A TALE OF FRILLY KNICKERS

I suppose a supermarket can offer more than an isolated corner shop...

Jimbo Jolly ran the village store. It was the only shop that sold just about everything for miles and miles because the village was the tiniest bit isolated from the rest of the county. In fact, the only road out of the village of Cockscomb went a most circuitous way until it came to the next nearest cluster of houses, and that cluster of houses, being smaller than a village and thought of by its residents as a pretty little hamlet hamlet, didn’t have any kind of shop at all.

Jimbo Jolly ran his shop for his customers. If there was something one of them required but that he didn’t stock he would nip into Brumpton’s cash and carry emporium and buy it so long as it had nothing to do with female underwear. In such a way everyone lived a happy and contented life.

Until a field was bought from Ugly Joe the farmer, and planning permission was granted for a supermarket with car parking facilities and a free outdoor loo.

“I’m not happy about this,” grunted Jimbo Jolly, “what need is there for another shop when I’m open every hour I can muster?”

“We won’t be bothered to go there, though,” his best customers assured him, “they can build as many supermarkets as they like, we’ll still patronise you.”

All that was well and good until news leaked out about the savings that could be made when hard-pressed purses were taken to the supermarket. There was no doubt about it, the ladies of Cockscomb found that in addition to the usual fare they had brought from the village store and without raiding their purses for even a penny more, they could even buy pairs of the most enchanting knickers they dreamed existed, the sort illustrated in newspaper supplements in tempting colour.

And what’s more, they still had money left over, and Jimbo Jolly had always drawn a line at selling knickers other that the plain white starched sort because, he always maintained, there were too many varieties of ladies smalls in the world and his shop wasn’t big enough. The truth, of course, was Mrs Jimbo Jolly might well have moved on from her plain starched white pants to frills and the like, and he baulked at the idea of her parading in front of him clad in such delicate finery for fear of what it might do to his heart.

And a further truth was, his customers broke every promise they had made and started going to the supermarket. But they were decent folk and still did some of their shopping with him, but his income became minuscule compared with what it had once been when he had been the hard-working richest man of Cockscomb.

“It’s no good,” he moaned, “I’ll have to free myself from the tyranny of international supermarkets. I’ll have to start rumours.”

And he was as good as his word. Now, as has been intimated he was widely respected, and that hadn’t been absorbed by the supermarket. It didn’t even look on him as competition. His friends and neighbours still loved him and believed every word he said. So they believed him when he told them the main reason the supermarket could undercut him was they bought out of date goods for a minimal price, redated them, and sold them on as if they were brand, spanking new, still making a considerable profit.

This, of course, was nonsense, but people will believe nonsense.

Then he told them they imported foreigners from as far away as Brumpton to operate their tills and restock their shelves, which put local people out of a job, neglecting to mention that the only local job it actually affected was his own. And the word went round and people hissed and booed at some of the supermarket staff when they arrived at work. It became the done thing, to hate foreigners even when those foreigners only came the few miles from Brumpton and weren’t really foreigners at all.

The atmosphere in Cockscomb became acidic and it didn’t take long for signs in house windows made the point that no blacks, browns or even yellows were welcome at their doors. Whites only, became the mantra, and it pleased Jimbo Jolly mightily.

Then he made his final assault on the competition. He inserted an add in the local press and a huge notice in his shop window that insisted that it was quite wrong for Cockscomb people to go to the supermarket, that the knickers they sold were manufactured by tiny children in garrets and cellars, that the sugar was toxic, that it was, in fact, tantamount to treason for them to shop at the gigantic emporium on the edge of the village.

And bit by bit quite a few of the people did as he suggested in his publicity campaign because they believed every word he said.

“Have you heard,” one old lady said, sniggering at a checkout girl on her way to work on a bicycle, “that they brought that tart in from the other side of the world, and pay her nothing for working twenty-five hours a day?”

“And she’s got our jobs,” raged a second, failing to mention that she didn’t actually want a job at the supermarket, being in her eighties and on her way to meet her maker before too long passed. In fact, there was nobody in Cockscomb who really wanted a job at the supermarket, though many said they did and were aggrieved that they still had to travel to Brumpton to work.

And it pleased Jimbo Jolly no end because his customers, in more than a trickle, returned. He celebrated by slipping the odd extra penny onto his prices, to cover the increased cost involved in having more customers, though he was adamant about stocking frilly knickers.

But the supermarket was a large affair and didn’t really notice a shortfall in its customers because, truth to tell, nobody counted them anyway and there were always queues at its tills.

It was just the good folk of Cockscomb who suffered when they couldn’t afford all the little luxuries they’d got used to, cheap but excellent deodorants, bubble bath fragrances that actually bubbled, delicious imported wines, and the menfolk when their ladies were back in starched knickers.

© Peter Rogerson 27.12.20