Lidl By Lidl (13 November)

The people of Campos have never known anything quite like it. They’ve finally got a supermarket, or at least this is the impression one gets. I confess to not being intimate with the details of supermarkets in Campos and its neighbouring Ses Salines, but one shopper was reported as saying that she wouldn’t any longer need to trek off to Al Campo.

I do rather suspect that there were already other supermarkets, but what there wasn’t, was a Lidl. There now is. And the astonishing thing is that every time a new Lidl store opens in Mallorca, it becomes not just a news event but also an occasion of such magnitude that, as with the opening of Lidl’s Alcúdia store in October last year, it is comparable to days of yore when the train first arrived.

The Campos shop is number thirteen in a series of twenty Lidls that will be dotted about the island. Slowly but surely, little by little, Mallorca is succumbing to a process of Lidlisation; Germanic commercial empire-building. Well, it makes a change to the Chinese emporia I suppose.

Lidl has benefited from relaxations to land rules that have permitted greater commercial property development. While the rest of the economy stumbles along, the supermarkets are booming. With their value for money, they are to be welcomed, though their impact in terms of employment is only quite small; the Campos store apparently received 3,000 CVs for the 30 jobs on offer. Mallorca, as I quoted recently in a different context, that of tourism, is getting itself more, but not so many, McJobs.

Despite feeling that Lidl wasn’t breaking entirely new ground in propelling Campos into the modern shopping era, the excitement surrounding its arrival does remind one of times past when there certainly weren’t such things as supermarkets. I can’t speak for Mallorca, but the supermarket first came to town some time in the mid-60s. It was a Sainsbury and it offered a whole new self-service and time-saving mode of shopping for the upwardly mobile housewife that its previous store hadn’t.

The old Sainsbury was a place of personal service and lengthy queues. It was also a place that was so outmoded that its walls were decorated with enamel dark-green tiling. If it hadn’t been for the cheese, the loose tea and the pound of sausages, it could have been mistaken for a public lavatory.

Back in the day, and prior to the moment the Sainsbury family was good enough to cash in on the new consumerism of the sixties, shopping was distinctly inconvenient but was, courtesy of shops’ quirkiness and even smells, infinitely more inclined to leave an impression than the monotony of the modern-day barn.

Just two of these shops in our local village were Underwoods, the ironmongers, a general store packed to the gunwales with all manner of rubbish and which had an alarming and potentially disastrous smell of paraffin and paint-stripper, and the grocers, that owned by Mr. Cutt.

It was Mr. Cutt’s misfortune to have a garage that backed onto our garden and my sandpit in particular. It was doubly unfortunate that, rather than brick, it was made of far from substantial wood. The temptation for a seven-year-old hooligan with a nicely sharp-edged spade was way too great. Thus started my vendetta with Mr. Cutt, one that was to take in my stories as to our flopsy, who did mysteriously disappear one day, being served up on his meat counter and to the awful things he actually did with his bacon-slicer.

It was probably as well that we moved not long after but also a shame that I had come to be barred from the shop, as that bacon-slicer was always a point of fascination. And the smell of bacon was what hit you as soon as you entered the place. It was the evocative smells that contributed, pre-supermarkets, to what were old curiosity shops.

The point is that in Mallorca you don’t have to ever go into a supermarket. Everything still exists in a way that it did in deepest Surrey in the early 1960s. Some ferreteria are just like Underwoods. Stocked to the rafters, ramshackle and utterly mad. There are delis by the ham loads. And then there are the markets.

Little by little, the Lidls and others take it all away. I’m not complaining. But, inconvenient or not, the individual shops retain the character, the quirkiness and the smells that transport you back decades. Just for one day perhaps, forget the supermarket and do these individual shops in the local towns. But if you see any rabbit … .

White Heat Of Technology: Mallorca’s future

There are thirteen new commercial projects in Mallorca, the consequence of the raising of the moratorium on their building. Let’s all celebrate. Evidence of recovery, evidence of confidence in Mallorca as a place to invest. If only.

What are these projects? They are ones being undertaken by Mercadona and Lidl. Ever more supermarkets. The others are a commercial centre and a Chinese-bazar hypermarket. Why not add a few more? All McDonald’s, and then the picture would be complete and appropriate. “McJob”, low-paid employment and short-term construction work on commercial buildings that rise up quickly. The new projects are not evidence of a suddenly reinvigorated economy. They are the opposite: a response to the economic crisis-led demand for lower prices.

The director-general of trade at the Balearic Government’s trade and industry ministry believes that these projects represent a “good rhythm” of investment. They are not unwelcome, but equally they are not diversification or wealth-generation. Their arrival has more to do with the ending of the moratorium than with real investment. Moreover, they can be seen in the context of what has been happening to the island’s industrial estates. New ones come along, and are under-utilised, while old ones are abandoned by smaller businesses because of high rents or are given over to car showrooms and entertainment centres. Mallorca’s industrial, manufacturing and skills base is marginalised in favour of the unnecessary and frivolous.

The trade and industry ministry should be looking for investments beating to an entirely different rhythm to those of groceries and the fish and meat counter. The need for diversification away from the unsustainable tourism-centred economic model of Mallorca is, to be fair to the ministry and to the government, understood. A strategy for innovation and development is reaping some benefit, as evidenced by the number of businesses that have sprung up on Palma’s ParcBit technology park. Taken as a whole, they offer new employment opportunities and the prospect of business growth. Mallorca’s hopes of becoming a Silicon Valley or a silicon beach are fanciful, but this is not a reason not to follow a technological future.

The quest for an economy in Mallorca not so dangerously dependent upon tourism has been too long in the starting. The seduction of tourism has been understandable, but it has been proven to be built on the sands of shifting tourist demand and international competition. Its dominance has also reinforced the hugely unsatisfactory six-months-on, six-months-off work culture, itself unsustainable. The service model, based on tourism, supermarkets, the plethora of lawyers and architects and any number of unproductive public-sector pen-pushers, is not a solution for the long-term. A far greater mix with technology and industry founded on new technologies has to be the way forward for Mallorca.

To this end, there is some good news. In Inca, a company called Vent Illes is due to start production of wind turbines for the generation of electricity. It will create thirty jobs. Not a huge number, but it’s something. It is also indicative of the development of technology founded on local resources and know-how. Wind is very much a resource, but the Vent Illes turbines require very little wind. They are designed with the constraints caused by a limited resource – land – in mind. They are practical for locations where colossal wind farms would be untenable: other islands, for instance. It is the one eye on export possibilities that makes the Vent Illes scheme particularly interesting.

The home market, that in Mallorca, is too limited to offer local technology companies the scope for expansion and for creating significant employment opportunities. They need to be export-driven, just like Mallorca’s most successful businesses, its world-class hotel chains, have, irony of ironies, exported tourism know-how to competitor destinations.

The hope is that the incubation of new-technology businesses in ParcBit, together with the likes of Vent Illes, creates a momentum towards the clustering of further businesses, thus establishing a dynamic which, while it will not completely transform the economy, will at least send it down the road to a more diverse future. It will be one predicated on what Mallorca can do well, such as marine technology and its export, and it will mean far more than the few months of tourism employment or being a shelf-stacker at a new commercial project.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

I’ve Had A Lidl Time

The traffic was unusually heavy. There were balloons and bunting. A grand occasion. Somewhere new was opening. The day that Lidl came to Alcúdia.

It must have been like this when the railway first came to town. Victorian women in Sunday-best bonnets and Victorian gentlemen with top hats and stout canes, an image courtesy of period dramas. Flags hanging along the platform and small children holding their ears against the noise of the steam-engine.

They were holding their ears against the honking of horns by drivers attempting to exit from car parks: Lidl’s one side of the main road, conveniently right opposite the longer-established one by the Magic roundabout. The art of traffic planning. It was of course nothing like the arrival of the train, except in there being a mêlée of people (and cars) and in there being the curiosity of a populace, thrilled by the appearance of modernity and some shiny new commerce to confirm that Alcúdia had indeed been connected to the outside world.

Since the colonisation by hotels, there have been only sporadic new arrivals – a civic building here, a swimming-pool there and even the occasional newer hotel. But Lidl is something different, not least because its time has been so long in the expectation and anticipation. Every year for donkey’s years the karting was going to disappear and Lidl was going to rise from the tarmac and tyre-enclosed track. So long and so certain had been the coming of Lidl that maps had even started to show it, before it had been approved let alone built.

After years of is it or isn’t it, suddenly this summer the ground was being cleared. Telecommunications engineers were among the first on the scene. Discussion in bars centred on the construction itself, the pillars and beams, the prefab sprouting of slab exteriors, the apparent absence of any notice on the wire fence around the building site which might have made clear that it was indeed to be a Lidl. Everyone knew that it was going to be, or thought they knew, but there were competing theories: a hotel or a supermarket from a different chain.

As it did become clear, so then the discussion turned to when. When would it open? “I’ve heard November.” “No, I’ve heard January.” “Can’t be. It’ll be sooner.” Lidls rise up very quickly, and as its shape became more and more apparent and more and more obviously Lidl-esque, the chatter increased in its excitement. “Lidl is coming. Lidl is coming.” Only over at Eroski, with four supermarkets in the town, was the excitement probably less palpable.

What finally clinched it was the re-classification of land, the land on which Lidl now stands. No sooner re-classified, no sooner built upon. Lidl has appeared, if not overnight, then over not so many nights. And the grand opening was well heralded. “Nueva apertura” flyer-newspapers filled letter boxes or were stuffed into the persianas of the houses without a “buzón”. Mallorcans are never ones to miss out on an inauguration, especially if it requires giving the place the once over of approval or affords the opportunity for a social gathering.

“It’ll be ok,” someone said. “How do you mean, ok?” “Although it’s German, Lidl that is, the land’s owned locally.” “So if the land hadn’t been, then it wouldn’t have been ok. For the locals, that is.” “Probably not.” “That’s ridiculous.” Except it isn’t, when you consider that it is not unheard of for a Mallorcan restaurant to be vetoed if the chef isn’t from the right part of Mallorca.

So it was as well for the grand opening that the locals could attend, confident in the knowledge that beneath every German supermarket there is some corner of a former karting track that is forever Alcúdia. The wait had been long, more than just a little time. It was like the arrival of the railway and it was maybe the best next thing. Lidl has been some years in the coming, but the railway has been over 70 years in the building. And it’s not still not arrived.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

What A Waste

It has long been something of a mystery quite why the local supermarkets are so liberal with their giving-out of plastic bags. Go to your nearest Eroski and at the check-out you will end up with four or five half or quarter-full bags of groceries when one or two would do the job equally as well. Not for much longer though. Perhaps. Eroski has produced a 20-page booklet all about reducing the number of plastic bags and energy efficiency. There are two “savings” to be made in the form of a “win” for you and a “win” for the environment. The booklet seems to be on recycled paper, which is just as well. The company’s director of social responsibility tells us on page five that Eroski is going to make it easy for us all to save the world (well, he doesn’t quite use those words, but whatever). For any bag not used, the customer gets a discount of one centimo. That should get everyone rushing to the store. 

 

How do they figure out how many bags you don’t use though? As I say it has been common to get several more bags than one actually needs. Do they have some means of calculating – by volume of sales – the resultant discount if one hacks along with a shopping trolley or reusable bag (bags) instead? “No, I think this lot’s worth a three centimo discount, not just the one. Come on, hand it over.” 

 

This environmentally correct approach is all well and good, but there is also the slight matter of all those plastic bags that are used to gather fruit and veg to which are attached those sticky-backed labels with the bar code and price, assuming you know that this is the procedure. They can’t be much cop when it comes to landfill either. Anyway, the huge incentive to not now use the bags at the checkout will probably lead to an increase in the sales of rubbish bags, as the checkout bags, especially when they are doubled up, have long been an alternative to actually buying rubbish bags. But the latter are at least eco-friendly in that they don’t give off toxic gases when burned, or something like that.

 

On leaving Eroski, 20-page booklet stashed inside one of the checkout bags, there was a noticeable pile outside the front doors. A pile of newspapers, bundled and tied up, just left there. How many? Fifty, a hundred maybe? It was a pile of “Euro Weekly’s”. First time I had seen them at the local Eroski for some fair while. Erratic is the distribution one might say. But more importantly, what was going to happen to them? Who knows? Maybe they get turned into Eroski booklets about the environment.

 

To a different environmental matter. No sooner has the golf course in Muro seemingly run its course as an eco-cause célèbre than up pops another affront to the town’s environment. It is the curious case of the Son Perera finca on which there has been some earth moving in readiness, or so it is being alleged, for a go-karting track. GOB, those noble defenders of Mother Earth, had “denounced” this work to the town hall which has now paralysed it, saying that there is no licence for the development. What is extraordinary about this is quite how anyone can apparently set about converting what is protected land and hope that no-one might notice. A go-karting track is pretty conspicuous, or would be were it to be built. 

 

 

Alcúdia – Day of the Tourist

Well it must be said that this was a pretty good effort. Hats off to the town hall. A rather attractive Danish girl by the name of Nana who works in one of the local hotels told me that those hotels participating get the teams organised, which did at least settle one of my questions. As to other questions, such as what is the point of all this, I refrained from putting them to the chiefs of the tourism department who were talking with rather concerned expressions into mobile phones like Conservatives during an election-night kicking. Quite why they seemed concerned I was unsure, unless they’d got wind of news that the Michael Jackson tribute lined up for the evening had taken his tribute rather too far. 

 

It was pretty obvious, though, that not all the beachgoers yesterday morning had any idea what was going on, but the music booming from the step and aerobics stage, the footy and volleyball games and all the people wandering around in “Fun 4 U” t-shirts would have given them some idea. I now know what this is all intended as – it is a major promotional campaign for the town hall’s tourism website. Not that anyone’s told me that, but as all the t-shirts have got the address on, then one would presume that it is at least an element of “the day”. 

 

But it was good. And fun, funnily enough. 

Mother, Mother

On the forum for thealcudiaguide, there was a question about supermarkets and which fiesta days affect their opening hours. I suggested that there were only two,  during the main season, that meant they closed for the whole day in Alcúdia – Pedro and Jaime. There are, of course, the other holiday days that you do tend to forget. Like yesterday. Mother of God, it’s another fiesta. And that was it. Mare de Déu de la Victoria that is celebrated next to the hermitage in the mountains above the town of Alcúdia. I knew it was the fiesta, but I had never cottoned on to the fact that it affects openings. Oh yes it does – banks closed, chemists closed, some shops and offices closed, supermarkets (the main ones) closing at two in the afternoon. How inconvenient is all this? I only realised all this as I happened to be at the paseo tourist office (which was staying open all day – the others were closed). San Pedro was on Monday; three days later there is another, and hardly anyone knows about it, unless they are truly immersed in the local traditions. I admit, therefore, that I am not, as – Mother of God – I wasn’t aware. I am now. 

 

The fiestas are an essential ingredient of the local way of life, they provide colour, spectacle and interest. No-one, least of all myself, is suggesting that they are abandoned. But how sensible is it that they disrupt the normal flow of commerce to the extent that they do? Profound changes have taken place and have impacted upon society and business, and yet, while these changes have occurred, the society itself has refused to change; it is caught in a time-warp. You can argue that the continuation of tradition and of the lack of change to society is an admirable thing in face of voracious commercialism, and you would be right, but there is a dissonance between this maintenance of tradition, this lack of change and the complaints about economic circumstances and all the rest. Now, the fiestas do not fundamentally affect the tourism economy, and so you can also argue that their regularity is at best neutral in terms of productivity, but they are indicative of a psychology that wants everything as it was while keeping all the commercial gains as well. But the poor tourist is inconvenienced. If he has schlepped up from Bellevue to do some economical supermarketing only to find the nearest Eroski shut, he has every right to feel hot, sweaty and more than a bit hacked off. The point is that, in a tourist resort, the tourist should take precedence. It may not be a view that everyone is comfortable with, but it is the tourist who pays for Alcúdia, not a bit of ball de bot by the hermitage.

 

In the wider context, it would seem that, finally, something is to give where shopping hours in Palma are concerned; it’s been a point of debate and criticism for some while that the opening hours are so limited. It’s a start I suppose. On top of societal conservatism, one can add the role of unions and Church in opposing change. Some years ago, the Germans, under Gerhard Schröder, attempted a liberalisation; it was burnt down in the flames of Hades by the strength of the religious and union lobbies and quickly dropped. It was a mistake. Of course, you can also argue that the Anglo-Saxon view of market liberalism and the combination of Thatcherite union bashing and religious indifference led to the 24-hour shopping and commerce culture of the UK, and that to view the local situation it is necessary to adopt a different cultural perspective. You would be right in this regard as well. But there should be greater compromise and willingness to change. Last year, as the storms of crisis gathered and there were moans coming from businesses, it was revealing that moaners were happy enough to clear off to Menorca for two to three days to celebrate Sant Joan. Go figure.