How to kill a town....

As you may know, if you read my earlier, panicked posts, I have friends coming to stay this weekend. Living in the back of beyond, as I do, this means that preparation is required. Lists must be made, menus planned and the shopping tackled. If I forget it now, that's it for the weekend unless I want to do a 30 mile round trip for milk. So this morning I headed off, list in hand, to a local town to do the food shopping.

From the new hovel I have three towns to choose from. They are all about the same distance (16 miles or so) from me. One of them has a large Morrisons, one has a Tescos, and the other has a smaller Somerfield. The last town was the most convenient today as I needed to head off in that direction in order to drop some things off at a neighbour's house.

Due to the fact that my money cupboard is virtually bare, I had done a cunning menu plan which would look as though I had gone to vast effort, whilst in fact spending very little. Or so I thought.

One small trolley later I was a HUNDRED POUNDS poorer. What? How the $?@* did that happen? I always mentally have a figure in my head for how much my shopping will cost. My worst case scenario for this one was seventy pounds. If it wasn't for the fact that I simply didn't have the time to drive the now 40 miles to the next town and back home again, I would have refused to pay. It was daylight robbery.

Shopping is getting more and more expensive, whatever they say about inflation. It's not like I was buying scallops on the shell, caviar and blinis. I was buying value chopped tomatoes, bread, milk; ordinary things. The cashier watched me go white and sway slightly with interest.

"Expensive isn't it." She commented.
"Euurgh, splutter, swoon, YES" replied I.
"They can charge what they want here, no competition see." she explained.

And that is the nub of the problem. There is no other supermarket within a good 30 miles of this one and they can charge what they like, so they do. The thing is that this is a surefire way to kill the town.

I had been to the bank, the post office and the hardware store before I went to the supermarket, as I imagine do lots of other people when they come into town. However if Somerfield doesn't get its act together people will stop deciding on that town for their shopping. They will head in the other direction instead. At that point, not only does the wretched supermarket suffer, but also all the other shops in town. Slowly but surely, it will die. All because Somerfield are too greedy.