Sainsbury's - Mission: Impossible?

I walked into the darkened room and, discerning a chair in front of me, sat down. A projector whirred into life, and threw an image of a supermarket onto a small screen. Smiling to myself, I pressed “play” on the tape recorder I’d found on a low table by the chair.

“Good morning, Mr Harrison,” said a warm, low female voice. “The shop you are looking at is Sainsbury’s Templars Shopping Park in Cowley, Oxford. This is the nearest branch of Sainsbury’s to your place of work.”

I smiled again – she was referring to my cover job as a mid-grade publishing professional, not my “real” job as an agent of Plastic Redacted.

“At lunchtime today you have a one-hour window of personal time. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go to this Sainsburys branch, and purchase 100 grams of chorizo for tonight’s jumbalaya dinner. As usual, you must try to make this exchange without incurring the use of plastic. This tape will self destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Andy.”

The screen went dark, and a moment later the tape stopped. I waited five seconds, but the tape did not self-destruct. A joke, I realised – the tape was not only plastic, but perfectly re-useable. Plastic Redacted would be nothing without a sense of humour.

The mission was simple, and I felt relaxed about my chances of success. I would eat my sandwiches before embarking on the mission, and then use the sandwich box to hold the chorizo which I planned to buy from the deli counter. They would give me a bar code which I could stick to the Tupperware and take to the checkout – simple.

Arriving at the shop, all was quiet. As was my habit, I went first to the seasonal aisle to check for special offers. Half-price Lego caught my eye, but I knew my superior at Plastic Redacted would frown on such a purchase. After that, I made straight for the deli counter.

It was easy to find what I wanted – a fat chorizo sausage lay, as yet uncut, for all to see behind the protective glass of the counter. Attracting the assistant with a blandly insincere half-smile, I asked her to cut me a hundred grams of it.

“Thin or medium?” she queried immediately.

I wasn’t thrown by this trick question. Tonight’s meal was to be jumbalaya – the thickness of the sausage would be practically irrelevant.

“Medium, please,” I replied. My hand twitched over my coat pocket, which bulged with the ungainly cuboid outline of the Tupperware. The crucial moment was almost upon us. She would cut the 100 grams, and would make to wrap it up in plastic – at which point, I would draw my Tupperware pot with the lightning reflexes honed over so many years of carrying objects in my pockets, and ask her instead if she wouldn’t mind placing the cured meat directly into my reusable receptacle of choice.

But what was this? Taking the entire sausage over to the admirable spotless meat slicer behind the counter, the assistant was now withdrawing – no, it couldn’t be! A small sheet of thin plastic, of the single-use type which I knew, almost to a certainty, would not be widely recycled! Before I could say a word, she had laid this along the bottom of the meat slicer, and within a moment, had sliced five, no, six slices of chorizo onto it.

I knew then my mission had failed. I could still ask her to put the meat in my Tupperware, of course, but the damage had been done – she would simply dispose of the plastic sheet herself. Better to stick to my cover as a mild-mannered English person, and accept the plastic-wrapped chorizo (now encased, for good measure, in a brown paper bag bearing the barcode label) with my usual meek politeness.

Sneaky plastic, wrapped in brown paper to make you feel better about it!

Heart sinking, I decided to try and salvage something from the mission by scoping out the rest of the shop. What I saw depressed me – almost every item was contained in some form of plastic. The bakery items, for which I had held out some hope that they may be wrapped in simple “rustic” paper bags, were either in single-use plastic bags or in mixed material monstrosities of brown paper and cellophane. We would not be buying our bread from here any time soon. And worst of all – all of the chocolate and biscuits were all plastic-wrapped. It was almost too terrible to think about.

Leaving the shop, I tried to take heart that I had at least succeeded in buying what I had wanted, and that, even though it was wrapped in a thin sheet of plastic, this was still less plastic than the pre-packaged chorizo chunks also available from the same retailer. Still, it was cold comfort. Cold meat comfort, actually. I like my cold meats…