Supermarkets have always moved with the times. After the recession we wanted affordable luxury, so we got M&S’s ‘Dine in for two’ and its various imitators. These promised us a restaurant-quality meal and a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc for a tenner.
Well, now the times they are a-Brexit, and retail giants are adapting accordingly. Last week Tesco opened Jack’s. Partly it’s a response to the explosive growth of German rivals Aldi and Lidl. Partly it’s an attempt to create a new, patriotic shopping experience for a nation trying to go its own way.
Tesco bosses swear Jack’s is ‘nothing to do with Brexit’. But the clue’s in the name. It’s supposedly an homage to Tesco’s founder, Jack Cohen — but it’s no accident that in-store, you’ll find Union Jacks everywhere, as well as signs telling you that ‘every drop of fresh milk is British’ and ‘eight out of ten products are British’.
How true that is remains debatable; Tesco has found itself in trouble before over its ‘fake farm’ brands, with bucolic names such as Woodside Farms pasted on the shop’s cheap ranges of fresh produce. These farms don’t actually exist, and the meat and vegetables are sourced from all over Europe. Apart from the fact that Britishness isn’t — whisper it — a guarantee of quality, I’m sure I can’t be the only one raising an eyebrow at a few of their claims.
Posters in Jack’s declare ‘All our tea is blended in Britain’ — but so is almost all of the tea you can buy in our supermarkets. Cheap British milk is only available thanks to lashings of EU subsidy. What’s more, a study by the National Farmers’ Union showed Britain cannot produce more than 60 per cent of its own food, down from 80 per cent in the 1980s, and predicted to fall further after Brexit.
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