I live in a city and I can't think of a shopping parade that doesn't have at least one Polish Food shop on it. The Polish shops I see have all their stuff written in Polish and clearly have a 'Poles only' feel about them.
The nearest Polish shop to me in my home town of Chatham is run by Turks, or maybe Turkish Cypriots. Labels are not translated. They also have a lot of stuff with greek lattering on tins and jars and these are also not translated. The reason for it very simple, I think, there is about as much chance of Englishman looking for calf tongue in aspic and vinegar or pork stuffed cabbage rolls in sauerkraut brine among shelf labels as there is for Polish folk enquiring about Greek, Turkish or Anatolian delicacies, be it lamb's head or jarred kokoretsi organs and intestines in lard. In other words, I don't thinks it's "ef you, Polish customers only", it's more of a "if you don't recognize the tin in the shop, it's probably not a toad in a hole ingredient".
The Poles killed the construction industry years ago but mainly down to greedy developers wanting cheap labour.
I think "killed construction industry" is a bit of an exaggeration. I like to think of it more as an "market equalizer". The world where fresh bricky with two week vocational course could earn more than Police officer with overtime, or where young sparkies could buy half page adds in yellow pages for their "call out fee + £££ per each 15 minutes" services is probably never coming back. But as a result, at least here in Kent, the price of building an extension is now about half of what it was in 2006. And when you hire plumbers, decorators or carpenters they no longer cost more than most of us, clients earn a day. I consider this beneficial and I think a bit of competition corrected a lot anomalies, it brought back a bit of order to sector that used to be, and still is in a lot of niche services, prone to developing very unregulated and deluded pricing policies. But then again I would, I only "just" arrived in UK on a boat in 1994, I am one of those pesky job stealing, marked deregulating foreigners myself.
Oddly enough, 2005 New Member States migrants will suffer the most from Bulgarian/Romanian wave. The newcomers are not coming for office vacancies or markets requiring higher education. They will go mostly for the low pay, typically Polish/Latvian/Czech temporary positions in agriculture/catering/packing/factories and building sites. There will be a lot of the jack-of-all-trades and handyman sole traders, car mechanics and people with driving licenses for everything from forklift to specialized forestry equipment appearing on kerbsides around the country. And thousands of small outfits with mini fleets of T.I.R. tractors and haul trucks and endless rotation of midnight runners permanently strapped to caffeine drips on wage margins so tiny it will completely wipe the floor with all the "contract stealing" haulage firms using [PL][CZ] and [LV] truckers.
