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Yes, although I do believe they don't actually need the whole lorry but that smaller vehicles would do if they didn't want one vehicle with one driver to visit multiple shops.
Exactly right about the way they undermine local business. I know someone who ran a very viable shop but couldn't maintain it within weeks of a Sainsbury's Local opening very close to him. They're probably not quite as bad as Tesco, but their strategy of opening smaller shops of their own to drive other smaller shops out of business has been getting up my nose for some time now.
Oliver Schick
The business model for these places is that they maximise shelf space by having almost no/the absolute minimum of space that's not the actual retail environment.
What this means is that there's not store room, there's a staging room but stuff comes off the lorry and onto the shelves - means they can have a wider choice than smaller places that had to hold stock, and they can respond to demand very quickly, but they absolutely have to have the lorry every 24 hours, and fuck the parking ticket. Needless to say a smaller grocery doesn't have the logistical machine that this sort of thing requires, so it's a very strong competitive advantage for the super-store chains.