Tescopoly by Andrew Simms: review

by Nik on March 4, 2008

There are many reasons to become self-sufficient. For some it’s the simple enjoyment of standing on your own two feet, while for others it’s a desire not to be beholden to the whims and manipulation of the big-chain supermarkets.

That second group would get a whole lot larger if everyone was forced to read Andrew Simms’ extraordinary Tescopoly. Bursting with stats and facts it documents the big four supermarket groups’ (and Tesco in general’s) exploitation of the market for groceries, and the harm they do to their customers, suppliers and the environment by strangling competition and forcing food producers into impossible deals.

More worryingly, though, it documents Tesco’s drive into ever more areas, wiping out whole high streets by providing everything from cabbages to cutlets, baps to bank accounts, and ready meals to medicine. Now, as it moves into providing phone services, broadband and even legal services, its power over our day to day lives gets ever stronger, and we only feed its ability to exercise this control by giving it more and more information about who we are, what we like and what we do.

There is so much in this book that is incredible, extraordinary and frightening that picking out just one quote is close to impossible, but Simms’ analysis of the supermarkets’ ability to gather such minute information on ourselves sticks in the mine, and should be enough to have us cutting up our Clubcards in droves.

With the power of Clubcard to analyse the lives of Tesco customers, this creates some fascinating opportunities for cross-selling. Remember, 60,000 different customised promotions go out with Clubcard mailings. Should the computer notice that Mr Smith is buying a lot of condoms when Mrs Smith seems to be away (indicated by a break in her regular shopping patterns), and Mr Smith appears to be buying flowers and lingere when it isn’t Mrs Smith’s birthday, it’s perfectly imaginable that Mr Smith’s next Clubcard mailing might include a money-off voucher for the Tesco Divorce Pack. This would, after all, be simple, customer driver marketing logic. From Baby Club to getting divorced to making your Last Will and Testament, Tesco will be there to take a slice of all of life’s (and death’s) key moments.

Is this feasible? Certainly.

There are around 25 million [Clubcards] in existence, representing 14 million households. Perhaps 10 million cards are in active use. This creates an extraordinary eventuality. Shortly before its fall, the German Democratic Republic – East Germany, one of the most famous police states in the world – only had a population of around 16 million. That means Tesco almost certainly holds more files on British citizens than the East German state ever held on its own people.

But of course the German Democratic Republic was very different to the UK, and it neither built up its records with overt help from the supermarkets, nor shared with them what it knew about their customers. In the UK, however, that may yet happen.

A darker twist to such surveillance technology emerged when the UK government let it be known that it planned to link proposed compulsory biometric identity cards, designed to help control immigration, to the data contained on supermakrt loyalty cards. The idea floated was to allow two-way data traffic between the government and major corporations like banks and supermarkets. Information contained on the national identity database, set up to underpin the ID card scheme, would be made available to companies for a price. In the other direction, the police could be alerted the moment someone who was the target of an inquiry made use of a loyalty card or cash machine.

You could discount a lot of what is said in this book as paranoia had Simms, who is policy director for the New Economics Foundation and coined the term Clone Towns, not backed up his facts with an impressive array of references and stats that add weight to his argument.

I’d have liked to have seen some direct response from Tesco, rather than mere reported quotes, and there is no indication whether or not the company was directly asked to contribute to the work, but this remains an important and compelling read, and one that will make you think twice, and perhaps three times before shopping at the famous red and blue store.

Self-sufficiency, then, could be about more than the simple satisfaction of eating your own produce throughout the year. It could be about preserving your own privacy, fighting for the rights of small producers and helping to save the environment.

There’s loads more about Tescopoly, and local campaigns about and against the store’s further expansion, at tescopoly.org.

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