I HATE TESCO!

TESCO possibly RESPONSIBLE FOR UK DIABETES AND HEART DISEASE

let's get Tesco Express out of our communities

I HATE TESCO. 

Because they are doing their damnedest to ensure that the fat guzzling sugar junkies of the UK are so obese and riddled with diabetes and  heart disease that by the year 2020 the national debt will be increased three fold as we open hundreds of new hospitals with super-size beds in order to treat gastric band and bypass patients in their thousands.

This is how the problem is panning out: Tesco are cornering the market on the corner shop, it's one of their manifold corporate Treat Everyone Shitty Cause Obesity strategies designed to preserve their place at the top of the grocery hierarchy in consumer spend, regardless of the effects on the waistlines of individuals, the ugly homogenising of communities and the deplorable eradication of traditional shopping methods where butchers and bakers and candlestick makers have all but disappeared as we stroll to the 'handy' Blue and White Tesco Express to get our vacuum-packed bacon and pre-packed sandwiches.

“Yeah, but they're all doing it.” I hear you cry. “Sainsburys and the Co-op are just as bad.” But it's just not true is it? Tesco seem (and perception is nine tenths of the law) to have an Express outlet on nearly every street corner these days, they are the new Arkwrights, they seem dominant, pervasive, like that smell you get on your shoe when you've drunkenly walked home through the park late at night and stupidly taken a quick detour across the grass. The dry numbers support this, there are currently around 1,550 Tesco Expresses in the UK compared with around 600 Sainsburys Locals.

“Well, isn't it a good thing that you can get a stale Danish Pastry or a criminally over priced bag of grab n' go walnuts or a barely cooked pale baguette sticking out of a floor basket where loads of germ riddled toddlers have passed and had a squeeze, all the day? Isn't that a good thing, that you can do these things generally from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week, and only a few yards away from your Coronation Street fix?”

the problem

And there in lies the rub. That's what they really are setting out to do, administer fixes to addictions they create, plugging us in to the fat and the sugar and the booze on the way home from work just before our soap fix. We are being engineered and shepherded to perceive their locality and abundance as a good thing, good old Tesco, on your doorstep, with such great (fat riddled) ready meal choices, and “look, huge bags of Walkers Sensations only a quid, and four, yes, FOUR Mars Bars or Bountys or Snickers or every other chocolate bar under the sun, for a quid, so hey, let me get my head around this, you mean I can walk home from work, grab a cheap fatty pizza for three quid, a huge bag of crisps for a quid, and four, yes FOUR Mars Bars for another quid, so I get ALL THAT for a fiver, just 2,500 calories, and I can wolf all this down tonight, maybe with a couple of bottles of oversized deducted lager or a reduced price 2 litres of Coke AND watch Corrie? Yea, count me in for some of that!”

“Yea, but it's up to the individual to make healthy choices, you can't blame Tesco for selling it, it's your fault for buying it.” Fuck off. That's like saying to a drug dealer, “hey, that's fine mate, you stand there on that street corner, get your table out, crack, heroin, cocaine, bit 'o weed, nice big bag of Es, pile it on that trestle there, and discount it right down, make it irresistibly cheap, then off you go, no one need worry, we can trust the good citizens of Britain to do the right thing, to walk on by, to ignore the cheap drugs, four good snorts of coke for a quid, don't want it, as many Es as sweets in a tube of Smarties, and four tubes for a quid, naw, it'll never take off, no one wants that stuff.” Well, clearly that is nonsense, within a year the country would be riddled with millions of junkies. And this is what Tesco are being allowed to do right now on your street corner, sell you immorally discounted sugar and fat (read diabetes and heart disease) and no one is doing anything at all about it.

What would I do?

Well, if I ruled the world, and that is the title of this blog after all, I would simply pick Tesco up with a great big mechanical dangly claw thing and drop it into the sea, I would eradicate it from our High Streets, from our out of town strip malls, and absolutely and most crucially of all, from our suburban streets and corners. Just get rid of this greedy irresponsible corporate behemoth altogether, wipe it off the face of the Earth.

But if I had to inject an element of realism, I would firstly put a moratorium on ANY new Tesco Expresses opening anywhere, just absolutely no more of those fucking god awful Tesco Expresses! Then I would begin compulsory closures of at least 50% of their existing Express floor space. I would not allow more than one convenience store of this type in a half mile radius of any other, so, stick a pin in the map in the centre of a Tesco Express, then draw a circle with a half mile radius, no Express or Local of any kind in that area, and then where any planning permissions on the periphery of that demarcation allowed, other retail chains get first dibs (Sainsburys, Co-op etc). Just slow those bastards down, stop the UK becoming just sixty million mouths feeding at the sugary Tesco Express teat.

And if that isn't practicable? Well, we could start by legislating against those end of isles four for a pound discounted chocolate and sweets offers and crisps offers, just actually ban that type of offer and display. Give the fat and sucrose junkies a fighting chance.