This was a disappointing read. I'm a little bit "converted" already, and I feel the supermarkets are responsible for a lot of ills in the UK and US; however this book was so rife with logical gaps that I started to feel sorry for Walmart/Tescos et al.
It sets up these straw men, doesn't really connect the dots in the narrative, leaving us with "Supermarkets have left our town centers destitute, with all the shops closing down and nobody going there anymore" and then, 2 paras later, "Supermarkets are moving now into the town center, because people find it more convenient to shop there"... There are complex relationships between these two trends that involve us shoppers, town planners, worldwide shopping habits, technology and price power that deserve exploration, but you won't find that in this book. Instead, it comes across as a diatribe, whereby everything supermarkets do is wrong by definition and "solutions" are scant.
I think I share some of the writer's goals; I'd like to see people consuming less, buying better (though fewer) quality products from more locally-based merchants and producers, regenerating some dormant civic values and local economies, but I don't think this book is a useful part of the conversation that needs to occur to achieve this.
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