Yes, how wonderful, our friends at the Non Economics Foundation make the news again today. Now that I’ve read a little more of their reports I can tell you that they’re really just Teddy Goldsmith’s old Blueprint for Survival in a lightly warmed up form.

Supermarkets have attracted widespread criticism over recent years,
with claims that their dominance in the retail sector has caused
thousands of job losses.

People say this like it’s a bad thing. Why? No one is seriously suggesting that people are being deprived of the opportunity to purchase items are they? No. So what we’re seeing is that the same (or better) services are being provided by the labour of fewer people. This makes us all richer as those extra people go of and do something else, produce some other good or service which we can then enjoy.

As the productivity of retail labour rises, we all benefit. So why complain about it?