This is highly successful retailer that has become the yardstick, particularly in the south of England, of whether you happen to live in an affluent area or not.
A Waitrose within five minutes drive of your front door probably adds£10,000 to the value of your house, as well as a considerable amount to the cost of food shopping if you spend too much time hanging around the many in-store shop-in-shops.
Now the grocer is heading for “market” towns - a term that can mean anything from 10,000 to 100,000 inhabitants and which conjures up images of the well-heeled Shires.
Waitrose is set to open at least 100 branches of its smaller format, but 15,000 sq ft to 20,000 sq ft these are hardly convenience-style shops. They do, however, represent the democratization of upscale food retailing and will enable a lot more people to say that they do most of their shopping at Waitrose, with all the connotations that this carries.
The question is, at what point does the thrill of better-end food shopping conflict with basic economics and mean that shoppers will head off to Aldi, Lidl or Netto, to get their aged balsamic, rather than frequenting a branch of the John Lewis group-owned supermarket?
The truth is quite hard to get at and it does seem to indicate that we are heading towards the German model where basics are sought at value outlets, while food for holidays and high days is obtained from the likes of Waitrose.
Sadly, this is not likely to happen all at once. There are neither enough value retailers in better-off areas or sufficient better-end supermarkets in less well-off districts for this to become an immediate reality.
There is still an inherent snobbery in the UK that makes some folk look down on those who shop in discounters and believe that real quality can only come from quasi food-halls.
For the time being, therefore, there will be a few towns and suburbs where a visit to a new-style Waitrose or its equivalent, will be accompanied by a trip a discounter, but they will continue to be relatively few and far between.
The British class set-up should ensure that we can’t enjoy the best of both worlds, as it the case in Bochum, Berlin or Bielefeld.
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