Supermarket forces will drive us into the grave

A donation of £500 for a skateboard ramp gives the illusion that capitalism with a human heart is here

Tate Liverpool has come up with a thoroughly contemporary idea for its latest exhibition. It is to celebrate the art and culture of that great central pursuit of modern life, shopping. The surrealists are there, deploying shop-window mannequins for freakish expressions of erotica, as are the futuristic visions of Lichtenstein, Oldenberg and Warhol. At the end of the exhibition, one will reach Damien Hirst's famous, if somewhat over-exposed, Pharmacy and, summing up the mood of the moment, Barbara Kruger's I Shop Therefore I Am.

It all sounds thoroughly worthwhile, but I fear I shall not be making the journey north to see it. Like many others, I find it easy to experience the effect of mass shopping on the human soul by the simple expedient of stepping into the grim, strip-lit cathedral of mass consumerism that is my local supermarket.

Most people, probably in order to stay sane, close down their aesthetic sense and human curiosity while being fed through the production line of supermarket shopping. They ignore the other dead-eyed zombies shuffling their way down the aisles as if being led by the trolleys in front of them, their minds fixed on the week's special offers. Just now and then, a shock of real human life – a row between man and wife, a child reacting badly to the shopping experience, a brief moment of consumer mutiny – breaks through the trance. But most shoppers ignore it, moving in a tranquillised daze to the checkout queue. Here, confronted by an exhausted, hollow-eyed employee behind the till, a brief moment of human contact is experienced, but anything more than a hurried "Hi" or "Busy today" will mark you out as an eccentric time-waster.

For most of us, this dehumanising process is an unavoidable part of the weekly routine. That great, unquestioned contemporary good, competition, and its attendant lie, consumer choice, have seen to it that, in most parts of the country, the daily essentials of life can only be acquired from an outlet owned by one of the mighty supermarket chains.

Month by month, the pockets of resistance to this process are eliminated. As rural post offices find it increasingly hard to make a profit, the supermarkets stand ready to step into the breach. When the Office of Fair Trading announced recently that buyers of pharmaceutical goods deserved more choice, the local chemist's shop, one of the few remaining areas where shopping has a human face, moved into the firing line. Soon that, too, will go the way of the grocer, the butcher, the hardware store, the village shop.

Almost unnoticed, a handful of highly profitable corporations have taken up a central position in national life. In my part of East Anglia, for instance, the news that the Safeway chain was up for sale made front-page headlines in the local paper. It was a development that "heralded a new shopping era" for the region, we were told. The only question was which way we would go – upmarket with Sainsbury or downmarket with Asda.

Without spelling it out explicitly, these reports confirm the sombre fact that here the supermarket is now the undisputed focus of the local community. Whether there is a local Tesco or a Morrison, an Asda or a Waitrose, it defines an area's style, image and personality.

This is a depressing, even sinister, development. The relationship that these organisations have to a community is simple and brutal: they want to make as much money out of it as possible. They care nothing for local interests, rarely if ever support local businesses and care only about local transport inasmuch as it effects the flow of customers through their doors.

Aware that a few sensitive souls might worry about their increasing power, they field smiling PR agents with every new development and takeover to trot out the usual rubbish about consumer care and choice. Bogus, dishonest campaigns are mounted in support of the very farmers whose livelihood their increasing power threatens. Attention-grabbing campaigns for school computers, or a donation of £500 for a skateboard ramp, or a condolence book following the latest high-profile murder or death in the Royal Family provide the illusion that here is capitalism with a human heart. On their media appearances, the chairmen and chief executives of these ruthless, greedy organisations like to describe themselves as "grocers" as if, deep down, they are just a good-hearted, red-faced bloke behind a market stall of King Edward potatoes.

Who knows where it will all end? Perhaps one day, in the not-too-distant future, the super-grocers will be in a position to cater to all our consumer needs, providing a brightly lit one-stop shop from crèche to funeral parlour. What a triumph for consumer choice that will be.

terblacker@aol.com