AM I am alone in thinking the profits amassed by the supermarket giant Tesco are not to be applauded?

The growth of supermarket shopping, while offering convenience, choice and value for money, has many other less desirable consequences. Small specialist shops such as bakers, grocers and butchers in villages, and even towns and cities, are vanishing. Elderly people without access to a car are not always able to visit supermarkets. When they do, they are often confused and unhappy at the crowded and pressured atmosphere which has turned shopping from a pleasant part of communal life into something to be completed quickly.

Worst of all, suppliers of food to supermarkets are going out of business; unable to survive with the pittances paid to them by these all-consuming money-makers hell-bent on making the highest possible profits

Would it not be a good idea for Tesco to be magnanimous enough to direct some of its huge profits back to the farmers and dairymen who actually enable them to make the cash they do to allow these hard-working people to survive a little bit more comfortably and enable family businesses to carry on?

Heather Causnett,

Escrick Park Gardens,

Escrick, York.

Updated: 10:41 Thursday, April 14, 2005