I went to Tesco today. I know they can be very annoying in many ways, and I have been highly critical of them in the past, but they better than Waitrose at some things (or at least Asian ambient food), and I wanted chapati flour. I don't know how much of a difference it honestly makes to the finished product using a bag of something labelled 'chapati flour' and not just normal brown wholemeal, given it's all wheat, but I thought I'd rather have chapati flour. Why start by compromising on the ingredients more than you have to? They sell big bags of basmati rice too, much bigger than we would ever need and presumably aimed at the catering trade, and I noted for future reference that they stocked gram flour, which is ground chick peas. I didn't buy any without a definite plan of what I was going to cook with it, but it was useful to know that I could get some if I needed to. Ditto coconut milk, which at 95 pence per tin is approximately half the price you'll pay in Waitrose (I think. Knowing the price of milk is one thing, but tinned coconut milk isn't a known value item that readily trips off the tongue).
There was a little gaggle of small children by the fish counter, wearing miniature brown Tesco tabards with a slogan that they were learning where their food came from. I thought that on that basis they shouldn't really have been at a supermarket fish counter, but down by the waterside at West Mersea or Harwich watching the fishing boats come in. Though to give a fully rounded picture they'd have needed to watch some supplementary footage about salmon farming, the environmental effects of bottom trawling, the destruction of the south east Asian mangrove forests to make way for shrimp farms, tuna by-catch, and the use of slave labour in the Thai fishing fleet. My faith in Tesco's educational enterprise was further undermined when the woman behind the fish counter held up a laminated sheet of A4 on which was printed the word SCOLLOPS.
I was mildly puzzled that the checkout was decorated with what looked like fake snow, thinking that Christmas was coming earlier than ever, when I spotted the plastic spiders and remembered that Halloween came first, so the fake snow must have been fake cobwebs. They were black, life size and jolly realistic, at least to a non-arachnologist (which is a real word according to Wikipedia). I didn't mind them myself, being quite kindly disposed to spiders, but thought that if you were phobic about spiders you might find them upsetting. It's a common phobia as phobias go, and I mentioned as much to the woman on the till, as she was wearing a badge saying Team Leader, but she said that while she agreed with me and didn't like them herself, the matter was Out of Her Hands. Oh dear, I'm afraid that Tesco really do have a long way to go. Staff are a retailers eyes and ears that can tell management what customers grumble about, and maybe what they like, and a good store manager should use their shop floor staff to find out what the great British shopping public thinks of them. Especially when they are in as deep doo-doos as Tesco are.
Addendum I didn't care for the severed foot by the brochures for pet insurance and loans, but maybe that's just me.
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