A Tale of Two Citrus

A Tale of Two Citrus

By Dr Jeremy Mellins

A new supermarket opened in my town this morning. I was there at the doors, like a child at Christmas, and I left with a bag full of bargains and a head full of questions about the future of civilisation. Which, I accept, is a lot to extract from a discounted jar of pesto.

For those reading from outside Britain, let me set the scene, because British supermarkets are not just shops. They are social coordinates. They are postcode, accent, newspaper, and school catchment area compressed into a logo on a carrier bag. To understand what happened in my town today, you need to understand the taxonomy.

At the top sits Waitrose. We do have Whole Foods in Britain, but it's not common. Waitrose is the homegrown version; it is where you go to buy organic sourdough and a sense of moral satisfaction. Its car parks are populated with Volvos and Range Rovers. Its customers say things like "we only really pop in for the special bits." In reality, they buy everything there, because shopping at Waitrose tells the world, and more importantly, tells yourself, that you are a certain kind of person. Comfortable. Discerning. Not the sort of person who would check whether the avocados are cheaper somewhere else, because the sort of person who checks is not the sort of person you wish to be.

Marks & Spencer sits one rung below; still posh, still a status signal, but with a faintly middle-aged, middle-England respectability. "M&S Food" is what your mother buys when she wants to impress. It is reliably good and reliably pricey, and nobody has ever been embarrassed to be seen leaving one.

Then comes Tesco, the behemoth. If you want the true Walmart equivalent, that is technically Asda, which Walmart owned for over two decades and still retains a stake in. But Tesco occupies the same market territory: vast, ubiquitous, and where most people actually shop. It is enormous, everywhere, and studiously classless; it is the supermarket equivalent of a grey suit. Nobody boasts about shopping at Tesco, but nobody apologises for it either.

And then there is Aldi.

Aldi is the German discount chain that has spent the last fifteen years eating the British grocery market alive. It is the equivalent of, perhaps, a Trader Joe's crossed with a Costco, but with a cheeky charm all of its own. The aisles are wide, built for big trolleys and big shops. The products are stacked tightly, often in their shipping boxes. The checkout operators scan at a speed that borders on the supernatural.

The marketing is brilliant; Aldi's social media team is arguably the sassiest, most self-aware brand account in British retail, cheerfully leaning into its discount identity with a wit that most premium brands would kill for. Everything about the experience says: we have removed every cost that is not food, we are passing the savings to you, and we are going to be funny about it.

My town already has a Waitrose. It has a large Tesco. It has an M&S Food. It has a small Tesco Express. It has an array of independent butchers, bakers, delis, and grocers that would make a farmers' market weep. By any rational measure, we have more than enough places to buy a pint of milk.

And yet today, an Aldi opened on the site of a derelict car lot that has been an eyesore for years. And the town, or at least a vocal portion of it, lost its collective mind.

The local chat forums were largely split 2 ways. Lots of people, the budget-conscious, were delighted. However, smaller in number but louder in noise was the raucous chorus of those who said NO!

The objections, when you stripped away the polite language, amounted to this: a discount supermarket will make our town look cheap. Property prices were invoked. The "character of the area" was solemnly referenced. Somebody, somewhere, will have used the word "undesirable," though they will have meant it about the people who need it as much as the shop. The pearl-clutching was vigorous, sustained, and almost entirely confined to people who have never had to choose between heating and eating.

Meanwhile, plenty of other people, the young family budgeting carefully, the pensioner watching every pound, the student, the person who enjoys a bargain, were delighted. A new option. Lower prices. What's not to like?

I went in this morning. It was, I confess, delightful. There was a carnival atmosphere: someone walking around dressed as a giant smiling carrot, a British Olympian cheering customers at the checkouts, staff beaming, children laughing. The whole place was as well-stocked, bountiful-looking, and as cheerful as any supermarket you could hope to shop in. I picked up things I needed for less than what I would have paid two hundred metres up the road. The satsumas were just as orange. The bread was just as bready. The pesto was, I suspect, made in the same Italian factory as the Waitrose pesto, merely without the premium that comes with being displayed on a nicer shelf.

This, by the way, is the supermarket that consumer champion Which? has named the UK's Cheapest Supermarket for five consecutive years. The one that Good Housekeeping readers just voted their Favourite Supermarket in Britain. The one that won the Grocer Gold Supermarket of the Year award in 2026. It is amazing to me that anybody could object to being offered the best value in the market. But object they do …. Boy, do they object!

And this is where it gets interesting.

Because the price differences between these supermarkets are, for most products, not actually that large. A few pence here, maybe twenty per cent there. For someone on the tightest budget, those pennies genuinely matter, and I am glad they now have a cheaper option within walking distance. But for the vast majority of the people who were anxious about this Aldi, the issue was never really about money. It was about meaning.

This is what economists call a positional good. A positional good is something whose value depends not on what it is, but on what it says about you relative to everyone else. A Waitrose bag is a positional good. It says: I can afford not to care about price. An Aldi bag says: I am either struggling, or I am the kind of pragmatist who does not play status games. Both statements carry social weight. Both are, in their way, performances.

And here is the thing I cannot stop thinking about.

If people cannot handle a discount supermarket opening in a town that already has abundant food retail, if the mere presence of a budget option on a derelict lot triggers anxiety about status, about neighbourhood identity, about what it means, then what happens when everything gets cheap?

Because that is where we are heading. Not in some distant science fiction future, but soon, measurably, within the lifetime of my children. Energy is getting cheaper. Computation is getting cheaper. The things that computation touches, which is increasingly everything, are getting cheaper. We are entering an age of material abundance that would have been unimaginable to any previous generation.

And the great naive hope of abundance theory is that when everyone has enough, the status games will stop. That is when food, shelter, healthcare, and education are no longer scarce; we will all relax into a gentle egalitarian contentment, freed from the need to compete.

My Aldi has arrived to tell you: no. That is not what will happen.

What will happen is what has always happened. When one scarcity is resolved, human beings invent another. When everyone can eat, the competition shifts to what you eat, where you bought it, and what bag it came in. When everyone has a home, the competition becomes which street, which postcode, which school catchment. When everyone has a car, the competition becomes which car? The goalposts do not merely move; they sprout legs and run so far away that the referee would need a telescope.

This is not cynicism. It is an observation. I sit in my consulting room, and I watch people make themselves ill over relative position. Not poverty; relative position. The patient who is comfortable by any historical standard but cannot stop comparing themselves to their neighbour. The patient whose anxiety is rooted not in having enough but in having less than someone else. The patient who is, by any material measure, living in abundance and is miserable anyway, because abundance without status is experienced as failure.

Positional goods are not a bug in human psychology. They are a feature. We evolved in small bands where relative status determined access to resources, to mates, to survival itself. That wiring does not disappear because Aldi is selling avocados for 69p. It finds new expression. It adapts. It will adapt to post-scarcity economics just as it has to industrialisation, suburbanisation, and the internet.

(DOI, didn’t actually buy an avocado, made up this price, but you get the point)

Someone, I promise you, will take a Waitrose bag into Aldi today. They will decant their discount groceries into the premium bag before they carry them to their car. This is not a joke. This is a prediction, based on twenty years of watching human beings navigate the gap between what they need and what they need to be seen needing.

The question for anyone who cares about the abundant future, and I care about it deeply, is not whether positional competition will survive the end of material scarcity. It will. The question is whether we can design systems, cultures, norms, and institutions that channel that competition into something less corrosive and more meaningful than "which supermarket makes your town look poor."

Because right now, on a slate grey Thursday morning, with the first daffodils breaching the soil, my town has just been gifted a gleaming new shop on a site that was previously a crumbling car lot, and a significant number of its residents were treating this as a catastrophe. Not because anything has been taken from them. But because something has been given to someone else.

If that is how we handle cheap groceries, we have a great deal of work to do before we are ready for cheap everything.

The satsumas, by the way, were excellent. So excellent, in fact, that I have a challenge for you. On the blog index page, you will see a photo I took of two pieces of citrus fruit. One came from Aldi. One came from M&S. One cost less than the other. Can you tell which is which?

I'll save you the suspense: it doesn't matter. They're both just small orange fruit. But the fact that you looked, that you wanted to guess, that there was even a flicker of curiosity about which was the "better" one; that is the whole point of this post.