A month in Tescoland

A brave reporter changes nationality to Tesco, here's the report of a month's 'citizenship'. Note the disorientation reported -one of the mind f***s that supermarkets use to make us more suggestible to the non-verbal and implicatory messages of their merchandising strategies. If we Christians are meant to value the renewing of our minds, then we need to develop liturgical and cognitive strategies for resistance built into our normal meeting together.

Anyway, here's a laying bare by implication of why they mess with our heads.

Competition Commission's 2000 inquiry into whether supermarkets were engaging in anti-competitive practices ... identified 27 practices by the (then) biggest five (Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda/Wal-Mart, Safeway and Somerfield) that operated against the public interest. Many involved manipulating the consumer's notion of good value. All five retailers were discovered to be regularly selling "Known Value Items" (the basic products that most consumers buy and by whose prices they tend to judge the value-for-moneyness of the supermarket's whole range) below cost, and three of them (including Tesco) to be engaging in "price-flexing", which means selling the same product at different prices depending on the store's location.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | A month in Tescoland:On Del.icio.us: supermarkets, Tesco, anti-competitive, value, manipulation, customer, price-flexing