A discerning foodie friend has taken to serving pre-dinner Rossinis, a flute of sparkling wine mixed with strawberry pulp. It can't testify to the quality of the Prosecco because the fruit overpowers it, but when I made appreciative noises, she whispered confidentially that the Prosecco came from Lidl. Lidl's £2.99 Prosecco, in its smart blue bottle, is beginning to have a haunting, surreptitious presence in households where a £10 New World sparkler used to be the norm.
In fact, furtive forays to foreign-owned 'hard-discounters' like Lidl, Aldi and Netto are rapidly becoming the chattering classes dirty little secret, and we can doubtless expect a rash of 'I shop at Lidl/Aldi/Netto' out-ings in the near future. The retail consultancy, Allegra Strategies, says that these chains are the fastest-growing sector of the grocery market, showing a stunning 86 per cent sales increase. Come 2010, it predicts that they will have ten per cent of the UK's food shopping spend.
They certainly didn't earn the tag 'hard-discounters' for nothing. This week in LidI, I came out with a 250g tub of mascarpone cheese for 89p (equivalent Waitrose price £1.79), Parmigiano Reggiano cheese aged 24 months at £9.99 a kilo (equivalent Tesco price £14.99) and a carton of chilled tomato and basil soup at 85p (equivalent Sainsbury's price £1.39), which was actually edible.
You can see why Allegra thinks that the hard-discounters' formidable growth 'will inevitably influence the fortunes of a wide array of participants throughout the grocery market'. That's a diplomatic way of saying that they are making our native chains look expensive. Remember 'Rip-off Britain'? Shoppers, we were told, were paying over the odds for food. Supermarkets were going to liberate us by offering democratically low prices. We believed it for a while, dazzled by in-your-face price-cutting on items like sliced white bread and bananas. The penny had not yet dropped that every penny we 'saved' on those was being clawed back 10 times over on items like South African grapes and cherry tomatoes, where we had no instinctive idea as to what a genuinely fair price might be. Far from saving us from Rip-Off Britain, the supermarkets had become Rip-Off Britain.
Hard-up sections of the population have long realised that British supermarkets are expensive. They have been peeling off to the likes of Aldi for some time, reckoning, quite correctly, that they can pick up much the same goods at a significantly lower price. Now the affluent classes are joining the mêlée. Visit a hard-discounter these days and it is almost as common to see people loading up their Volvo as it is to see those carrying their brimming bags to the bus stop.
Low price isn't the only draw. British consumers are increasingly unenthusiastic about navigating Kafka-esque aisles stocked with endless cloned variations on the same thing. Your typical British-owned supermarket stocks thousands of lines. Hard- discounters count theirs in hundreds. They do not attempt to sell a comprehensive one-stop range of goods that makes every other shopping outlet redundant. What they do guarantee is a backbone of essential items of comparable quality to British chains, at a much lower price.
There's something pared-down and honest about the hard-discounters. They do not try to enlist you in some falsely chummy loyalty club. They do not try to sign you up for an exclusive, all-round Aldi/Lidl/Netto lifestyle. They do not want to insinuate themselves into your life as your insurer, mortgage lender or internet provider like Tesco. There is no coffee shop where you are encouraged to bring the kids for a family 'treat' of a Sunday. The hard-discounter mentality is like hunting. Drop in for a forage, see what deals you can bag, then fill the gaps left on your list by shopping elsewhere.
Hard discounters have a siren-like lure for British consumers chronically bored with what our indigenous chains sell. Whichever chain you chose to patronise, all those tubs of coleslaw and garlic baguettes have a haunting similarity about them. The shelves look weirdly familiar because their ruthless policy of 'category management' means that only the biggest spending brands can afford to buy space. On the shelves of hard discounters, by contrast, there's a Eurovision Song Contest of random brands you've never heard of. By contrast, a fridge filled with Tesco own-label is a depressingly uniform prospect.
People whom I respect keep telling me that a selective, discriminating shopper can net some high-quality purchases from the hard-discounters. I remain wary. I wouldn't give house space to 90 per cent of their stock. I harbour deep suspicions about what their low prices mean for their suppliers. I remain stubbornly loyal to my treasured independents and farmers' market. But if they slow down the relentless march of the Big Four, I'll toast them. Though not, perhaps, with a glass of £2.99 Prosecco.
· Joanna Blythman is the author of Bad Food Britain
