The news that Tesco is to shut the fresh food counters at 90 of its UK stores was surprising in one detail: it has chosen to retain the butcher’s, cheese and deli counters at 700 more. Why? The remaining counters will surely be streamlined but, in 2019, is anyone really taken in by the supermarket fresh food counter, that sentimental harking back to a world of town squares and traditional retailers? Does anyone browse what Morrisons calls its Market Street and feel like they are in a market … or a street? No.

In a 2012 Financial Times article, which identified fresh food as the next major supermarket battleground (tell that to up to 9,000 people now facing redundancy at Tesco), one expert revealingly described fresh food as “the biggest single determinant of the quality image of a superstore operator”. Key words there: quality image. As opposed to actual, objective quality. Retail magazine The Grocer this week described fresh food counters as key to customer “perception”, but “an expensive luxury” which, say analysts, have been “haemorrhaging” money for years. Unlike in continental hypermarkets (yes, even here we are diverging from Europe), fresh food counters contribute “microscopic” amounts to turnover.

In other words, they are pure window dressing, but, if that marketing trickery ever worked it is now untenable.

It would be amazing, as a food writer, to report that this is because a newly food-conscious generation have risen up, marched out of the supermarket and into their local cheesemongers. But plainly they have not. For every new-wave fishmonger or butcher that opens (Clifton Seafood Company at Bristol’s Wapping Wharf; the wet fish counters at Nottingham’s Cod’s Scallops chip shops; The Butcher’s Quarter in Manchester; London’s Ginger Pigs), hundreds more have closed in recent decades. It is impractical for the vast majority of us to regularly use independent food shops. Similarly, while many of us may be eating less meat (a good news story), the vegetarians and vegans don’t yet have the numbers to explain why, suddenly, supermarket meat and dairy counters are surplus to requirements.

Instead, I think, broadly, Britain is now food-literate but food-cynical – especially where supermarket fresh food counters are concerned. To varying degrees, we have bought Nigella’s books, seen Tom Kerridge on TV and, if pushed, probably agree with whatever Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is banging on about this week. We know just enough, in fact, to see through the supermarkets’ attempts to sell us an artisan food experience on their fresh food counters, without quite having the wherewithal to stop using supermarkets.

There was a moment, circa 2006, when it felt like this might shift. Provenance, animal welfare and traditional food production were being more widely discussed. Food quality was rising up the agenda. On everything from free-range eggs to sustainable fish, victories were achieved that continue to play out. But then the 2008 financial crash happened, wages stagnated – falling in real terms – household bills continued to rise and, suddenly, food (and particularly the weekly supermarket shop) became a resented drain on our collective resources as much as a source of pleasure.

In those circumstances, who is going to pay slightly more at the fresh food counter? (Aldi and Lidl don’t even have them). Particularly at a time when – as two years of testing supermarket own-brand products for the Guardian brought home to me – food quality in most supermarkets is, at best, wobbling precariously. Caught between rising raw material and production costs and an increasingly price-sensitive public, the supermarkets are bean-counting every last, well, bean. And we can taste it. We might still be buying “posh” vanilla ice-cream flavoured with low-rent vanilla extract and powder or pesto bulked-out with bamboo fibres, but, we are doing so begrudgingly. We are not being enticed to trade up to more expensive items on the fresh food counter. One Tesco executive suggested we lack the time to linger at them. Could we simply lack the appetite?

Tesco’s chief executive, David Lewis, should be pilloried for this decision. Those staff he is laying off helped deliver £1.3bn in pre-tax profits to February 2018. But cutting those counters probably sums up exactly where mainstream food retail is right now. “Drastic Dave” is getting real with the public. This is a “challenging” market in which Tesco wants to make money and we all want value. As we stare down the barrel of Brexit, let’s drop the pretence that anyone is shopping in UK supermarkets because it is a delicious experience. We expect them to deliver OK food, functional food and, most importantly, cheap food.

This is grim news for those facing redundancy, but also for the overall direction of British food. Nonetheless, pulling those fresh food counters makes perfect sense.

• Tony Naylor is a freelance journalist based in Manchester, UK