Читать книгу The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age - James Naughtie, James Naughtie - Страница 23

When Alan Sainsbury walked into one of the first self-service shops opened by his family in Croydon, south London, at the start of the 1950s, a shopper, on being told who he was, threw a new wire basket at him in a fury. Not everyone wanted cheese wrapped up instead of being cut by a wire, nor their vegetables pre-packed. But Sainsbury knew that many did and that soon they would be the majority.

He’d been convinced in the United States. In 1949 he went there to look at the experience of shoppers in the lengthening chains of stores that were criss-crossing the country. Even before the war, 40 per cent of American shopping was self-service, the supermarkets having mushroomed through the Depression, giving people value for money and cutting out the frills, except for those sturdy brown paper bags that many of them are still reluctant to throw away. Sainsbury – ‘Mr Alan’ to the company board, which was still dominated by the family – argued that it was the future in Britain. There was scepticism. But he was given a chance to try.

Sainsbury’s had been started in 1869 as a dairy in Drury Lane in central London and had built up a big business with shops in many parts of the country. In the twenties it expanded into general groceries (and watched with interest when another company set up shop in 1929: Tesco). So the network existed. What hadn’t happened in Britain was the change to self-service. Customers still expected personal service from a person in a white coat, if it was a grocer’s, and perhaps a conversation about the apples, or an investigation into the age of a cheese.

Who owned the shop was less important. After all, about a quarter of shopping in the years immediately before the war was done in co-operatives, and another quarter in shops that were part of a chain. Small, independent retailers were cherished on every high street, but they were not the whole story. The big retailers were spreading their influence, and Sainsbury came back from America convinced that it was time for revolution: self-service shopping would take off. At that early shop in Croydon he was proved right. Despite having had to dodge the flying wire basket, he saw a shop that attracted customers like bees to a honeypot. Mr Alan had got it right, and he became the architect of the changing high street, and the retail parks that were still some way off but would change the landscape. He was the father of the British supermarket.

Sainsbury started serving as an apprentice in the family store in Bournemouth, at the Boscombe branch, keeping his name a secret. He did time in the dairy department, working for Uncle Arthur and Uncle Alfred, when it was still the rule that only members of the family could order the eggs and milk. Having known the founders – he was born in 1902, only thirty-three years after the first shop opened – he had an attachment to the firm as a family concern but made a connection between that inheritance and what would now be called social responsibility. He’d worked in a charity mission in the East End of London and in the thirties his politics were not conventional for a rising figure in a rich business family. He’d thought of committing himself to some kind of social work but eventually did the inevitable, saying his mother told him it would break his father’s heart if he didn’t.

He campaigned for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, making common cause with Conservatives and Communists in the process, and became a committed member of the Liberal Party (he would join Labour in 1945 and be a founding member of the SDP in the eighties). During the Second World War he represented the grocers to the Ministry of Food when decisions were being taken on rationing, arguing strongly for a points system, which he thought would be fair, though frugal. Everyone would be entitled to something.

That was characteristic of the opinionated zeal that Sainsbury brought to his business. There was no contradiction between producing good balance sheets for the firm and providing what he considered to be a kind of public service: decent provisions at a good price. There was always an idea around the corner that could make it happen, which is why he was so excited when he came back from the United States with his vision of aisles of deep freezers.

In 1950 the change hadn’t started. Marks & Spencer had done a trial of self-service a couple of years earlier, but was still very cautious. Shoppers, constrained by the surviving bits of the rationing regime, still preferred a butcher’s shop with sawdust and gleaming tiles, grocers who smelt of rennet and built pyramids of home-made butter on a wooden counter. Sainsbury, however, had seen the future and within a year he knew he was right.

There were about fifty self-service shops in business by the end of that year, and they spread like mushrooms – nearly 600 by the end of the decade, when Sainsbury’s had started to use the new medium of television advertising, choosing as its star product that strange new beast, the frozen chicken.

The transition had involved some risks. It was expensive to build new premises, and there was some resistance among shoppers who already started to fret about the loss of the special atmosphere in old-style stores, which they could see threatened. Perhaps there was an element of regret for the withering away of a deferential relationship between shop staff and customers, at a time when the growth in personal consumption – of greater choice – was equated with modernization and the new. Washing machines were in most homes, fridges in many kitchens, and habits had changed. In the late forties The Grocer magazine had said portentously: ‘The people of this country have long been accustomed to counter service and it is doubtful whether they would be content to wander a store hunting for goods.’ Well, now they were. Indeed, it seemed rather smart – a new way of doing things.

Looking back from a time when the wheel has turned, and supermarkets are often painted as the villains who despoil landscapes and homogenize the high street, it’s intriguing to remember how fresh and exciting the supermarket revolution once seemed. Fruit and vegetables began to appear all the year round, you could fill a freezer and live off it for weeks, like a camel and its hump. And for the supermarkets there was a bonus: not only shoppers with more money to spend, and a higher turnover in shops that could eventually sell anything, but fewer staff. They could make more money.

Alan Sainsbury was at the heart of one of the changes that made this even easier for the supermarkets. In the last of the Conservatives’ thirteen years in power, 1964, Edward Heath, as Lord Privy Seal in the government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, pushed through a measure that split his party and had caused almost as much trouble for Douglas-Home’s predecessor, Harold Macmillan, as the Profumo scandal which is so closely associated with his departure from Downing Street on health grounds in autumn 1963. That issue was the abolition of resale price maintenance, or RPM. Many Conservatives hated this decision.

RPM was a form of price fixing which meant that producers could set a price with the shops that couldn’t be undercut. Their income was guaranteed and small shopkeepers, without any of the advantages of economies of scale, could compete on level terms with the supermarkets that were now opening in every town. Ted Heath argued that competition was better and eventually got his way, in spite of the biggest backbench rebellion a Tory government had seen since the last days of Neville Chamberlain’s government in 1940. The wounds were raw, and didn’t help the party in trying to prevent the election of Labour under Harold Wilson, who squeaked in with a majority of four in October 1964.

For the supermarkets it was a godsend. They had the strength to sell more cheaply, introduce the era of the ‘special offer’, and watch the long, slow decline of the small family business that had to rely on the loyalty of customers who were willing to pay more for the privilege or convenience of walking round the corner, holding a conversation with a shop assistant and never having to join a queue of trolleys.

Within five years of the abolition of RPM, the number of supermarkets in Britain had reached 3,700 and the age of the battle between giants had begun. When Sainsbury retired as chairman in 1967, his business was established as the market leader. Tesco opened its first superstore in 1968 in Sussex, a harbinger of the future. It was nearly thirty years before it overtook its old rival, in 1995, and went on to claim a market share of more than 31 per cent. By 2006 it was able to use the extraordinary statistic that in that year Tesco’s tills swallowed up fully an eighth of all consumer spending in the whole country.

The supermarkets’ dominance had come about by the exploitation in the seventies and eighties of relaxed planning laws, which gave birth to the retail parks, and marketing techniques that allowed supermarkets to be sure that the bigger they got the more vigorously they could apply their power to keep producers’ prices down, give shoppers ever-better offers, and fill their stores with anything and everything. By the end of the century that power became controversial because it sometimes seemed to be untrammelled, sweeping away everything in its path, even infiltrating high streets with their own versions of ‘local’ stores to make life even more difficult, or impossible, for little shops without their power to sell in bulk, and cheaply. Planners, local authorities, family businesses, farmers all struggled with a balance that seemed to tilt decisively towards the big battalions. The story of the fightback on the high street would be another chapter, but the world that Sainsbury left behind when he died in 1998 aged 92 was one in which the supermarket was king.

He remembered a family firm started with capital of £100 that became the first of the giant supermarkets in Britain, and had seen a way of life transformed. He was proud of saying that part of him remained an outsider – he was the businessman who joined the Labour Party in 1945 and was never a Conservative – and he retained a strong belief that social responsibility should come with wealth. His family has continued that tradition with a notable commitment to arts and charities of all kinds. He always wanted to run a certain kind of shop. That often showed through. At the same time as he was campaigning for an end to RPM, knowing how much power it would give the supermarkets, he was fighting the introduction of trading stamps to lure customers into stores. In the early sixties he told a newspaper interviewer that Sainsbury’s wouldn’t use them. He told her, ‘You must go elsewhere for your temptation.’

Yet temptation had always been his business. More food, better quality, lower prices, and supermarkets everywhere – on every high street and in every open space that Sainsbury’s and its rivals could find, where they’d continue their endless battle for supremacy: a battle in which Mr Alan had been the first general on the field. He relished the fight, and, in his time, he won.