Sainsbury's just couldn't win

When I was growing up, my mother always went to Sainsbury's on Ballards Lane, Finchley. I can remember the marble counters, the rotating saw of the ham-slicer and, strangely, hairnets. What she most remembers is that "for £7 a week I fed four children, one dog and a husband".

My mother was Sainsbury's through and through. Cut her and she'd bleed orange and blue. My mother was as unassailably a Sainsbury's person just as Sainsbury's must have thought back then (we're talking late Sixties and the Seventies) that it was unassailable itself.

My mother went to Sainsbury's on the same day at the same time every week, and when my brother got married on that day, he said in his wedding speech that he'd had to phone the shop first thing to say she wouldn't be in so they didn't put out a missing person's bulletin. Everyone laughed. They thought he was joking.

Also - and this is absolutely true, too - when I graduated I got a congratulations card signed by the ladies who worked behind the delicatessen counter in Ballards Lane. This is how Sainsbury's was. But now? Now, my mum shops at Tesco. Who doesn't?

The facts and figures are scary. Tesco has announced pre-tax profits of £1.7 billion (yesterday, as Sainsbury group's profits were expected to fall eight per cent, its chairman, Sir Peter Davis, departed). Tesco now takes £1 out of every £8 spent in British shops. If you don't count non-food items, it's £1 in every £4. It sells 4.4 per cent of all UK clothing. ("I recently went to Tesco to buy some cheap gardening clothes," says a friend of my mother, "which I then couldn't wear, as they were too good for gardening.")

Soon Tesco will be running your bath and raising your children. A Finest upbringing, madam, or just a Value one?

The thing is, 30 years ago my mother, and almost everyone she knows, would not have shopped at Tesco. There was a Tesco on Ballards Lane, too, but we never went there. Tesco was for the working classes. There were no marble counters. The window display was just cans - it was pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap.

If supermarkets were holidays then, Sainsbury's would have been a villa abroad while Tesco would have been a caravan in Rhyl, in the rain, with a cross, muzzled dog. And, as a family, we didn't do caravans in Rhyl with cross, muzzled dogs.

So, what happened, Mum? Well, she says, in 1985 Tesco opened a big store at Brent Park, just off the North Circular, and that was that. "It was convenient, it had a big car park, and the quality was as good as Sainsbury's, but cheaper." Good food patently didn't cost less at Sainsbury's, and my mother has never been back since.

Tesco has been frighteningly commercial. It was the first to realise the value of out-of-town sites, which killed off high streets, and once it had killed them, was the first to move back into them with its "Metro" stores. Yes, I hate it for that, too, but are you saying it's not smart?

Tesco was the first to offer online shopping, 24-hour shopping, two-for-ones, a Marks & Spencer-busting upmarket range, Finest, and loyalty cards. Tesco also seduced the middleclass shopper largely, I suspect, because it realised that the middleclass shopper is, in fact, extremely price-conscious, whereas Sainsbury's went blithely on assuming that reputation alone would be enough.

The middle classes won't fly BA if they can get there by easyJet. My mother, for example, won't buy a cucumber in Marks & Spencer for £1.40 because she knows she can get it in Tesco for 62p and it will taste the same. But while we want cheap, we don't want Iceland cheap. We want cheap in a certain environment, where organic fillet steak and poncy ready meals are available along with 8p baked beans.

And we don't want Sainsbury's cheap because it simply isn't as cheap as Tesco's cheap, for food that no longer has the edge when it comes to quality. Recently, a Which? survey of organic produce found that a typical basket from Sainsbury's cost £45.25, whereas the same items from Tesco added up to £37.95. Waitrose's was £46.81.

Another friend of my mother's says: "Sainsbury's are charging Waitrose prices but you're not getting the Waitrose brand." Sainsbury's took their eye off the ball, but their customers did not.

My mother takes me to her Tesco, which is now the one at Brent Cross. This was built in 1995, the same year that Tesco finally knocked Sainsbury's off the top spot, so it must have been feeling the pinch of her defection by then.

The day before I had been to a Sainsbury's (Whitechapel) for the first time in years, and it was fantastically depressing: the car-park ticket machine taped up, newspapers spilling everywhere, an electrical goods shelf that could only boast a Walkman in a battered box, a miserly organic section. And Tesco? Bright, clean, orderly newspapers. A bugger to get round, though, as my mother usually shops here every Monday (8.45 am) and this is not her day.

So, four times per aisle, we're accosted by astonished members of staff. "Mrs Ross, what are you doing here on a Thursday?" I think we can safely assume that my mother feels at home here.

My mother shows me around proudly. She shows me the books section which sells historical romances but also The Lovely Bones. I note, in the DVD section, that the film In America, which I'd considered buying in Sainsbury's for £14.99, is on sale here for £9.99. I am a financially reckless person but even I can see that 50 per cent less is 50 per cent less. She talks me through the entire Finest range. It's fantastic, she says, and cheaper than Marks.

While Waitrose and Marks are quite upmarket, and Asda and Safeway are quite downmarket, heaven knows what Sainsbury's stands for any more. Tesco, though, manages to cater for everybody. It's villas and caravans, all in it together.