Never fear, in the kingdom of Malta you are never a five-minute drive away from a Lidl supermarket, your new corner food store, your new local green grocer and butcher and baker, with ample parking for your new, second-hand Range, all rolled into one.
You would expect a country the size of a pebble could do with one, maximum two Lidl supermarkets. Since their first store opening in 2008, Lidl now boast eight generic uniformed mega stores, with a ninth on its way to grace the outskirts of Żebbuġ.
From my home village, I am spoilt for Lidl choice: Lidl Luqa, Lidl Qormi and, just in case I can’t find the generic and low-cost item at either store, I don’t need to worry because I will soon be able to find it a few kilometres away in Lidl Żebbuġ. I’m never more than a five-minute drive to the nearest €10 Chablis. #Winning.
Whoever the local representatives of Lidl Malta are, they must be soulless greed-mongers as well as equally thick. How can so many identical mega stores built in such close proximity be a good business plan? We all know about cornering the market but this is not only silly, it is irresponsible.
Perplexed, I asked a friend in finance: “How can this business model even work? Aren’t they choking themselves out with so many of their own stores competing in such a small space?” He laughed and said: “It’s the land… the land that they get to develop on is the prize.” Penny drop. “Who’s the thick one now,” I thought to myself.
It’s the land… the land that they get to develop on is the prize
Soon, everywhere you look in Malta you’ll be faced by that bright blue and yellow logo, signalling to your closest church to cheap commodity. Replacing all the local village shops and their unique store fronts (some of which are generations old and works of art in their own right) with a Lidl or some generic chain will kill important parts of the soul of society.
This doesn’t seem to concern the ‘decision-taking’ Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Planning, Aaron Farrugia. You have only to look at his plastic plans for Romeo Romano Gardens, in Santa Venera to see that the man has never spent a moment of his life surrounded by nature.
It is ‘sad and pathetic’ to see environment minister after environment minister systematically fail to grasp the catastrophic ramification of their incompetence and glad-handing. And this social media savvy iteration is no better. Watching him fail to juggle his contradictory portfolio would be hilarious if not for the dire consequences. On paper, environment and planning make logical bedfellows but, in reality, it is an abusive relationship in which the environment is the victim, only to bare toxic fruit.
The only way this relationship would ever work would be if planning was the submissive partner but we all know how impossible that is, with the likes of the Sandro Chetcutis and Silvio Debonos of the island.
It’s 2067 and a family sit in their blue and yellow seats, on a high-speed blue and yellow painted plane. The parents flip through the inflight magazine, checking out all the latest deals and bargains, while the children play in their VR sets. The intercom buzzer goes off: “This is your captain speaking. We will be landing at Lidl Malta shortly. Thank you for flying LidlAir. Don’t forget to keep your masks on as you disembark.”
The climate in the Mediterranean has become almost uninhabitable. The air outside is hot, it is physically unbearably hot, 47 degrees Celsius in the shade. The shoppers are quickly herded from the plane into the vast climate-controlled Lidl store that once was the Republic of Malta.
The government has been replaced by management and HR, while what’s left of the Maltese populace stock the shelves, man the tills and maintain the Lidl multi-storey car park, Lidl seaport and Lidl airport. We’ll probably even sell passports from the aisle next to the hams.
Damn me if we don’t deserve it at the rate we’re going.