Perhaps someone, somewhere, is trying to tell me something. Since leaving the civil service after 39 years continuous service, I have now started – and finished – work with two major supermarket chains within four months. Whilst one ended amicably, on the best possible terms, and the other didn’t, I have still managed to gain an insight of where our large supermarkets are going, or not as the case may be.
My first back office job was not on the shop floor, but even at my induction meeting, I became aware of the dramatic changes to the way in which we shop. One of the store managers said, right at the start, that this particular store would not exist in its current form within a decade. The era of ‘The Big Weekly Shop’ was becoming a thing of the past, as shoppers moved to on-line shopping. Personal visitors were mainly coming in for smaller, top up shops or to buy smaller amounts on a regular basis. My first experience was with a supermarket that was situated next to a number of employers, and one huge one, and the smaller shop pattern was obvious to see. Shoppers were coming in for small amounts of things. The only people coming in for Big Shops were generally senior citizens who often regard the weekly shop as a regular habit, who enjoy ‘getting out’ and/or rarely if ever use computers, and – without trying to sound patronising – those with limited incomes who fill up on budget lines and the reduced counter. The make up of shoppers was striking, but this was, I felt, a uniquely situated shop that suited the smaller shop mentality.
Having left my first supermarket, I moved to another for better hours and very slightly better (or less bad) pay. And it was a huge place, with something like 600 employees working over a near 24/7 operation. And, like my first supermarket, it ran on line shopping but that’s where the similarity ended. This was a behemoth of a supermarket which was initially designed to be, well, a behemoth supermarket and nothing else. For years, supermarkets operated on the basis that the boom would last forever. The Sainsburys. Asda, Tesco and Morrisons giants of the mid market saw off the worldwide financial crash and they reasoned we would shop in their bigger supermarkets more often, forever amen. And then they all took their eyes of the ball.
On-line shopping caught on quite quickly and with good reason: you could sit in your armchair, choose your shopping, order and pay for it and then have it all delivered to your house, the shopping being done for you by an in house personal shopper. And so it came to pass that the giant stores, designed as supermarkets, soon became dual businesses, with small (and recently not so small) armies of personal shoppers crowding the aisles and mingling with ‘ordinary’ shoppers, competing for the freshest produce. There is no doubt in my mind that had the big supermarkets planned for on-line shopping they would never have opened stores that little or no provision for it. Instead, they would have designed one large purpose built warehouse away from the towns from which one operation would have been operated. But instead they run two operations simultaneously: a more conventional supermarket and on-line shopping with a ‘hope-for-the-best’ operation and no strategic plan. Or perhaps there is a plan and they just haven’t told us yet, with a long term move to large warehouse operations?
One thing is for sure: the conventional mid-market shop is changing. Top end (Waitrose) and bottom end (Aldi, Lidl) are both thriving but more and more people are shopping via their computers. The giant new Sainsburys and Tescos are a thing of the past. Some new sites will be scrapped, others will be moth-balled, which will, in the long term mean the same thing.
The future is on-line, it’s home delivery and, who knows, even the small shop may become a thing of the past. How about motorcycle courier riders bringing small quantities to homes and offices?
Three or four months does not make me an expert, especially as the latest one deemed me not competent enough to carry out personal shopping, so I left before being pushed. I have no quarrel with them, nor bitterness. I cannot deny that my overwhelming motive was to ensure that the customer got a good service, to engage with customers who often dislike the presence of an army of personal shoppers, that they got the products they ask for, that they were able to ask me where something was and, if necessary, I would take them to it. But the giants of business focus on internal targets, performance indicators and all the rest of it in order to sustain and grow their business and who am I to argue?
It was a fascinating insight to a world about which I knew nothing and now know a little bit more than nothing. But every little helps!
