We had some excitement this week, I can tell you. For the past few months we’ve been putting up with the dulcet sounds of JCBs, wrecking balls, generators, pneumatic hammers, etc. as they’ve been knocking down a couple of buildings next to us and in their place they’ve constructed a Lidl superstore. I kid you not. A Lidl, right next door to us! It’s got a blimp marking the spot and everything.
The German team who put the store up – where was the support for British labour there? – did so in record time. Just up the road they’ve been trying to widen a roundabout for about four months, and we’ve had the main road through town closed for the best part of six months while some sort of repairs are underway. The Germans manage to completely level and clear a building site, lay a 70 odd space carpark, and construct a supermarket, in about 3 months, regardless of the weather and using floodlights to get the job cracked. They announced the opening day before they’d even got the roof on, and everything ran like clockwork.
Now I’ve got nothing against Lidl, but when it opened on Thursday this week I really couldn’t see what the excitement was all about. At the end of a day, it’s a supermarket. There’s a Co-Op supermarket just up the road, and within a mile there’s a monster Asda megastore on the outskirts of town. ‘Our’ Lidl shop is puny in comparison.
Despite the manager apparently saying that it was fairly quiet when they opened – what did you expect at 8am? – very soon the word got round, and by 10am there were queues of cars waiting for the overwhelmed car park to empty so that they, too, could enter some sort of Lidl induced shopping frenzy. This queue lasted for the next 10 hours.
While I could understand what the attraction is if they were giving away colour TVs, I didn’t really understand this. Economic doom and gloom abounds, yet here it seemed that Lidl had a licence to print money. It’s no wonder that they’ve planned a 50 store expansion in the next few months. They couldn’t have planned this at a more perfect time.
The only downside that I can see, aside from the almost adjacent Co-Op supermarket having to raise its game, is that I can just see that there’ll be hundreds of people out there with all sorts of food in their cupboard, and they won’t have a clue what it is as the label will be in Greek or some other foreign language. All that matters is it only cost them 5p and the picture on the label looked like something edible.
Fantastic.
