Monty Don thinks supermarkets reduce choice

This is not a contention which survives any interaction with reality:

Supermarket plant sales are reducing customers' choice, says Gardeners' World presenter Monty Don.

Nurseries increasingly focus on plants that can be mass produced so the big stores can sell them cheaply, he says.

"You have these vast wholesale nurseries now supplying supermarkets - and that's a diminution of choice," he told Radio 4's You and Yours.

Some of us are old enough to have lived in that world before the general rise of supermarkets. One or two of us have lived in Soviet-style places without those supermarkets. And we've really got to tell Don and others that the supermarket expands choice hugely.

The average UK supermarket has 10,000 skus, stock-keeping units. An Aldi or Lidl might have 1,000 to 1,500. That lower number is still vastly more than the entire High Street would offer those years before the pile it high and sell it cheap years.

Seriously, go talk to Granny about when olive oil was sold in pharmacies only as an earache treatment - or read Elizabeth David. Supermarkets reduce choice? Pah!

Further, mass production and lower prices reduce choice? You mean that if my plants cost me less I have fewer choices in my life? 

Err, yes, but then Monty Don is associated with the Soil Association which is full of this sort of nonsense, isn't it?