why must every moderately successful store in the UK be immediately turned into a chain?

i.e. that place does great croissants but the bread is bad, and this place has the best lamb west of pau, whereas this place etc etc etc etc til your head splits open

yeah, sorry tracer i am talking about cambridge. and it was david gest, sorry. i didn't realise he spelt his name all funny style. he was fucking TINY

e leclerc was up and running before supermarkets in the uk btw.

nationmaster is great!

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_tea_con-food-tea-consumption

Is the issue that the French and Italians are, generally speaking, more protectionist and precious about their cultural heritage than the British?

(And with that, clusterfuck fans, it becomes a race issue as well as a class issue, oh joy)

France and Italy are a lot less "integrated" in terms of their immigrant communities, put it that way.

I'm having roast beef for dinner

Plus the English "protecting" their culture of food is a bit like American Samoa protecting their culture of football, let's be honest.
lol xp

Is the issue that the French and Italians are, generally speaking, more protectionist and precious about their cultural heritage than the British?

time for a french farmer to weigh in.

that's why this thread is not about "the good old days" vs today's bad bad world

american samoa are my spiritual bros, it's not every day you let 31 in

Zelda, to a certain extent the crowds at a hypermarket Flunch would proove you a little wrong. However you are mainly right, france and especially italy have a culture of eating out that is very diferent from that in the UK. Walk round Turin on a sunday evening and every pizzeria and trattoria will be bursting with family groups, a fair number of whom will go and sit at the same table week inweek out or atleast on a monthly basis. There is an attitude of a local restaurant being an extensions of the home. It is certainly somewhere where the tenure of restaurant property is more ownership than leasing.

On the UK side, I think that the culture of leverage is pretty strong, i.e. mortgaging your business to extend your business. The banks of other European nations have been less gung ho about this.

Weather's nicer there innit?

Well we have a similar pub culture in the UK that places like Italy generally lack and that hasn't stopped the majority of them becoming owned by massive impersonal PubCos. I suppose you can pinpoint the moment that started to Thatcher forcing the breweries to sell off pubs, though.

firkin' chain pubs, hate the lot of 'em. :D

the smoking ban hasn't helped. sometimes a chain pub gained a musty individuality through the atmosphere created by its clientele. i don't smoke myself, but i'm really pissed-off about the ban.

i don't smoke myself, but i'm really pissed-off about the ban

Oh fuck off you're not, you bandwagon jumper.

I sort of agree with Tracer to some extent. Obviously the preponderance of chains is an economic factor and the US does of course have thousands of them, but in California at least most people I know tend to shop and eat at independent businesses or community-minded local chains. I think in Britain perhaps this kind of behaviour is seen as a little precious and bourgeois but that's sort of how Britain is, sometimes.

Walk round Turin on a sunday evening and every pizzeria and trattoria will be bursting with family groups, a fair number of whom will go and sit at the same table week inweek out or atleast on a monthly basis

and the vast majority of these families will be a snapshot of urban upper middle class, much like the clientele you mainly see sitting outside restaurants in any major european city.

it's the people you don't see eating at these restaurants that may well be shopping/eating in chain supermarkets/restaurants. they're generally the majority.

"if you can eat this peperami we'll know you're not a class traitor"

"ok"

menacing guard waves peperami under nose of detainee

"ugh.. no. NO!"

* bang *

apparently carrefour is the second largest hypermarket chain in the world second only to walmart

Oh fuck off you're not, you bandwagon jumper.

The majority of my friends are smokers, and I side with them and their right to choose. No way am I a bandwagon-jumper. I genuinely prefer bars with a musty old-man smoky vibe.

Of course you do. "Right to choose"? What right to choose?

you mean the right to choose what

darraghmac takes the arg one step further: european people who eat at restaurants are upper middle class!

Choose whether to smoke or not when they're out enjoying themselves!

um, i meant uppity middle class, possibly

they can choose whether to smoke or not outside

xpost

has the thread question been answered yet?

well i'm pretty sure Tracer knows why

Also with regards to "cheap food" and "chain restaurants" being one and the same, I am a graduate student with negative income. I can't even really afford Starbuck's!

Mark - lay off, just because you're really passionate about the anti-smoking ban it doesn't mean all non-smokers share your views. (I'm saying this in an affectionate, small nudge way, BTW.)

Personally, I prefer the small shops. For reasons of quality and middle class guilt. That said, I've just done a shop at Lewisham Tesco. My boyfriend is in hospital and, like, Grimly, I haven't got a spare second right now, let alone waiting for a carrot until I can get to the market on Saturday. (Fuck waiting a carrot?) The danger is a homogonised chain of supply, suppliers prices being forced down and being stuck with standardised apples.

The other issue: when I was really poor a few years back, small shops were a God send. I could buy small amounts from loose produce, three apples, one fish fillet etc. Supermarkets only really work as the cheapest option if you're bulk buying - so if you're feeding a family on a budget, then yes, supermarkets are cheaper. If you're an elderly person living alone/ a freelance journalist who hasn't been paid in three months, shop small and local.

and i'm not going to look down on some harassed mum taking her kids in for a child-/family-friendly meal, because -- hey! -- preferring the food from the wee bistro round the corner doesn't make me some superior life-form.
No, I think it's great. Means I can have a nice meal in wee bistro without screaming sprogs smearing food on each other! That said, if I had kids I'd probably take them - just because they'll have staff who can provid crayons and the other diners will know what they've let themselves in for.

this question was answered after 1 minute- if you do something well, and are making money at it(presumably), why wouldn't you want to expand?

You can buy 3 apples and one fish in Tesco.

Also, some of us have children who behave in restaurants, whether it's a pizza hut coz it's next to the cinema or a nice wee bistro.

xp

Darragh - because the appeal of some businesses and therefore their main USP is that they're unique?

wee-bistros were the reason maddie went missing

Maddy would still be with her parents if they'd taken her to McDonalds.

Oh I'd never take my kids for tapas, it's hard enough to get them to choose one thing.

and the vast majority of these families will be a snapshot of urban upper middle class, much like the clientele you mainly see sitting outside restaurants in any major european city.

Not in my experience.

No I know that Onimo - I quite like other people's children most of the time, it was said partly in jest. But some people are quite happy to let their children run riot (some people of all classes and income levels, before we go down that route.)

As for the smaller portions thing - you can in big superstores, but in the smaller branches I've really struggled to buy small amounts. And to get to a big store most of the time you need a car. (I'm basing this on personal experience, so may not be wholly accurate.)

also, those three apples and one fish are going to cost almost exactly what they cost at the wee shop around the corner

there are plenty of shopping configs for which the whole "supermarkets are cheaper" truism is AN CANARD (i.e. i can get a litre of puglian olive oil for a fiver at my farmer's mkt and carrots at 50p a bunch)

hey another thread where we can hate on corn:

Food is scarcer now thanks to market liberalisation, which helped to cut excess production and lower stocks. At the same time demand for grains and other food commodities has shot up in China, India and other countries with rapidly growing economies. The biofuel industry is gobbling up an increasing share of the corn and sugar crops. And this year floods and droughts around the world destroyed much of the harvest in countries such as Britain, which had one of the wettest years in recent history, and Australia, which had one of the driest.

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10085859

of course that puglian olive oil is produced by african slave labour.. er eek

yeah the big-box grocery stores are only remarkably cheaper if you're buying shitty food, in my experience.

ok not to be too pejorative or classist, but "shitty" as in cases of coke, potato chips, frozen chicken, etc

in my experience, cases of coke and enormous bags of potato chips are enjoyed by rich and poor bastards alike

hmmmmmm.

yes that is my experience also

don't see as many middle-class kids eating mccain micro-chips and processed not-quite-chicken-burgers bought in frozen bulk, though, do you?

Darragh - because the appeal of some businesses and therefore their main USP is that they're unique?

yes, but to be fair business owners that know that this is their USP aren't going to expand, are they? the chain stores/restaurants that we're discussing are exactly the opposite, as are their selling points- cheap, mass marketed and (usually) predictable wares.

does it all just come down to demand? you don't see many antiques stores branching out into chains.

maybe there's a niche there......