Sainsbury's Spin Cycle

The Bishops Waltham Action Group (BWAG) had made a fair number of points against the development of a new store in their town and Sainsbury’s have responded to them in the making the most absurd arguments. It does Sainsbury's no credit.
The list is long but the highlights in the absurdity stakes are:
1. BWAG said a new store no matter how green it is must contribute to global warming. Sainsbury’s responded by saying that BWAG were wrong and they had reduced their carbon footprint last year. Well, sorry Sainsbury’s your argument is wrong. A new build store no matter how eco friendly you make it MUST add to the carbon footprint. Sainsbury’s tactic is a distraction tactic. Say the other side is wrong and then change the argument. It does not matter how much more green Sainsbury’s are this year than last... building a new store will make them less green unless it replaces and inefficient store ... which it does not. On the assumption that Sainsbury’s are intelligent people, they must know what they are arguing and that they are talking bxxxs. It does them no credit to engage in this kind of argument.
2. BWAG said that there was academic argument that new Supermarkets destroyed as many jobs as they created. Sainsbury’s said that this argument was not relevant to the case and they were creating X jobs. Under what circumstances is the destruction of existing jobs in competitors to Sainsbury’s not relevant? This is callous and heartless. Sainsbury’s don’t operate in a vacuum. A new store will take business from local shops and result in lay-offs. Apparently jobs don’t count unless you work for Sainsbury’s. Again Sainsbury’s are deploying a denial and distraction and not using any sort of logic. Clearly Sainsbury’s will bring their own figures to the planning committee and argue their corner, but they just don’t want to have the argument in public. This is an abuse of the planning process and a denial of basic democracy.
People have a right to be informed and big business does itself no service by engaging in falsehoods, distractions and a failure to engage in reasoned debate. If Sainsbury’s case was so good they would be more transparent.
The one figure that Sainsbury’s have used from BWAG is the figure for car journeys at 20k per week. Personally I think that this figure is an underestimate as I think it was based on Sainsbury’s estimate for the number of shoppers using the store each week so the correct figure should be 40,000 journeys. My own calculations based on average shopping basket size and turnover per square foot is 60,000 journeys per week, but that is probably too high.
Tesco underestimate traffic by an average of nearly 50% in their planning applications. There is no penalty for getting it wrong and no reason to believe Sainsbury’s any more than Tesco - they use the same processed to create their surveys.
I think the planning process should include a claw back from developers for external costs incurred by the council/community when they get their estimates wrong. We’d soon get better estimates then.