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Yes, I have a great idea for a really profitable supermarket. It will work like this. There will only be branches every 10 - 20 miles, no local stores. We won't have stores within walking distance of where most people actually live. Instead of the 30,000 or so product lines in a big Tesco, these will only sell maybe 2,000 different items. You won't be able to park your car outside these supermarkets, not unless you pay around £2.50, otherwise you lug your shopping back on a bus. Moreover the opening hours of these supermarkets wil be very limited, maybe 10 minutes in every hour, certainly hardly open at all in the evenings or on weekends, and if you come at the wrong time you wait in a draughty, vandalised, no-seats, waiting room in the middle of a cold wet deserted area of tarmac (where the cars might have parked). We do have a 'first-class' shopping service but we charge double Tesco prices for this. Then again, maybe the staff don't turn up, or we haven't recruited enough staff, and you wait a really long time till the next opening slot. Building standards and building maintenance too have been skimped on, and if it gets over 30 C the aisles are liable to buckle in the heat and we close for the whole day. We don't actually tell you this, we keep you waiting for some hours, then make an garbled message over an intercom you won't be able to decipher. We do have a cafeteria, but it only sells 3-day-old cheese sandwiches and stale tea, and we charge £5.00 for this. Actually, we tell you when you can come and shop with us, and we may have special offers but they are incredibly complicated to work out, and we charge more to shop here when everyone wants to come. We more or less tell you what you can buy here, too. And we know normal supermarket queues can be slow, but, just wait till you've tried our 30-minute queues! Best of all, if you want, say, meat and cheese, you buy the meat, then have to 'change', wait 45 minutes, then shop at another of our branches for the cheese. The really smart way we make money is, we charge about the same as the Tesco or Asda would, but we say we are more environmentally friendly, well we would as we don't have all the lorry deliveries or car parking they do, do we? So we now rely on your environmental awareness to use us, even if you could use Tesco etc. for about the same price. Convinced this is going to really get the tills rolling? Then apply for a job with us, at Railtrack-Britrail Supermarkets Limited, Bentrail House, 13, Cancellation Lane, Beechington, Costlyjourneyton, Wrongleaveshire. Or just ask yourself why UK train fares, for one person, are quite similar to the petrol costs of a car journey (for up to 4 people) and how this will tempt you to be a good environmentalist and take the train. Hillary Shaw, School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, [log in to unmask] Hillary Shaw, P/G Geography, University of Leeds