Cheers!
Bruce Wilder 10.19.11 at 9:31 pm
patrick @ 9
These things come and go. I’m old enough to remember the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), a supermarket chain, which, in the 1950s, was one of the largest business corporations in the world, as big (proportionally to GDP) as Wal-Mart is today. At the core of its original business model was fresh ground coffee, which was more than pretty good, and, not incidentally, made their stores smell wonderfully. Its Eight O’Clock coffee was the best selling coffee brand in the world in the 1940s.
William Timberman @ 9
I used Google Maps to track down a streetside picture of this Tesco, and it, indeed, looks even more soulless than it sounds. (In L.A., the same Brits are assaulting us with Fresh and Easy, which, predictably, is neither. The joys of globalization; doesn’t everyone long for a Trader Joe’s, complete with tattooed former rock roadie at the cash register?)
I wonder what you read about Century City. I had dinner there at Rock Sugar, a weird Tamil/Burmese/Thai Buddhist temple of a restaurant with one of the best martini’s I’ve ever had. Neither the architecture (interior design really, since this is all inside a reinforced concrete block) nor the food had a true, identifiable origin, though both were delightful.
The Grove has been enormously successful, and looks like nothing so much as Hollywood set — maybe, the town square in Back to the Future, only with an enormous parking garage hidden next door.
Straightwood @ 13
Maybe, people just want simulacra, with parking, and corporations are just the “people” to give it to them?
JW Mason 10.19.11 at 9:52 pm
one of the best martini’s I’ve ever had.
I would have thought that a martini was one of those things where to be good is to conform to standard, so there’s no upper tail — a martinis is good precisely because it’s identical to any other good martini. No?
Tim Wilkinson 10.19.11 at 10:29 pm
Well, do you think that applies to gin?
straightwood 10.19.11 at 10:35 pm
Maybe, people just want simulacra, with parking, and corporations are just the “people†to give it to them?
Maybe the people want “New York” and “Paris” as interpreted by Las Vegas, rather than the authentic environments. Maybe they want a diabetes plague sustained by the junk food industry. Maybe they want to see simulated zombies dismembered and gutted on their TeeVees. Maybe they want to be impoverished by predatory student lenders. Maybe they want to be stripped of their savings in casinos. Maybe they want to be charged $40 for each item of carry on luggage they bring on the airplane. Maybe people prefer ugliness, cruelty, deceit, and predation to beauty, kindness, honesty, and generosity. Maybe corporations are the heroic champions of democracy, and their critics are totalitarian ideologues.
Maybe not.
guthrie 10.19.11 at 11:36 pm
The developments around Edinburgh have made driving to shop almost compulsory over the last 15 years, probably the earliest being the Gyle centre, with the nail in the coffin being the development of Ikea and that stuff round the Musselburgh side of the bypass, I can never recall the name.
Of course if we actually had decent planning regulations at the time or well enforced ones (cough Caltongate Cough) there might have been more attention paid to the local shopping aspect of it all. Although to be honest a lot of the new suburbs around Edinburgh were nucleated around villages anyway but if you lived at the far end you would end up a mile away, and since the developers have been filling in the gaps in the greenbelt over time you will easily end up a long way away from local shops in the newer builds.
Watson Ladd 10.20.11 at 12:11 am
And comments 13 and 14 contradict each other. If urban living is preferred, firms would attempt to offer it to compete with the suburbs. 14 indicates it is, while 13 says it isn’t. Make up your minds!
William Timberman 10.20.11 at 12:42 am
Bruce Wilder @ 19
Century City I know well, or rather did in the Eighties. I remember a tatami-room dinner at a sushi joint much like the place you describe, followed by a nightcap at the revolving bar atop the Bonaventure downtown. (Neither were my idea.) I remember asking myself, Who in Hell do I think I am, and why on Earth did I agree to spend an hour in a glass frisby 20 stories up in a burg this close to the San Andreas fault? Am I Richard Branson?
MPAVictoria 10.20.11 at 2:16 am
“And comments 13 and 14 contradict each other.”
Watson two different people made those comments.
Walt 10.20.11 at 4:55 am
MPAVictoria, you know perfectly well that all opinions have to be approved by the Central Committee. Watson caught commiting a clear case of deviationism. Please report to the Rehabilitation Center for corrective measures.
Bruce Wilder 10.20.11 at 6:50 am
WT@25 My prior on any restaurant with a view is that, having a view, it will not feel a need to serve really first rate food. Next time you are living the high life in lala land, try the Water Grill.
JW Mason @ 20 There are two views on martinis. One says that it is, properly, gin leavened with vermouth, in close proximity to an olive. The other view is that a martini is alcohol in a martini glass disguised as a sweet breath of arctic air. In the first instance, shaken or stirred, a martini can only be as good as the gin. Enough said. In the second instance, one is free to employ vodka as the distilled spirit of choice, and so quality may take wing and creativity soar. Or, a clown show. ymmv
ajay 10.20.11 at 9:31 am
22: “Maybe they want to see simulated zombies dismembered and gutted on their TeeVees. ”
Well, I do for one. Also aliens, orcs, and underground goddam monsters.
Barry 10.20.11 at 12:08 pm
Watson Ladd: “And comments 13 and 14 contradict each other.â€
MPAVictoria: ” Watson two different people made those comments.”
Watson’s not to big on that whole comprehension thing, or liberal perversions such as facts.
MPAVictoria 10.20.11 at 1:47 pm
“MPAVictoria, you know perfectly well that all opinions have to be approved by the Central Committee. Watson caught commiting a clear case of deviationism. Please report to the Rehabilitation Center for corrective measures.”
My mistake Walt. Is the Center still located under that inactive volcano shaped suspiciously like a skull?
Pete 10.20.11 at 5:52 pm
@24: people want a big detached house with a garden that’s close to where they work, shop, and go out, while far from things they don’t like, at a price they can afford. Everyone solves this problem differently.
Thomas Beale 10.24.11 at 5:53 pm
Ok, it’s off-topic, but I can’t help pointing out that Tesco’s self-checkouts are the other way round from Sainsbury’s. As someone who never shops at Tesco simply due to geography, I was caught twice in recent months standing looking like the last moron in the world who couldn’t operate a self-checkout. When I finally realised that the stainless steel plate on the LEFT side at Tesco is the weighing plate… now, what genius came up with that?
And: I have also thought often about how the megacorps could simply build decent urban environment rather than giant boxes. But go to any giant box (Westfield, Shepherds Bush for example) and you see that apparently most of the population love them.
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