Town & Country Planning, May 2007
Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy doesnt give media interviews very often, so it was interesting to hear him in person under close questioning from the business editor of the Today programme. And then, rather unexpectedly, skewered by him.
If you said you were going for a pint in your local, and then you drove there for half an hour up the motorway, wouldnt people think you were a bit crazy? said the interviewer.
I dont know; we dont run pubs, said Leahy, and that was the end of the interview. I imagined him glowing with irritation to have ended it on that note.
It was rather a fascinating exchange for Tesco-watchers, and since Tesco is clearly one of the great centralising forces of our time, I am one of those. But at its heart, this was a small tussle in the growing argument about exactly what local means in business.
During the days of Mrs Thatcher, it became trendy in leftist circles to gargle with the word local. Local had been anything but a radical word before that, but thanks to the emerging community movement and people like Tony Gibson in the 1970s, local was suddenly rather trendy.
Now, of course, it is much more than that. It doesnt matter how vast and impersonal an organisation or company is they still need a whiff of local about them.
There is nothing particularly new about this: I remember hearing Lord Chadlington, John Gummers brother and chairman of the international conglomerate Shandwick, using the 1970s radical catchphrase think global, act local as long as ten years ago.
But who would ever have imagined two brontosauri like Interbrew and HSBC taking each other to court for the right to call themselves the worlds local
As a customer of HSBC, I found this particularly grotesque when they closed my busy local branch in Crystal Palace, presumably because not enough of us were millionaires.
Certainly, anyone unfortunate to call them up will be put through to an anonymous call centre which could be anywhere in the world, which will then operate customer relationship management software which may or may not relate to what they want to talk about.
Tesco has not fallen for this particular vanity, but they have become aware that the word local holds some perils for them, at least while the Competition Commissions groceries market inquiry continues.
Once the commission announced they would be paying particular attention to local markets, Tesco began to worry. We can all name places like Bicester which have seven Tesco stores and not much else which must be anti-competitive. So the race was on, for them at least, to redefine local as broadly as possible.
Which is why they have put a submission forward to the commission saying that they have evidence that people regard a 30 minute journey as local at least when it comes to groceries.
If Tesco gets away with this, we might as well kiss goodbye to most of the grocery retailing that makes places distinctive, but it was quickly pointed out that you could drive from Liverpool to Manchester in 30 minutes.
On a good day, I can certainly manage the outskirts of London to Basingstoke. Everyone must have similar examples.
It would clearly be ludicrous to accept that definition, and if it wasnt that I have some concerns about thinking of the Competition Commission I would assume they would reject it.
Even the present 15 minute journey seems rather steep: one group of consumers may regard a dash by car in that time as local. Others, the elderly in particular, might only manage to get to the other end of the high street in that time.
But that leaves us with the original question: can you define local?
Im not sure you can very easily for legal and competition use. But for me, I do think there is a useful rule of thumb which politicians might adopt.
It is the catchment area of your home within which it is possible to have a network of human relationships with the people who run business. Not just one or two, but an interconnected network.
Local is a human thing. When it stops being so, and gets to be some kind of strange Tesco-inspired abstraction, it loses all meaning.
Which reminds me. I need to walk to the end of the road to buy a pint of milk from my local shop while its still there.