Thirty years ago we would shop in local Town Centres. We’d visit the local butchers, greengrocers, wander around the open market and if we felt rich we’d have an amble around the local furniture and furnishings store. Once a month we’d catch the bus, or if we were lucky, drive our car to the local superstore. As most towns only had one, we didn’t have a choice which one to visit.

Once at the supermarket, we’d pass native British vegetables with angled mirrors above them to make it look like they had more stock. We’d pass fruit and salad where the most exotic items on display were dates and pomegranates and maybe once a year they’d get a shipment of blood oranges. We’d wander around fridges chilling two brands of yoghurt, two types of sausage – either beef or pork and glass bottled milk from a local farm. The widest choice came in cheese where there would be up to ten different types and two of them would be foreign. We’d walk down aisles with Tate and Lyle sold straight from the pallet and passed rows of tins where the total foreign food offering was the ingredients of our Saturday Tea Time Spag Bol.

UK Lion Rock Mart : United Kingdom Oriental Supermarket  Then we’d proceed to the twenty deep check-out and not complain about the half an hour wait, we’d talk to our queue neighbours and be more concerned about our little ones begging for one of the delights temptingly on display next to the cash register.

Then perhaps twenty to twenty-five years ago the Supermarkets realised they could sell more than just food. They started to sell clothes, electrical goods, tools, kitchenware, records, videos and plants. Supermarkets became bigger and the shelves became wider to accommodate the ever-growing selection of brands. In the yoghurt chillers there were now varieties aimed at the health conscious, dieters, children, the older generation and babies.

The nations passion for cookery programmes and celebrity chefs accelerated the foreign offering and the supermarkets merrily began to stock high margin fruits, vegetables and sauces from all four corners of the planet.

Supermarket owners became bigger and bigger and the cleverest ones gobbled up most of their competitors. Super Store groups that had been around for generations, either fell on their swords or had their fascia changed to reflect new ownership.