English supermarkets, food tastes, economic laws & good performance

Tesco is celebrated as a model for retail success in Europe. Just as the McKinsey study which showed (paid subscription required) how Wal-Mart made significant contributions to American productivity growth, Tesco is also held up on two strategic anchors: unbeatable prices and supermarket convenience.  So when Tesco opened a shiny, new supermarket in a small town, Dominic Prince of Spectator decided to investigate. The results are counter intuitive to say the least! To paraphrase the article, not only was Tesco 43% more expensive than the neighbourhood store, it took one-third longer and the quality was way bad compared to the fresh produce from local stores.

As Dominic Prince says,

The results of my experiment were pretty obvious — we are all being done. We are being misled, brainwashed, cheated, and we don’t even know it’s happening. The trick has yet to be exposed, but there is nevertheless a very clever marketing trick being perpetrated and we are all the victims of the rip-off. The food writer Joanna Blythman has just written a brilliant exposé of the supermarket culture pervading the country. Her book, Shopped, should be required reading in every household, but you’ll have to make a little effort to get it, as the supermarkets won’t stock it. In it she argues that Britain has surrendered control over what we eat to a few powerful chains that can dictate not only what we put on our dinner plates, but also how much it will cost us to put it there.

I started to wonder why does this happen in UK? Then, I remembered an article by Paul Krugman that I read way back about English food and the laws of supply and demand.

...The appreciation of good food is,quite literally, an acquired taste--but because your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn't demand one. And because consumers didn't demand good food,they didn't get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass. And then things changed. Partly this may have been the result of immigration. (Although earlier waves of immigrants simply adapted to English standards--I remember visiting one fairly expensive London Italian restaurant in 1983 that advised diners to call in advance if they wanted their pasta freshly cooked.) Growing affluence and the overseas vacations it made possible may have been more important--how can you keep them eating bangers once they've had foie gras? But at a certain point the process became self-reinforcing: Enough people knew what good food tasted like that stores and restaurants began providing it--and that allowed even more people to acquire civilized taste buds.

What is the connection between supermarkets, quality of food and delivering good performance. Good performance, like good food, does not happen by chance. It has to be acquired painstakingly. It has to be demanded, encouraged and continuously monitored with regular feedback. The process by which, English food went from bland, tasteless and greasy fare to the current excellence, needs to be employed here too. This can happen only when teams get a taste of excellence by first in small tasks that are meaningful and then gradually bigger and more important jobs. Once a team member achieves that flow, he or she will never be content with mediocre results or efforts. 

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