OK, OK, so this is going to be another post about beer. Well, it's not about beer as such, but the glorious nectar is tangentially involved. This post is about Richmond Co-op reaching its nadir.

If you know Richmond Co-op, you'll realise I'm talking about a pretty impressive kind of nadir. I used to be all in favour of the co-operative principle: employee owned company works hard to make profits which are then split between workers, customers and charities, with no fat-cat shareholder capitalists getting a slice of the pie. The problem is that by opting out the capitalist system they've become deeply uncompetitive. The goal of the Co-op is simply to continue to exist rather than to make as much profit as possible.

The result of this is that Co-op management - at least in Richmond - is jaw-droppingly, stunningly, record-breakingly incompetent. As long as they can survive, they don't try to go any further. So they have a dozen checkouts but only staff two at a time, or maybe three if they're flat out busy. Staff don't know where stuff is outside their own section. At peak periods they don't bring in extra staff or do an 'all hands to the checkouts' call like Tesco does. They leave snotty notes on the grapes ordering shoppers not to sample the fresh produce. They spend thousands upgrading POS gear that never gets used. Their veg is crap and the deli staff don't know what they're talking about.

The nadir of which I speak happened earlier today. I'd gone to one of the aisle-end coolers for some cold beer. I noticed that the cooler was full of brown ale and bitter - Black Sheep, Batemans, Theakstons. Bitter shouldn't be refrigerated. All the bottles of lager - Stella, Grolsch, Nastro Azzuro - were on the shelf, getting nice and warm when they should have been refrigerated. In a spirit of helpfulness, I spoke to one of the hollow-eyed supervisors.

'Excuse me, do you know you're supposed to refrigerate lager, but not bitter?'

There was a long pause, presumably while she stopped breathing in order to free up enough brain power to parse a sentence containing both the interrogative case and a conjunction. For a scary moment it seemed the effort of having to follow this up by constructing an intelligible reply would cause her to lose bowel discipline, but she managed it:

'Yeah, I know' - and then the killer logic - 'but the lager bottles don't fit in the fridge.'

'But,' I said slowly, 'nobody will buy chilled bitter.'

'I just do what the manager tells me.'

Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. I can't wait to move out of this town.