Getting better & better – not

Words: 449 Reading Time: 1 minute 30 seconds

My nearest Sainsbury’s has a number of large, temporary signs outside proudly declaring that “We are improving your car park”. Let me disabuse them.

It is true that various pieces of construction and earth-moving equipment are trundling about, making an uncommon mess and changing the car park’s configuration. But it is not my car park. It is their car park and they would not be “improving” it if they did not expect solid payback as a result.

Of all the things I would have changed about this Sainsbury’s, it would not have been the car park.

1. The store is quite small, so I would have made it larger.

2. I have yet to see all checkouts staffed all at the same time – even the busiest of times – so I would have changed that.

3. And they are routinely out of routine items, so I would have worked on “improving” that.

None of this has been done.

I am a regular shopper at this site. Was I ever asked what I would like “improved”; even once?

Umm, no.

This is Sainsbury’s idea, so naturally the improvement is angled towards their priorities, rather than mine. It does not seem to have occurred to them that by addressing what the customers want their expected return might be even bigger that the one they have calculated.

Sadly, Sainsbury’s are not alone in this propensity by the big battalions to portray their selfish decisions as being in “our” interests by deliberately false or misleading statements.

1. The repeated message put out by the BBC (taxpayers’ money!) that DAB is wonderful and will make life better for everyone has long been discredited, but they continue to pump out the propaganda at everyone else’s expense.

2. ‘Because you’re worth it’ – which, if the company really believed its own publicity, would result in them giving you the product without charge.

3. And ‘Delays Possible’ before major motorway works that run for miles without a sign of any activity by man or machine. The arbitrarily imposed lower speed limit means that delays are not just possible, they are inevitable, because whatever hour of the day or night I pass through I cannot drive at the speed customary for that stretch of road.

The less sceptical among us may be drawn in by these blatant falsehoods; the rest of us grow weary as our delicious language is hijacked in the service of mammon.

With our words we tell our stories and through our stories we sell ourselves and what we offer. How are we to do that if the words no longer say what they mean? We cannot mangle the moving parts and still expect a functioning mechanism.