Supermarkets count cost of takeover madness

With the weeklong frenzy of bid and counter-bid finally over, the directors of the UK's major supermarkets have emerged blinking into the harsh light of day.

An astonishing series of events was kicked off by Morrisons' £3 billion pound bid for the Safeways chain. This was an astute move that would vastly increase Morrisons' share of the UK shopping market. Obviously unnerved by Morrisons' bold move, the other major supermarkets waded in clutching their piggy banks.

In a lively round of bidding, the offers rose from a modest £20 billion in cash to a slightly more extravagant £100 billion in gold and three years' Colombian cocaine yield. Tescos looked to have the deal clinched with an offer of its entire profits for the next fifty years, placed just minutes before the bid deadline on Thursday.

Unfortunately for Safeways, their director, Mr Carlos Criado-Perez, became caught up in the atmosphere of fiscal madness. In a stunning move, which he later described as rather foolish, Mr Criado-Perez made a successful bid of £1,000,000,000,000,000,000 and his first born child.

In the stunned silence that followed Mr Criado-Perez's purchase of his own company, Tescos took the opportunity to buy Asda whilst no-one was looking. Deprived of a major chain to take over, Sainsburys made a sideways move and bought the entire county of Sussex, forcing at gunpoint its shocked inhabitants to become Sainsburys customers.

BHS then leapt into the fray with 96 highly trained and ready-to-roll prostitutes who engaged all executives in a five-hour orgy of boardroom depravity before slicing off their penises with letter openers and forcing them into the suits' mouths.

But where does all this fiscal frippery leave you, the British consumer? All the supermarkets have claimed that it will be business as usual but it may be necessary for some price restructuring to recoup integration costs. An early example of this was the introduction by Tesco of the £15 cup of tea, a move that was criticised by several major motorway service station chains as "exploitation of a virtual monopoly to undercut the opposition".