Waitrose, that most 'ethical' of food stores is joining forces with Shell. They plan to have some Waitrose minimarts on Shell forecourts around the country. How can a company that prides itself on its ethical buying processses even think of teaming up with Shell who want to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean and have actually admitted that there will be oil spills?
So we advertised on the web page that we would be outside Waitrose on Milton Street (opposite John Lewis) today to catch the lunchtime rush of people popping in to Waitrose for a sandwich or a cake (mmmm cake) and that we would be there at 11am but we changed our minds and turned up a bit later. We went in to the store and spoke to the manager who was actually very supportive of our campaign but refused to be photographed with us. This seems to be policy as the manager in the London store near Angel Islington also refused to be photographed with us. It was busy as you would expect on a weekday lunchtime and there was lots of support for the campaign from passers by and shoppers and most people were quite shocked to hear what Waitrose were doing - in fact many refused to go into the shop after they had spoken to us. The police turned up - in fact they had turned up at 11 o'clock when we were supposed to start and were disappointed not to find us there but they came along later, had a chat, took a leaflet each and stood around for a while pretending not to watch what we were doing when it was so obvious they were watching us. Obviously real crime is not an issue in Nottingham.
Anyway after about an hour Cath's feet got cold and my hands were frozen so we decided to call it a day. I went into the shop to get the manager out to have a look at our poster full of stickers put there by people who supported the campaign. He was very impressed with the leaflet we gave him and when I asked whether he would sign up on line he said he would neither confirm or deny that. Let's hope its a confirm and not a deny.
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