Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow

[venta]

Tell me, oh, UK-based people of LJ, what are your general thoughts and impressions of the Nisa chain of corner shops?

I always think of Nisa's as the most down-market of convenience corner-shops. Fine if you want a pint of milk, but a dead loss if you want anything else other than white bread and processed cheese.

Which means I've been surprised repeatedly by the Nisa on my local shopping street. The street has two small Co-Ops on it, and a bunch of indepent shops. If you want fresh meat, or fresh fish, or greengrocery, or wine, or something that the high-end deli sells, you're sorted. But there's a large range of comestibles which are too obscure/exotic to appear in a small Co-Op, and not covered by one of the specialist shops.

After years of walking past the Nisa, I went in out of desperation when I was halfway through a recipe and realised I'd run out of Stork baking marg[*]. Nisa had Stork. I was surprised. Today they furnished me with tahini, tamarind sauce and coconut milk. They also have an impressive array of spices, dried pulses, nuts and seeds. I know corner-shops can be unexpected; particularly if they're run by people of different ethnicities - one cuisine's exotic is another cuisine's staple. But the range of goods this Nisa has jammed into its tiny space is awesome. (And I do mean jammed - the chap who directed me to the tamarind sauce returned to shelf-stacking and vanished shortly afterwards in an avalanche of rice cakes.)

Just before I posted this, I looked Nisa up on Wikipedia. And it turns out that they're not really a chain. They're more of a buying co-op, so independent retailers can compete with the big boys. Which is a great idea.

And, if you're curious: Northern Independent Supermarkets Association. Though that still doesn't answer the question of whether it's Nissa or Neesa.

[*] If you're going to get sniffy about baking with Stork, I remind you that I regularly feed dairy-allergic people ;)

Comments

[shermarama]

Right. Um, my dad used to be a big cheese in Nisa, the association, (and yes it is pronounced like Nicer) so I have a weird perspective on this. The family business, as started by my great-grandfather, was wholesale foods, which later also included cash & carries, which I worked in as a child. By the late 80s we had four locations, covering from Carlisle down to Birmingham, roughly, selling Nisa-Today's stuff, as well as the usual big-name branded goods, to independent shops and a few other odd places, like pubs and Texaco garages. I don't quite know what the rules were in terms of buying only from us, versus for example from our local competitors Nurdin & Peacock, who were Happy Shopper, but I think the deal was that if you took the marketing stuff (bags, price posters, signage, display units) then you were supposed to only be supplied by one. But I'm sure if you were a local independent shopkeeper and N&P had a special on Benson & Hedges that week you'd have nipped by there instead; it largely depended which bit of the M6 you were on and whether you were passing by, I think. I don't know exactly how the various branding streams evolved over time - I know we used to sell A&O branded stuff, and changed to Today's sometime early in the 1980s (because the drawing paper we had as children was the back of obsolete price posters - glossy, of course, so a bit rubbish for pencils, but great for felt-tips) but Nisa as public branding might have been slightly after our time. Because by the early 90s, when supermarkets started opening much longer hours, the playing field for convenience stores was really changing fast and the smaller wholesalers couldn't compete any more, so there was a big flurry of acquisitions. We sold out in 1994 to Booker, I think, and Booker bought Happy Shopper along with N&P in 1996, and I read on Wikipedia that Booker got bought out by Iceland supermarkets, bought again along with Iceland by someone even bigger, and then sold off in a hurry in the 2009 financial crisis, and now they're back distributing to Happy Shopper and Premier stores. So when you ask what I think of Nisa, I think, who's distributing that these days? But it looks like they've rebuilt their own distribution and that Costcutter are part of the same group so, all the more if they have some control of their distribution, they're going to stock what they like, as long as they can get it for a price they can sell it for.

(When you say 'co-op so independent retailers can compete with the big boys', by the way, I think that makes it sound fluffier than it is. Corner shops can't buy direct from big manufacturers like Cadbury or the tobacco companies, so they have to buy from a wholesaler, and wholesalers have to be quite big organisations to run at all and there can't be that many of them. So there's an instant power mismatch between them and the corner shop... unless the corner shops band together and work with the wholesalers, avoiding the short-termism that if left unchecked could completely kill any alternative to supermarkets. (That mediation used to be part of what my dad did - somewhere between union rep and mob enforcer, talking to the corner shop owners to see what they wanted out of their organisation and what the organisation could do for them.) I didn't exactly pick up a taste for business from my family, but I did pick up a sense of the propped-up fronts and terribly vulnerable back ends of these sorts of organisations. I'm much more likely to worry about corporations collapsing tomorrow and there suddenly being no food in the shops than I am about corporations taking over the world, basically.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Gosh, thanks for that. And useful to have a definite answer on Nicer, too :)

My fluffy understanding was entirely based on one or two sentences on Wikipedia, so possibly quite wrong.

Your description of your drawing paper made me smile. My mum was a journalist, so my drawing paper was always press releases - same principle, but not glossy. It was years before I could stop thinking of it as having printing on the back, and acknowledge that I was drawing on the back. (Indeed it was years before I really understood what a "press release" was, other than the collection of syllables that described my drawing paper.)

[shermarama]

*grins* I'm sure everyone must have some odd little legacies of family work like that; it'd be fascinating to try and track them down. (I don't think I ever really got over the perception of there being printing on the back of the drawing side, especially since I've never had to address the working side of price posters in the meantime.)