How I loath supermarkets!

But the problem is we still go to them at least once a week so all that is written in this post is so hypocritical.

(I’ve hated them for a while now but I guess I don’t hate them enough to handle the inconvenience of not using them, what with both myself and my wife working full time blah, blah blah, excuses excuses.)

 I thought that I loathed them because of the way they are destroying local shops, how every one looks the same so that no town seems to have an seperate identity etc etc. But then today I had reason to visit a producer of  pure farm produced apple juices. You can picture the story, gave up one job, sold up moved to the countryside, pressed some apples by hand and sold the juice at a farmers market, got bigger, invested, worked hard.

Now in talking to this chap I realised why I loath supermarkets. He began by selling his apples to supermarkets but soon felt that he had to stop because the only thing they were interested in was apples that were all the same. Same size, same shape and same colour. They had NO interest in taste or smell. Why I hear you ask! Because that’s what the public want the supermarkets say. Is this TRUE? Do you all want identical fruit, vegetables whatever, do you all have no interest in taste?

Anyhow this guy wasn’t going to put up with this so told the supermarkets to shove it. Stopped selling apples to them and sold them only at farmers markets, and moved the resultant surplus into juice production. Now has a thriving juice business as more and more people want local, pure juices.

The other major problem I have with supermarkets (this is turning into a rant) is the way that they take on these local farmers as suppliers, set impossibly high specifications and impossibly low prices then build the business with the particular farmer until he is beholding to the supermarket and then ask for yet cheaper prices. Result farmer operates uneconomically or loses his livlihood.

By the way the apples at this farm looked like apples, none were identical to any other one, they tasted great and smelt great and the juice tasted great. 

End of rant.