Bringing it home

When Tesco announced a while back that it was closing a bunch of stores I’m sure many people felt, as I did, an obscure sort of hubristic satisfaction. Even if you don’t pay much attention to their more unappealing habits, there is a vague sort of sense that companies like Tesco are the enemy. If pressed, one might wave one’s arms vaguely and mutter something about forcing suppliers prices down, or express doubt about the ethical quality of their supply chain. Also Tesco= supermarket, and supermarket = death of high st, and probably that nice little specialist food shop you like, but only go in once a year. Because you’re in Tesco.

So their increasing travails have been a low level of background mirth in my world over the last year or so. Tesco suffering? Ha, and furthermore, ha. Ohh, share price tumbling? Poor lambs. So it came as, if not a jolt, then at least something to pull one up short when I read the list of stores to be closed and discovered that the Ormskirk one sat nestled there. I’d thought it odd that it was closed when I jogged past it on an evening run, but, preoccupied as I was with a howling gale, didn’t give it a great deal of thought.
Now, I’m still not shedding tears. But it’s easy to think about a company’s problems in the abstract, but when you can put faces to it well, it’s not as simple. I didn’t often go in there (the dislike is genuine), but nevertheless you recognise people. Actual people. People who turned up for work yesterday morning and were told to go home.

And there you have it, the way it was handled clearly = evil faceless company (seriously? You let them travel to work before telling them to go home? What?). So Tesco struggling is a Good Thing. But Tesco struggling has just put a bunch of people you know that faces and voices of out of a job which is, uh, not .