The triumph of Tesco

Deborah Ross joins her mother on a trip down the aisles of Britain’s favourite food chain

When I was growing up, my mother always went to Sainsbury’s, the Sainsbury’s on Ballards Lane, Finchley. I must have accompanied her sometimes because I can remember the marble counters, the rotating saw of the ham-slicer, turned by hand, and, strangely, hairnets. What she most remembers is that ‘for £7 a week I fed four children, one dog and a husband’. (I have no idea, by the way, how my father will feel on reading that he always came after the dog, but imagine he won’t be too surprised.) My mother was thought to be Sainsbury’s through and through. Cut her and she’d bleed orange and blue. My mother was thought to be as unassailably a Sainsbury’s person just as Sainsbury’s must have thought back then — we’re talking late Sixties and the Seventies — that it was unassailable itself.