Andrew Gilligan: Small Shops Are Cheaper

“BABY: nothing yet,” declared the blackboard outside Dring’s butchers in Royal Hill this afternoon. For me, it said it all about how local shops, local shopkeepers – and their families – give something to a community that supermarkets never can.
 
One of the most popular things my newspaper, the Standard, has ever done (apart from helping to stiff Ken Livingstone) is its campaign to save small shops – and Greenwich is amazingly lucky to have somehow held on to many of the sorts of shops that have been swept away elsewhere in London. They’re part of the lifeblood of the area. Their stock is more interesting, they do less damage to the environment and the money we spend in them goes back into our area, not into corporate shareholders’ pockets and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands.
 
Yet the one killer argument for small shops we never thought to make – the one we simply assumed wasn’t true – is in fact true. In Greenwich at least, small shops are often cheaper.
 
We’ve all been conditioned to believe that supermarkets offer value for money. That was, of course, their proposition when they started up: pile it high, sell it cheap. But now that they control three-quarters of the grocery market, things are a little different.
 
Yesterday and today, on your behalf, I spent a couple of hours comparing the prices for groceries at my nearest supermarket – Somerfield, in Greenwich High Road – with those in my nearest collection of small shops – those on Royal Hill. I admit to being surprised by the results.
 
The small shops, as you might expect, offered produce better or equal to the supermarket’s. But they were also remarkably competitive on price. In around half the cases, they were cheaper; most of the rest of the time, they were within a few pence.
 
On fish and meat, the quality and choice at Drings and the Fishmonger (round the corner in Circus Street) was far higher than at Somerfield, but the prices mostly lower. Free range lamb chops at Drings were £5.99 per pound. Non free-range lamb chops in a sad plastic box at Somerfield were £15.40 a kilo (£6.98 per pound.) Free-range pork chops were £2.99 per pound at Drings. At Somerfield: £4.89 per kilo (£2.21 per pound), for non free-range in a plastic box.
 
Somerfield barely seems to have any fish at all, but the one comparator I did find – mackerel, again in a little plastic box, was £9.84 a kilo at Somerfield against £6.99 a kilo for fresh mackerel at the Fishmonger.
 
Supermarkets have scored in the meat stakes with pre-prepared ready meals, but Drings caters for this market too. It has a rosemary and garlic chicken breast for £2.15 and a thyme and garlic chicken thigh for 75p – both substantially cheaper than their closest equivalents in Greenwich’s ready-meal king, M&S.
 
On fruit and vegetables, the Creaky Shed in Royal Hill charged 20p for an orange (Somerfield 32p), 25p for a lemon (36p), and 39p for a pound of cooking onions (Somerfield 45p). The small shop was more expensive on grapefruit (50p to 46p), apples (30p to 9p), and potatoes (88p/lb, Somerfield 45p).
 
On eggs and packaged groceries, the Royal Hill mini-market again beat Somerfield on most prices, and came very close on others. The list (compared yesterday):

Now it is true that Somerfield, the only general supermarket in central Greenwich, may to some degree be exploiting its position. Most prices at my closest large store, Tesco in Lewisham, beat the local shops – though even then, not by very much at all, and there are still some goods that are cheaper in Royal Hill. When you add in the cost of petrol, parking and time, the difference amounts to very little indeed.
 
So the question arises: why do we blindly flock to supermarkets, with all their queues, when it would be quicker and often cheaper to use small shops? Partly that false perception that they are better value. Partly habit. Partly, perhaps, their general shininess. We are greater suckers than we’d like to admit for bright lights and polished metal surfaces. And it is true, too, that though the supermarkets fall down on the quality of their fresh foods, like fruit, meat and fish, they offer a much wider choice of enticingly-packaged snacks and junk.
 
All of these are simply terrible reasons for choosing supermarkets. But what my little survey suggests is that Greenwich customers aren’t, yet, as price-sensitive as they should be. People just chuck things into their trolleys or baskets without noticing what they cost. As the economy slides, however, more people will be looking at the ticket on the shelf.
 
The small shops could, I think, do more to woo us. They could take credit cards; not all do at present. With the honourable exception of the Royal Hill mini-market (daily till 10), they could open later – the butcher’s started putting away its stock today soon after 4.30. Some of them could do with a better range; the selection of goods in the minimarket is quite downmarket for this area, though to be fair the supermarkets have sweetheart deals to  monopolise some of the best brands.
 
Above all, though, they need to find some way of making us aware of the fact that they actually offer extremely good value for money.