I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

Hi. I see you're new here. That's cool. To find out what this site is about, please read this page. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. It's free, you won't receive any spam from me (like, ever), but more importantly: you'll never miss a single word. Thanks for visiting!

Organic. Free range. Whole foods. Whole grain. Five-a-day.

None of that stuff matters.

Putting aside that it is, of course, all complete and unsubstantiated rubbish, the notion you are, or could ever be, measured simply on the basis of what you put into your mouth is as outdated as the idea that Linux will ever have more than two or three per cent of the desktop market share.

Eat what you like. All that really matters is where you buy it.

Consider the supermarket where you do most of your shopping. And then see where that places you on the list. This is who you are.

(NB: If you’re one of those odd people who shops around and has an even split over two or more supermarkets, you can still work out where you stand. Make a note of the number of each store as per the list above, and then average it. Round up or down and that’s where you should actually be shopping.)

18. The Garage

Cons: Drunks, junkies, terrorists, mentals, hookers (really, really ugly ones), Ginsters pies, 85p cans of Coke
Pros: As long as you pay in advance, they let you drink the petrol.

Oh come on - who shops exclusively at their local garage? You? Scum!

17. Corner Shop (aka Happy Shopper)

Cons: Drunks, junkies, terrorists, mentals, hookers (really ugly ones), paying above the odds for already expired food, bread that lasts about four hours (at £4/loaf).
Pros: Good collection of top-shelf material.

You’d have thought that in these heady days of at least four Tesco Express’ on each and every street that the humble Corner Shop would have long been killed off. But no - like some kind of virus, they seem to be getting stronger, rebuilding themselves with new and indestructible strains that are impervious even to Tesco’s evil charms.

16. Londis

Cons: Drunks, junkies, terrorists, mentals, hookers (ugly ones), paying above the odds for already expired food, bread that lasts about four hours (at £2/loaf).
Pros: None.

Londis is kind of like the posh Corner Shop, inasmuch as haemorrhoids are like the posh anal warts.

15. Spar

Cons: Drunks, junkies, mentals, hookers (hideous ones), paying above the odds for already expired food, bread that lasts about four hours (at £2/loaf), one till serving forty people (thirty-nine of which are doing the lottery, and you).
Pros: There’s usually a kebab shop nearby.

Spar is the world’s largest food retailer, with over 15,000 shops dotted around the globe. Fifteen thousand, making 26 million euros in 2006 alone. That’s a lot of White Lightning.

14. Iceland

Cons: Millions and millions of chavs, junkies, winos and worse (old people).
Pros: None, unless you’re the kind of person who equates a £1 microwave curry with the word ‘result’.

That’s why mums go to Iceland? Yes, uber-chavvy, gold-hoop and Wonderbra wearing single mums, with a cheap pay-as-you-go phone always on the go (where do they get the money for credit!? Oh yeah…) and three kids with names like Kylie, Britney and Callum, all by different fathers (of mixed race, and jail terms).

13. Co-Op

Cons: Chavs, drunks, violent nutters who’ve clearly just got out of prison - and that’s just the staff.
Pros: Alcohol is cheap and plentiful, and they don’t mind you drinking it outside the front doors.

Co-Op is the largest convenience store retailer in the UK. In October 2002, they bought (and killed off) the bankrupt Alldays, thus eliminating Spar’s only real competition, and dumbing themselves down in the process. The thing is, Co-Op as a brand was already pretty retarded, and no matter how much money they chuck on their ‘good for food’ promotions, the only thing they’ll really ever be good for is six cans of Tenant’s Super for a fiver at 10.55pm on a Tuesday. And then having somewhere to kip.

12. Lidl

Cons: Chavs, drunks, the local mental, obnoxious staff (who, to be fair, are treated like slaves), Germans, other foreigners. And they charge you for bags. And trolleys.
Pros: Lidl’s fresh produce is actually not half-bad.

It’s a truism that if you could develop some kind of mechanism that would, at any given point, kill everybody who was shopping in Spar, Iceland, Co-Op and Lidl, you could end most of the world’s problems.

If you want to see scum, check out your local Lidl. It’s a shame, really, as Lidl’s fresh fruit and vegetables are actually quite good. However, their German imported filth is anything but. They seem to have bizarre alternatives for British standards, like tins of plankton instead of tuna. And it’s not in spring water, either.

Lidl also has extremely dubious staff policies. The Guardian reported that the company spies on its workforce with cameras, makes extensive notes on employee behaviour, particularly focusing on attempting to sack female workers who might become pregnant and also forces staff at warehouses to do “piece-rate” work (which is now illegal in the EU).

In March 2008 the German news magazine Der Stern came up with a cover story reporting covert, systematic surveillance of Lidl workers, including the most intimate details of their private affairs.

Lidl management denied all the charges, but did not press charges. Ho hum.

11. Aldi

Cons: Not as cheap as they make themselves out to be.
Pros: It’s better than Lidl. Just.

Aldi is like Lidl’s faux-superior, preening older brother, kind of like the way Noel Gallagher is to Liam. Of course, at the end of the day, they’re both cunts.

10. Somerfield

Cons: Overpriced, poor range, TV commercials totally suck.
Pros: It’s somewhere for smelly people to go.

Somerfield tries to promote itself as a hybrid of value and decency. It thinks of itself as slightly posh, kind of like an upmarket Iceland. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s the downmarket Budgens, i.e., it doesn’t get much better than students and old people.

Somerfield also has questionable business practices, pulling out of the Ethical Trading Initiative in 2006. This means that that horrible chocolate chip muffin you’re eating was made by the dying hands of a 9-year old Indonesian cripple.

9. Budgens

Cons: Overpriced, poor range, old people as far as the eye can see.
Pros: There’s half a chance it’s high on Al Qaeda’s ‘soft target’ list.

Budgens is awful. Poor, overpriced food and because it seems to have a clientele with an average age in the high 70s, is consumed by the smell of death on each and every aisle.

8. Tesco

Cons: Most of their own brand is rubbish. Bakery is the worst of all the major retailers. Chavs as far as the eye can see. Their value range is possibly Satan reincarnate.
Pros: Cheap. You can’t walk half a mile without passing at least three. And no matter how empty it is, they always seem to have about seventy tills open.

Tesco is far and away the largest British retailer (both by global sales and domestic market share), with a 30 per cent share of the UK grocery market (which is about the same as Asda and Sainsbury’s, its nearest rivals, combined) and rakes in about £2 billion worldwide per year.

But can they make a decent loaf of bread? Can they fuck.

7. Asda

Cons: £1 trolleys. Which means chavs and thieves.
Pros: Cheap, decent range.

Who steals a trolley? Who? Who is that lazy and/or retarded that taking the trolley home seems not only sensible, but worthwhile. I blame Johnny Knoxville.

6. Morrisons

Cons: £1 trolleys. Chavs, but less than Tesco since Safeway was vanquished. No matter how busy it is, they only ever seem to have about four tills open.
Pros: The best bakery of the ‘big four’ by a country mile.

When Morrisons completed a takeover of Safeway in March 2004, literally millions of chavs had to find a new home. Some stayed, but most moved on to Lidl and Tesco. Morrisons is actually a half-decent store. The bakery is exceptional - if you don’t agree, you haven’t eaten their fresh bread (or you’re an idiot) - and they have a reasonable range at good prices. The in-store butchers are okay, too.

But those bloody £1 trolleys. They make me want to hurt people.

5. Sainsbury’s

Cons: Can be expensive. Jamie Oliver (avoid the meat tongue.)
Pros: Great bakery and meat selection. Own-brand food is the best of the big four. The trolleys rule.

Recently a huge, fuck-off super-Sainsbury’s opened down my way and it really is the best thing ever. Everything about it is huge, but not in a tacky, Asda/Toys R Us way. Even the trolleys are bigger than normal. This is very exciting.

Sainsbury’s is, of course, quite posh, and always has been. “I shop at Sainsbury’s”, you say, and all your Tesco/Lidl/Garage-loving friends gaze up at you in awe and fear, wondering how you possibly afford it with your part-time job at the local Scope.

4. Marks & Spencer

Cons: Expensive. Food only ever seems to last about two days, and virtually nothing can be frozen. Even the frozen stuff. Too many old people.
Pros: Great quality. Good own-brand wine.

If Sainsbury’s is ‘posh’ in the supermarket/retail world, M&S is just that little bit posher. Okay, it’s not as marvellous as it was back in the glory days of the 1980s, but if you do all or most of your shopping at M&S chances are you’re either (a) very, very old or (b) loaded. And probably a bit of a snob.

3. Waitrose

Cons: There’s only about three in the entire country.
Pros: It’s good stuff.

“Quality food, honestly priced”, is how their slogan goes, and that’s pretty much it in a nutshell. It’s not cheap - far from it - but it is good. The problem with Waitrose is finding one. Okay, so given that their entire business practice is based on targeting the upper middle-class it makes sense that you can only find them in posher areas, but the nearest one to me is 15 miles away. The wife and I have to plan trips there like some big fancy day out, like going to bloody Disneyland, passing four Lidls, two Sainsbury’s, one Asda and sixteen Tescos along the way.

2. Selfridges

Cons: Very expensive. Bit of a round-trip if you’re not a Londoner.
Pros: They let you try everything, and then you can run off without spending a penny!

There’s only one Selfridges that really matters, and that’s the one in Oxford Street, which is the second-largest shop in the UK, and dates back to 1909, don’t you know. The sheer scale of the place is a bit of an alien experience if you’re some out-of-town country hick (like me). It’s horrendously pretentious, sure, but the food halls have to be seen to be believed. You can sample whatever you like over a period of a few hours, and because the produce is so unbelievably rich and fancy, you won’t have to eat again for several months.

1. Harrods

Cons: Far too posh for you (sir).
Pros: You have to pay £1 to get into the toilets - and you’ll want to.

Harrods is the single largest store in the United Kingdom. It’s massive. Fuck-off massive. Over one million square feet of selling space on a 4.5 acre site. Imagine what Lidl could do with that.

Harrods motto is Omnia Omnibus Ubique — All Things for All People, Everywhere, but that’s a load of old balls. Harrods is so far beyond posh that if you go inside and even begin to think of it that way, an alarm goes off and several very-polite security guards will escort you to a free taxi outside.

Harrods has 330 departments, 328 of which sell things by brands you’ve never even heard of. Not that it matters as you couldn’t afford anything anyway, and as soon as you step inside an alarm goes off and the floors kind of move and shift and before you know it you’re back on Brompton Road and the doors are locked.

Harrods is so fancy, if you visit the website, it scans your browser history for words like ‘Tesco’ or ‘Hotmail’ and if it finds a match, re-routes you to Selfridges.com.

Harrods is, in short, not for you, so if you’re actually maintaining that you do most of your shopping there, you’re lying. And you know it.

So behave, and I’ll see you in Sainsbury’s.