Anton Savage: When it comes to supermarkets, the worse they are, the more we like them
The Irish may have high standards when it comes to restaurants, hotels and bars, but when it comes to supermarkets, we’re happy to settle for miserable experiences.
Originally published in the Business Post.
In the 1980s, rich Irish people would travel to New York to shop. Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue were all filled with exotic merchandise we poor micks could only dream of.
In the intervening decades, globalisation brought the world to our doorstep. Not only can we now buy the exact same merchandise here: much of it we can get without even leaving the couch, thanks to Jeff Bezos.
We have become accustomed to world-class retail, and we’ve become accustomed to having the best standards of everything on our little island. Restaurants, hotels, bars and beauticians: if it has anything to do with our capacity to indulge ourselves, we have the best of it. With the weird exception of supermarkets.
We lag behind the world in supermarkets. Well, specifically, we lag behind America. It’s as if all the Catholic guilt we used to attach to matters carnal had nowhere to go in modern Ireland, so we applied it to grocery shopping. The more miserable, barbed-wire-in-the-underpants-Opus-Dei we can make the experience, the happier we are.
Dedicated shelves? No, far too flashy. Just leave the stock in the cardboard it shipped in; that’s all we deserve. Friendly staff? Not for us humble peasants. Just give us sullen, hassled shelf-stackers who appear to be on a permanent Bluetooth headset call with someone more important than we could ever be.
Someone to collect our trolley when we’re done with it? God no, just hold us to ransom so we re-stack the thing you lent us so we could buy your products in your shop.
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