Supermarket Shortcomings
A summary of some supermarket shortcomings are listed below.
- Supermarket profits go to shareholders in far away places. We want to encourage local economies where money spent in smaller stores and the Eco Market, it will circulate several times through the local community benefiting everyone, not just those fortunate to be on the shareholder register.
- Supermarkets generate a lot of waste. Most items on the shelf are already in 2 layers of paper or plastic wrapping and that's before they put it in a plastic bag. Before they reach the shelves, these items would have been packaged inside larger cardboard boxes, which in turn would have been transported on wooden pallets or large containers from their giant warehouses. In the United Kingdom, Food and packaging waste now makes up nearly a quarter of al household waste. Do we really need plastic wrap around our fresh produce?
- Supermarkets lure you into their stores by advertising some items below cost price, then, once they’ve sucked you in, they know you’ll buy lots of other things at full price. With all the bright lights, smells and advertising, they know you’ll be tempted to buy things that aren’t even on your shopping list.
- Supermarkets use their buying power to ensure the lowest prices. Lowest prices to farmers and growers that is.
- Supermarkets have been found guilty of breaching laws and regulations. In 2005, Coles Myer-owned Liquorland was fined of $4.75m for liquor trading breaches and in 2006, Woolworths fined $8.9 million for price fixing. Who knows what else they are getting away with.
- Supermarkets reduce choice. As people are lured to the cheaper prices offered by supermarkets, main street shopping strips die off, as do all the small local independent retailers, leaving the community with less choice when it comes to where they shop and the range of items available. Once local shops have closed down, people with mobility issues often find it difficult to get to supermarkets.
- Long supply chains. When you buy something from a supermarket, the product may have been traded through many entities between the producer and the retail shelf. Each entity along the chain adds their price mark-up and contributes to the products food miles. The original grower or producer only ends up with a fraction of the profit.
- Food Miles. Even food grown in the same suburb as a supermarket is likely to have been processed many kilometres away, placed on a truck and sent to a supermarket distribution centre, before being placed on another truck and sent back to the suburb where the food was grown where it will sit on the supermarket shelf. It just ridiculous. A recent CERES food miles report showed that the goods in an average Victorian food basket had travelled over 21,000 km and that only included road transportation. Imagine if the distance of the Californian grapes or cherries was included!
- Produce quality. Have you tasted a supermarket tomato lately? Unripe, pale orange, tasteless, unsatisfying. Should they be able to even call it a tomato? Need we say more.
- We'll be adding to this list shortly when we have more time. From requiring produce sellers to pay shelf space and in-store promotions to requiring produce growers to sign strict contracts and dictating what to grow, how to grow and the high level of embodied energy in many of the processed food products on the shelf, the list could go on and on.
