All Saints Church – King’s Lynn

Every little helps – is the slogan of the Tesco Supermarket chain, designed to make us believe that they have our best interests at heart -helping us to have a better quality of life.  The truth is that, during the past year, Tesco has been involved in:

• supplying customers with ’contaminated’ petrol, which caused extreme damage to some car engines
• refusing to pay dairy and other farmers a decent and fair amount for their produce, forcing some out of business 
• forced the closure of smaller shops through building more stores and monopolising the local economy – King’s Lynn has two large stores and a petrol station store
• used Radio Frequency Identification Technology to spy on customers shopping traits, as part of a plan to ‘track’ every product they sell 

Yet, inspite of all the protests, boycotts and lobbying against such practices, the company still managed to declare an excess of £2.5 billion pounds in profits and a 30% share of the retail market.

Some might say, what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, is a true enough saying, but unfortunately for Tesco at Gaywood in King’s Lynn, some people did see.  On Christmas Eve, staff were seen throwing food into black plastic bin bags.  Personally, I think that it is sad that the management didn’t contact the local churches, Hospice or Homes, either directly or through the local press, and enquire as to whether their ‘waste’ might have benefitted someone for whom every little might indeed have helped. 

The truth is, I suppose, that the produce that they buy and the manufactured products don’t cost them a lot.  Yet, was it better to throw it away, than to give it away to someone who might have truly benefitted from such a benevolent gesture?  The problem is that those who offer and sell an economy range of products simply tend to forget that there are still those who struggle on low incomes, for whom cheap is still expensive and, for whom, Christmas is as expensive a time as for those who are rich.

Every little helps - but who does it help? To my mind it is no more than a ‘cheap slogan’ for a company with a cheap moral and ethical policy – or could I be terribly wrong?  Oh, and make no mistake, Tesco’s computors for schools and free sports equipment – who do you think pays for that?  In truth, the one who is not even deserving of a free hand-out on Christmas Eve – the consumer, who saves the tokens given free (?) by a company which never stops thinking about the ways it can help us ….. because every little helps … them!