Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24919 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 372 pages

Andrew Marr, BBC Radio 4, Start the Week
'Very passionately, very well written, very well researched.'

John Bird, founder of the Big Issue and local-shop loyalty scheme the Wedge Card
`Simms shows the creeping, invading unsustainable world of the
supershop, its tentacles strangling the life out of our communities. Read
it.'

Alain de Botton
`What should be done about Tesco? Many critics want the place
banned and hemmed in by regulation ... But ultimately the real trick is not
to ban such places, but to create different desires in consumers, to reach
a situation where people are sufficiently sensitised to the drawbacks of
Tesco or Macdonald's that they won't want to shop there.'

Customer Reviews

A Rant with a Strong Thread of Common Sense
Like many of this book's reviewers, I think Andrew Simms started out with a conclusion and then researched facts to fit it. The book is unashamedly biased, heavily anecdotal and at times descends into little more than a rant.

However, some of the wider arguments in the book are plain common sense, and difficult to dispute regardless of which reseach you choose: Supermarkets are too big and powerful; They use their power in abusive ways; They suck the life out of communities; The oil-dependent logistics behind their operations are a study in lunacy.

The book is well written and engaging. If you take it with the pinch of salt that any politically savvy reader should, you will enjoy it thoroughly and will probably still want to change your shopping behaviour afterwards.

Terrible
This book is terrible. I have the same political orientation of the author, but I believe that writing something so vainly full of rants, personal musings and cheap populism is actually damaging to our cause. I had to reach page 143 before finding any interesting facts and by then I was on the verge of total boredom. If you want a serious, thought-provoking anti-globalization book, buy The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein instead.

So bad it almost inspires pro-Tesco thinking
This is nothing but left wing propoganda. No reliable sources, no economic insight, no apparent thought process. Please dont buy it, its painful to read. Who the hell sources himself? no credibility, nothing. Take the list of things Tesco need to do towards the end... number one, reduce market share in all areas of business to under 8%. how the hell are you to implement that? Please, please dont buy.