I’ve been living in the UK for just over a year and a half. My wife and I moved here for my dream job, which reality proved to be more of a nightmare. These past several months have not been lacking in difficult moments. Fortunately, in the darkest hours, I always had an awkwardly comforting sentiment to assist in retaining perspective. It just happened to be something I learned during my first fortnight in the country.
Searching for a place to live in an overcrowded metropolis is one of the more unpleasant aspects of contemporary life. After several days spent touring overpriced shitholes in far outlying neighbourhoods, we finally found a comparative gem in Camden Town. It was small and overpriced, yeah, but it was a clean, brand-new development and centrally-located. A far cry from the palace we had in Chicago, but with us and our cat living in a crappy hotel that was fastly depleting our meagre funds, compromise was going to prove essential in improving our immediate situation.
As we discussed the flat with our future landlord, he modestly listed the virtues of his property, “Washing machine, large wardrobes, hardwood floors, bit of a deck outside: you could do worse!” Wait, huh?
You see, where I come from, everything is oversold and hyped beyond belief. This is why “awesome” has come to be known as the quintessence of American slang. We like superlatives, generally a little too much. When everything is the best thing ever, nothing stands out, and after a while, it all begins to feel slightly mediocre. Nevertheless, when you’re trying to sell something in America, your prime directive is to convince the potential buyer that what you’re selling will truly inspire awe.
So naturally I was a bit confused when our dear landlord’s best sales pitch ended with an enthusiastic and somewhat gleeful exclamation of “You could do worse!” Immediately I thought of that statement’s inverse: I could do better. Well, yes, of course I could do better. Perhaps the next flat I would see would be bigger and have more mod cons for the exact same price or less. I could also do worse, however, as Mr. Landlord so aptly noted. I might not see something this nice again for weeks and then by the time I came back round to beg for this place, it will have already been let to someone else. A gamble was placed before me, and I needed to choose whether to hold ‘em or to fold ‘em.
I folded ‘em after about 15 seconds. The flat was good enough and it meant we could move out of the hotel and actually get things sent to us in the post and put groceries in the fridge and make cups of tea and do all the things that people who live in flats do. The next day we signed the lease and proceeded to the nearest pub to celebrate.
I left my landlord’s office that day with more than just the joyous privilege of paying him gobs of money each month. I also got four words out of the deal. If something’s not going your way, you can generally stop and think, “You could do worse,” and most of the time you’d be absolutely right. Whilst it sucks to be chained to Jabba the Hutt sporting your best bikini, you could be inside the Sarlaac Pit as it slowly spends the next 1,000 years digesting you.
Perhaps “you could do better” is a sentiment born of the American Dream. It’s a thought that means well, for at its best it encourages you to strive for more. At its worst, however, it prevents you from being happy with what you already have. “You could do worse” always reminds you to be thankful for what’s right in front of you. It’s possible that the tension between the two variations of this phrase sits at the centre of the gap between American and English approaches to life. I’d love to explore this juxtaposition more deeply, but unfortunately this is not an anthropology study, it’s just the beginning of a blog about Sainsbury’s Basics products.
For the uninitated, Sainsbury’s Basics is the popular UK supermarket chain’s bargain basement line. I’d call it their generic range, but that word belies the greatness behind the humble white, orange and yellow packaging. Generic products don’t put any extra effort in, whereas Sainsbury’s Basics is frugality with a self-conscious sense of humour. Why am I so obsessed with one specific budget line of groceries and household items? Nothing I’ve found anywhere in Britain expresses the sentiment of “you could do worse” better than Sainsbury’s Basics.
Almost every Sainsbury’s Basics product has a tag line that shrugs its shoulders and thinks, “Well, you could do worse!” The slightly-more-than-£2 bottle of red wine quips, “For the table, not the cellar,” as the simple fruit salad honestly states, “Not fancy, still fruity.” Clearly if you have a tenner to drop on a bottle of vino, Sainsbury’s Basics won’t get in your way, but if you’re impecunious and in need of a tipple, it’s there for you with open arms and a good, straight-forward taste. You could do better, but you could do worse. Having no wine at all is, indeed, far worse!
This could be the story of our epiphany at the end of the supermarket aisle, but will mostly be the tale of Rin and I eating a lot of really cheap food and telling you what to steer clear of and what to stock up on. Sometimes you need to treat yourself and buy posh, but most of the time you can get by on the basics. You could do worse: you could be forced to shop at Somerfield.