Welcome easyJet's Food Bank-Themed Supermarket

It's incomprehensibly grim to think that extreme poverty to the point of food banking exists in our Keep Calm and Carry On plushie toy society. To many, this level of poverty is something only heard of. Poverty is abstract until you've seen it.

EasyJet baron Stelios Haji-Ioannou has taken it upon himself to open a place called easyFoodstore, which is aimed at people who are too poor to buy groceries at budget stores like Lidl and Aldi, but are not quite destitute enough for food banks. Here he will sell "food honestly priced," with "no expensive brands." His charity, which gives food to the needy in Greece and Cyprus, inspired the shop. On its inaugural day of business, everything in the store was priced at 25p.

Usually when shops advertise their items at extremely low prices, people swarm like flies to shit. We've seen enough shared Facebook videos of people on Black Friday falling over their own feet trying to buy three toasters. So where was the mad rush at easyFood? You could get enough grub to last you until summer for less than £20, but where were the security guards pushing people back into the road with cow prodders? There was a smattering of people in there, mostly curious passers-by and local office workers, coming to get snacks or a cheeky tin of ravioli.

The store is placed inside another "easy" business venture, easyBus, which appears to have moved. Can you guess what service they provide? Its home, Hanger Lane in north west London, is a place familiar to most people as a prefix to the word "gyratory" on radio traffic reports, usually talking about how congested it is. It's basically a large roundabout surrounded by tile shops, burger bars, and residential roads. It would be unfair to critique it as a place, as it serves primarily as a gateway, home to the North Circular and Western Avenue, paths to the suburbs and beyond.

easyFoodstore is sparsely decorated, with items stacked on rudimentary shelves, like the pantry in an army mess hall. The usual suspects were there: tinned beans, tinned peas, vats of salt, bags of flour, jaffa cakes, rice, pasta, pasta sauces. It was like being in a doomsday prepper's fridge. How can Stelios afford to sell all this stuff cheaply? Matthew Gwyther, editor of retail magazine Management Today says, plainly: "He can't."

"Maybe his business model is that you'll only pay 25p for you bag of teabags at the beginning, then they'll bump the price up to 40p, or something slightly squalid like that," he says. "The central reason why it's a bad idea is that we all need food to live. It's not a lifestyle choice, like going to the gym or getting a budget flight. It seems to me a kind of race to the bottom between Lidl and Aldi. I think it's thoroughly tasteless. People who are too poor to eat properly is something different altogether and needs to be handled with some degree of care."

In an interview with the Independent, easyGroup press director Richard Shackleton appeared to confirm Gwyther's theory, stating: "With Lidl and Aldi drifting upmarket it has left space at the bottom between them and food banks. Yes, there is a strong philanthropic thread to this, but we are also looking to make money."

Budget supermarkets engaging in a bidding war over who can sell us the cheapest tinned food will not get people out of poverty, or liven up the painful mediocrity of trying to feed yourself for less. I stood outside easyFoodstore and watched an old man walking slowly out with his bags of shopping, head bowed, not wanting to make eye contact with any of the journalists, like me, who had come down to take a look. Maybe he didn't want to be asked stupid questions like, "Why are you here?" This was hunger made spectacle.

Being skint and being poor are two different things. easyFoodstore has a bizarre agony to it, from its gloomy location to its uncomfortable interior and its cheap, laminated signs, but most of all, to its sense of necessity. It's easy to wax poetic about the vibe of the place and how grim it is, but the fact that it exists in the first place is the problem, not how it stands now. For many, the act of going to a food bank is imbued with a great sense of shame. Perhaps with prices this low, that necessity would be slightly alleviated, even though this is clearly a shop designed to feel like what it is—somewhere you have no choice but to go to.

Whether it is genuinely a charity move, or more Stelios Haji-Ioannou trying to get a piece of the rocketing profits of budget supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl, it makes little difference to the people who actually need to shop here. The "easy" brand treads a weird line between giving you services for no money, but making them as unbearably basic as possible. easyFoodstore is bad and it's dark, but sadly, it also serves a purpose.

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