Get me to Gail’s
Friday, August 16, 2024 at 10:20 Until a few days ago I had never heard of Gail’s bakery. Suddenly, I seem to be reading about nothing else.
According to the Telegraph:
Gail’s, the upmarket bakery chain, is facing resistance to its plans for a new shop in a trendy east London area, over fears it will force independent cafes out of business.
Local business owners have also sided against the plans because of the pro-Brexit and anti-lockdown views of Luke Johnson, the company’s minority investor.
The story has also appeared in The Times, Daily Mail, inews, Time Out, and the London Evening Standard, among others.
I’m a big fan of independent cafes, but competition is good, is it not, and if the independents are well run and provide a satisfying service, they should continue to prosper.
As for resisting the incursion of a new business because of the (mainstream) political views of a minority investor, that’s something else, and my immediate reaction was to go online and find out more about the bakery chain I had never heard of.
First off, I discovered there is a Gail’s bakery in the centre of Cambridge which is 20 miles from where I live.
As you can imagine, my first instinct was to drive into Cambridge and check it out, but the name of the investor, Luke Johnson, rang a bell - and not just because he’s a former chairman of Pizza Express and Channel 4 and much more besides.
According to a Guardian profile in 2004:
Mr Johnson is aggressively anti-smoking and has been known to storm out of parties when too many people have lit up. In his writing, he has often criticised the tobacco industry, asking why protesters target oil and drug firms when Big Tobacco kills so many.
So I’m torn. Or at least I was before I read this piss poor article in The Times this morning.
A gap year job in the upmarket bakery taught Charlie Aslet to smile maniacally at customers and led to pin-up status. But he’ll never buy a cinnamon bun again.
See: I was the face of Gail’s — I’ll never forget the smell
Neither the headline nor the sub-heading reflect the true awfulness of the piece, which says far more about Charlie than the bakery for which he worked for all of three months in his gap year before going to university (Oxford, since you ask).
So tomorrow morning I intend to get up early to beat the traffic and the tourists, and visit Gail’s, following which I shall report back.
Watch this space.
PS. To be clear, I wouldn’t boycott a bakery because of the anti-smoking views of a minority investor, but it does annoy me when people in the hospitality industry - Tim Martin of Wetherspoon, for example - support comprehensive smoking bans.
If you want to ban smoking on your own premises, fair enough, but don’t demand that government imposes the same policy on your competitors. That’s anti-competitive, isn’t it?
Update: My wife tells me that branches of Gail's are "everywhere". Where have I been?
Reader Comments (2)
Tim Martin put a smoking ban in about 64 of his pubs a couple of years before the comprehensive ban. He reversed it because it affected trade when customers still has a choice.
Tobacco Control is the "tip of the spear" to foist government control over almost every aspect of society. It demeans private enterprise by vilifying industries as "Big Tobacco," etc. to hide that the regulating entity is far bigger and more powerful and does not answer to the public, i.e. the customer, as private business must. If an industry scrutinizes regulation propaganda it is accused of "misleading" the public by "muddying the waters."