@ Susan Gaszczak: I do like the idea of counter-based selling and having your own containers, some high-end stores in the US do this.

As for incentives, any supermarket group adopting this model and hence demonstrably reducing its carbon footprint could be offered tax relief.

I don’t see why it need differ from the current arrangements where you have the superstore and the pickers there rather than in some central distribution place.

But why would they? If they can make the same amount of money employing less staff in a cheaper place, surely they’d do that?

In rural areas, there is a strong case for the local authorities to find ways of facilitating home delivery. Reliable services which reach everybody can and should help to sustain rural communities. They could carry the post too, as well as deliveries from all types of shops. As the cost of driving rises, these services will steadily become more economic.

If, therefore, we were to encourage more home deliveries of the sort which have sprung up over the past ten years, we are in danger of encouraging more comfort for those who perhaps do not need comfort and at the expense of the small retail outlet. The supermarkets will simply get stronger.

What would be interesting would be to encourage doorstep deliveries from independent shops: could not a consortium of high street shops be given a tax incentive to club together to hire a van? Or is this a service which could usefully be provided by local government? (After all, in an ideal world, local government would regain its right to run bus services – which are in some ways merely the reverse of doorstep deliveries).

Either way, I think this whole area is something we need to be interested in. In the new era of markets that the super-interconnected world is in, transport and delivery systems are going to be the key players alongside the ICT & network providers.

When we can deal directly with producers in far off lands the logistics, which up till now have been handled by commodities type intermediary corporations are going to be much more fragments and new demands made on such services.

If Tesco can deliver a TV at 11pm, Currys, Comet and Dabs are all going to have to start offering this sort of time flexibility in deliveries.

I wrote in 2006 about how “Most supermarkets will already deliver your rubbish to your door, complete with its temporary contents of course, why not collect the empties at the same time?” I think getting the supermarkets involved in this market is key to the next stage of reducing waste and/or making recycling easier and more transparent and getting competition into waste collection and disposal.

I’ve also always maintained, on the point Richard makes about local high streets, that local trader groups need to get together and set-up mutual services to create, for an example I floated ten years ago now, the Oxford Covered Market virtual-supermarket.

1) As both Susan and Richard alluded to, few people know exactly what they are going to buy beyond the basic provisions when shopping – Supermarkets of course take massive advantage of this to make you buy things you weren’t planning to, and good on them. Therefore any incentive you could give them to stop doing this would have to be pretty bloody impressive!

2) It seems strange for a “social liberal” forum to be advocating job losses. Again no expert, but surely it requires far fewer people to run a large automated warehouse, such as Amazon have, than to run the dozen or so supermarkets that said warehouse distribution system would cover? Personally, I am all for efficiency but I am surprised you want to see the 1/4 million people that evil, nasty Tesco employ in this country out of work. You know, even I think that’s a bit steep!

James, last week you said you “entirely agree[d]” that figures and facts are the key to winning an argument, yet here you haven’t presented even a modicum of research to back your idea. Is this the kind of slipshod thinking you hope to present to the Manifesto Working Group?

If it can’t be made to work, I’m open to binning this idea. It is also possible that supermarkets might end up going in this direction regardless of any intervention. But I see so many positive outcomes that exploring how it could be made to happen is worth doing, in my view.