If it's anything like what is detailed in 'The Wal-Mart Effect' by Charles Fishman, then supermarkets moving into a town actually raises poverty.

Up to the last ten years or so, Morrisons grew by acquiring smaller supermarket chains or even single stores, they rarely built from scratch. The Totnes one was built on a brownfield site but there wasn't enough room for a filling station, so that's on an adjacent site. As I said, it works well down there and I know the ratepayers are backing the council in resisting any new out-of-town developments, how long that can last is anyone's guess, especially if an application gets called-in.

It does make you wonder why other towns don't follow suit. We have many town & city centres that are literally dying on their arses because of out of town developments. IIRC the Totnes car park is pay & display and is patrolled by ex-Stasi agents, stay over two hours and you're clamped, for bona fide shoppers, they discount the car park from your bill at the checkout

My dad started doing business with Ken Morrison when they owned four stores

I joined his (my dads) company in '84 when Morrisons had around 50 stores, all in Yorks/Lancs and we serviced them all and actually they built most of those from the ground up rather than take over existing buildings, the very first ones in Bradford and the warehouses were existing buildings but most of them were self-builds and you can tell which architect they used by the style of each one, he was a canny old bugger and would use the same design and layout on every site for years, even now I can look at the outside of a Morrisons and tell you where the Personnel and Visitor office is

Stores like Wetherby, Ripon, Stamford, Horsforth, Yeadon, Nelson and dozens upon dozens of others that I could point to if I had the full list of outlets in front of me were all built from foundations up on town centre sites and those that I named being actually on the High Street of those towns with very narrow frontages, those stores didn't come with a standard design because of the individual site layouts and I'd guess that they'd break Kens heart at having to pay an architect to do a set of plans that he could only use the once.

When they started to move down south in the 90s is when they started to buy existing chains and rebadge them, a regional Co-op sale gave them their first foothold in London and it was shortly after that that they started to look for a distribution outlet in Northampton culminating in the one at Burton Latimer which is the biggest warehouse that I've ever walked through.

The Safeways takeover changed the company beyond all recognition, Safeways actually had more outlets than Morrisons at the time so you can imagine the culture shock, the Head Office was moved out of its old location and afterwards was once used as a location for a retro 1970s TV programme without having to dress the place up so you can imagine just how much money Ken had spent on it since the day it was built

I never dealt with Morrison's until the mid to late 80s, they hadn't even appeared in the East Riding before then. I sold Morrison's their trucks and although most of my dealings were with the Fleet Engineer (Ken Morrison's son in law), I also used to get the occasional telephone call from the man himself (Ken Morrison was one of the very few people who had my home-phone number), including one that led to me attending the Bradford site on a Sunday morning because "that's when most of the trucks are there lad". The contact continued well through the 90s and into the new millennium, for various reasons but usually him calling on a favour. I still can't recollect me ever saying no to the man.

MY general impression of him was "Arkwright on speed". He was basically still a grocer at heart but knew that he had to find an edge or be swallowed by Tesco's or similar. Although he could be a 2@, you knew once he'd shaken hands, the deal was done.