Tesco is the exploding giant of the British retail market. One pound in every eight spent in all shops in Britain is spent in Tesco, and its aggressive management presumably will not be content until it has replicated its cross-channel success over here, writes Kevin Myers.
So tin-hats on, chaps: the Tesco typhoon is on its way, and we should be ready to deal with it, because we have important decisions to make, and soon. At the moment, the legal maximum size of a single retail outlet is 3,500 square metres in Dublin, and 3,000 square metres outside the capital. This is billiard table stuff: the new Ikea store near Cardiff covers nearly 28,000 square metres, which is less a shop than an Olympic stadium.
So do we do go down the road of the US, the UK and France and allow the development of huge outlets? Surely that is the way forward - and also, surely, the free market solution to the challenge of delivering goods most cheaply to the consumer. Isn't that what we want - to cut costs? Moreover, don't we want the huge range of goods that you can get in French and US hypermarkets - everything from television sets to cars, to toothpaste, insurance, beds and paints? And in Britain, doesn't Tesco sell more DVDs than HMV, and more toiletries than Boots?
Actually, the "free" market doesn't solve everything. Police forces, armies, the care of the elderly - these are not amenable to pure market solutions. To be sure, you can privatise policing to a degree, as virtually every shop and pub in Dublin now does; and of course we have private old people's homes. But when market forces no longer supply what is required - care, say, for the indigent old, or the mentally ill - then the state has to step in. Any society must at a certain point make a decision about the minimal standards of life it intends for its citizens, and ideological absolutism is a poor friend in such circumstances.
So, yes, the French hypermarkets are wondrous things, but there's a price to be paid for them. Go into any French village, and you'll be lucky to see any of the little shops which remain so commonplace in rural Ireland. In Britain too, many villages have no shops at all. In the US, the hypermarket has swept all before it.
Is this not a triumph of the free market? Well, the problem with hypermarkets is that the market is not free. One of the defining features of a free market is local competition, yet the key to the survival of the hypermarket is that it almost eliminates all local competition, rather like Alexander Fleming's penicillin bacillus in its laboratory broth. What any hypermarket competes with is its nearest rival hypermarket, which could be 10 miles away or more. It does that by influencing the decision of people to get into their cars and drive a relatively large distance to it rather than to the opposition: the isochrone factor.
Hypermarkets create regional monopolies which share penumbra with neighbouring monopolies. They enclose two killing grounds. One is next to a hypermarket centre; the other is where the penumbra isochronally overlap. No newsagent, no petrol station, no sweet shop, no fruiterers, no butchers, can survive in these arid zones. And of course, the dominance of hypermarkets is totally dependent on their customers' ownership of a deep freeze and a car.
So what do we want? A vast range of relatively cheap goods from a relatively small number of huge hypermarkets? Or a rather more limited range of more expensive goods from a larger number of more convenient outlets? There's no obviously right answer. The traditional protection of small shops by the use of planning regulations in essence attacks the standards of living of young, low-income parents raising a young family, who desperately need a single, large, cheap outlet, for a single, large weekly purchase. Instead, by being denied the cheapness and the ease of the hypermarket, they end up subsidising the convenience shopping of the poor and the old. In other words, we end up organising our entire society around the modest needs of the economically least successful; which is crazy.
The hypermarket, with its dazzling food halls, and rack upon rack of cheap clothes, seems infinitely more promising. But then wander the trackless deserts of central France, with tiny, ageing communities clinging onto their shopless existence by their ageing, rheumy eyelids. Those at the very bottom of the heap - the car-less, the aged - are barely able to get to a shop at all. Worse, no shop, no stop; and small communities which don't attract visitors soon perish. Ghost villages are the growth industry of rural France.
We have huge and difficult choices to make. And most terrifyingly, the political culture which gave us Luas, the Red Cow Roundabout, our absurd restaurant licensing and our fatuous dog-muzzling laws, not to speak of our countless insane tribunals, will soon be making these vital hypermarket decisions for you. Prepare, then, to weep.
But before you do, a small point. Tesco sells own-brand rivals to bourbon and Bombay gin in its British stores, but not in its Irish ones. Why is that? Is it one of those mysteries of life, like why spiders get stuck in the bath only in autumn, and why people on offshore islands - the Japanese, the British, ourselves, the West Indians - drive on the left-hand side? Hmmm. Unlikely. So why does Tesco not sell lines in Ireland which it sells in Britain?