ChristopherWhite.info

The Guardian reports, under the hysterical headline “Tesco nears complete conquest of UK”, that the supermarket chain’s purchases of stores on a couple Scottish islands leaves the Harrogate postal-code area as the only part of the UK without a store.

They write:

The retailer has faced accusations that it has a near monopoly of the UK grocery market, with protest groups forming across the country.

But such accusations are mainly nonsense.

Yes, there’s a Tesco in my postal-code area. However the nearest one is 5.63 miles away from me. In the same radius there are, among others:

• 9 Co-ops
• 5 Sainsburys
• 2 ASDAs
• 1 each of Morrisons, Somerfield and Iceland.

And that’s clearly not a monopoly.

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Though I did watch a bit of last night’s X-Factor, I can’t remember if the god-awful MacDonald brother are still in it. If they are, then it can’t possibly be on talent. There’s more chance of somebody buying Oranjeboom because they actually like it, and the best thing about Oranjeboom is you don’t have to piss it yourself.
Read Charlie Brooker’s Screenburn columns in the Guide with saturday’s Guardian for a criticism of the awful brothers much better than anything I could write here. Brooker puts their continued particpation down to Scots nationalism.

I would, for once, have to disagree. I think they’re beneficiaries of their name.

Ok, it’s spelled differently - but it sounds identical to a certain fast food chain whose advertising can be best described as “prolific”.

It is too hard a stretch to imagine that viewers hear “M(a)cDonald” and vote for them nearly automatically because they’ve conditioned for approval of the name - especially among the demographic that votes for X-Factor contestants[1]?

Maybe it’s time to anonymise the contestants.

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1 I nearly wrote “proles” or “plebs”, but I’m not sure how acceptable it is to do so even ironically.

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