Supermarkets are like tower block housing: what once looked like the future now feels mired in the past and what once felt thrilling and new now seems tired and passé.

I remember wandering around giant French hypermarchés a couple of decades ago and wishing that British stores would follow suit – 15 kinds of bacon, perfect, glossy vegetables stretching out as far as the eye could see, rows and rows of babyfood, clothes, aisles of wine. Today, British stores are very much in on the act but, to my mind at least, the result induces consumer nausea rather than enthusiasm.

We are not as naive as we used to be and we notice things. The bacon leaks the water it has been artificially pumped up with, the vegetables are perfect only because they have been sprayed with chemicals, nobody much wants to feed their children jars of nondescript mush, the clothes’ cheapness raises uncomfortable questions about their manufacture and most wine-lovers would rather buy their supplies from knowledgeable small shops that care about their stock. Far from quickening the consumer’s spendthrift heart, the sight of yet another out-of-town monolith makes it sink like a stone.

But the monoliths keep on coming. Last week the Competition Commission issued proposals to increase competition in the food retailing market but failed to issue any kind of blueprint for breaking Tesco’s stranglehold over it – the so-called Tescopoly that has led to “Tesco-towns” (the company has double the market share of its nearest rival). Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons may take heart at the recommendation that planners should explicitly bear competition in mind when other supermarkets bring forward development plans, but I don’t think the same can necessarily be said of consumers.

Who really wants to live cheek-by-jowl with some monstrous new supermarket development? Who is really being helped here? The supermarkets themselves may speak proudly of job creation and of helping the local economy, but what about people’s quality of life? What about the disfiguring ugliness of these buildings? And, most of all, how are small local businesses supposed to deal with what is effectively a death warrant?

We are complete imbeciles when it comes to supermarkets: we still think, by and large, that they are doing us a kindness by existing. I don’t say this wearing an eco-warrior, anticapitalist, down-with-big-business hat, but rather as a consumer with a family who has, until recently, relied heavily on the weekly supermarket shop. I realise I am speaking from a fortunate standpoint: I can afford to pay a little more for organic and locally sourced ingredients, and I use my local butcher and fishmonger (which I’m lucky to have: both are a dying breed) because I would rather eat fantastic meat once a week than mechanically recovered slop on a daily basis. But actually I question the whole “value” status of supermarkets, not least because whenever I go to one I end up buying a pile of stuff I don’t actually need or, indeed, want; stuff that, more often that not, ends up being thrown away (shamefully).

Far from every little helping, I find every little adds up to a ridiculous bill, an awful lot of horrible plastic bags (to say nothing of an infuriating mountain of unnecessary moulded plastic packaging), a traffic jam or two and a sense of being spaced-out and disengaged. Supermarkets may strive to feel like soothing consumer oases but there’s so much to take in – literally: there’s so much brightly lit stuff for the poor eyes to look at – that the experience is often stressful in the extreme.

Shopping locally, on the other hand, adds up to buying what you set out to buy – no more, no less – and storing it in a string bag, with change left over for a coffee. There’s no contest, plus it works out cheaper. I used to think this way of shopping worked only if there were one or two of you, but I regularly do it for six people and it works just fine. I can honestly say it’s one of the few things I’ve ever done that significantly simplified my life. Sainsbury’s is still there for bleach, cleaning products, loo paper and huge boxes of washing powder, but nearly everything else comes from the high street or from markets.

The counter-argument to shopping locally is inevitably to do with convenience and with the need of lower socioeconomic groups to bulk-buy cheap food – an artificial need that has been imposed on them by supermarkets, clever advertising and the use of “offers”. I don’t expect that their grandparents bulk-bought Sunny D. Besides, I find the poverty/grotesquely bad diet thing completely wrongheaded. Rubbish highly processed food is not cheap, whereas you can make enough rice and dhal for six people for about £1.50. Make a couple of vegetable curries to go with it and you would still get ample change from a fiver – considerably less than the cost of a bucket of deep-fried battery chicken and a great deal more nutritious.

The supermarkets may provide an embarrassment of choice, but they do the opposite of educating: they pile their stuff high and sell it cheap, pretending to be the consumer’s friend while lining their pockets courtesy of their customers’ naivety.

Meanwhile, the high street is dying – either that or it has become a carbon copy of every other high street, with nothing to make you think that you are in Devon as opposed to, say, Hampshire. We’re all agreed that this is very sad, but not many people seem inclined to do much about it, not when there’s a shiny new Tesco on the edge of town.

These days, how you decide to shop defines you as much as how you choose to dress. We treat supermarket shopping as though it were a nonchoice, but it is as acute an ethical decision as anything else. This is illustrated in microcosm by the big four supermarkets’ sale of books. They choose only a handful of titles a year and sell them at such a vast discount that they have effectively closed down scores of independent booksellers – lovely shops run by people who care about books – because booksellers simply can’t compete on price. Supermarkets often sell books cheaper than the wholesalers: I know independent bookshops that bought their copies of last summer’s Harry Potter from the supermarket because it was the cheapest option.

And there you have it. We like the words “cheapest option” and we think it’s what we want. But is it really? “Cheapest option” means no bookshops, no butchers, no fishmongers, no bakers. It means no fruit and veg shop, no cafe, no chemist and Starbucks in their place. It’s not much of an option at all.

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