{"id":20223,"date":"2013-05-11T09:05:33","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T14:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20223"},"modified":"2013-05-11T09:05:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-11T14:05:33","slug":"britains-latest-wave-of-snobbery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/05\/11\/britains-latest-wave-of-snobbery\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain&#8217;s latest wave of snobbery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bigissue.com\/features\/columnists\/2341\/tesco-has-saved-us-drudgery-local-shopping\" target=\"_blank\">Brendan O&#8217;Neill<\/a> examines the worldview of the supermarket-hater:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A malady is spreading through the leafier bits of Britain. It\u2019s causing fevered thinking among its sufferers, who can\u2019t even walk down a high street without experiencing distressing symptoms: cold sweats, anger, an urge to shout rude things at dumb shoppers.<\/p>\n<p>Their ailment? Tescophobia, an irrational loathing of Britain\u2019s biggest supermarket.<\/p>\n<p>A certain tranche of the middle classes hates nothing more than the sight of a Tesco store. Except perhaps the sight of Tesco patrons, whom anti-Tesco author Andrew Simms snobbishly describes as always looking \u201clistless and depressed\u2026 slumping from place to place\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It is nothing more than thinly veiled class disdain for the plebs:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But there\u2019s a reason Tesco and other supermarkets have been a roaring hit: it\u2019s because they\u2019ve made people\u2019s lives, especially women\u2019s lives, so much easier.<\/p>\n<p>Remember when we had to traipse from shop to shop almost every day of the week just to have enough grub and stuff to live on? I have vivid memories of going shopping with my mum, accompanied by my five brothers, back when supermarkets weren\u2019t as common as they are now.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019d go to the butchers, the bakers, the greengrocers, the corner shop, packing our wares into tatty bags and dragging them home, before having to do the same thing again in a couple of days\u2019 time because the foodstuffs sold by small shops didn\u2019t tend to last long. The arrival of the supermarket revolutionised all that.<\/p>\n<p>Suddenly, everything you might need or want was under one roof. A family larder could be stocked in the space of an hour, where once it was a never-ending task. How much of mankind\u2019s, or rather womankind\u2019s, time has been freed up for other pursuits by the spread of Tesco?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brendan O&#8217;Neill examines the worldview of the supermarket-hater: A malady is spreading through the leafier bits of Britain. It\u2019s causing fevered thinking among its sufferers, who can\u2019t even walk down a high street without experiencing distressing symptoms: cold sweats, anger, an urge to shout rude things at dumb shoppers. Their ailment? Tescophobia, an irrational loathing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,831,74],"tags":[159,907,43],"class_list":["post-20223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-business","category-food","tag-shopping","tag-snobbery","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5gb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20223"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20225,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20223\/revisions\/20225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}