Tesco Bottle It and Pay The Price

About 18 months ago, it felt that they were starting to get back at their best, with new store concepts such as Watford, Chelmsford and Tooley Street once again proving that their detractors in retail do so out of fear and envy rather than the pseudo-local/ anti-big rhetoric they spout.

A Tesco who hadn't seen their leader lose some of the best brains in retail under his tenure wouldn't have bottled it, but here we are in a new and scary retail environment seeing Phil Clarke looking like a late era Roman emperor ignoring his empire's problems and blaming everyone but himself. I'm amazed there hasn't been a Downfall video appear on YouTube featuring Phil Clarke's words dubbed over Hitler's last rant. Actually, Clarke's infamous motivationals on YouTube are getting closer to Downfall - where once he would be filmed in a store, nonchantly chatting in front of a fixture, now he's filmed in his bunker on the first floor of the grey Lubyanka in Cheshunt.

Clarke's allies suggest there were critical flaws in the organistation he inherited from Terry Leahy, conveniently forgetting that he would have had a lot of input into those from his previous roles. The reality is very few big businesses are perfect organisations, with processes tending to evolve or adjusted to meet changing demands caused by expansion or the market changing. What makes a great leader of a big business is the ability to keep all the plates spinning - through trusting his senior team and inspiring the business. People at Tesco would do anything for Terry, they'd do anything for MacLaurin. But for Phil? Well, I can't say for certain as I'm not working for them, nor particularly closely with them, at the moment. But the slipping standards in stores suggest he has "lost" the workers in the same way a football manager is said to "lose" the dressing room.

There is still some pride out there as the picture of a produce fixture tweeted recently shows (see below), but there's also countless examples of pure shoddiness (two examples below!)

You have to question priorities in a retailer that seems to accept these two extremes. I've been saying a while that grocers ignore ambient departments at their peril, but Tesco are continuing to put all their eggs into a fresh basket. Trials of push-merchandising kit will help them move store hours away from ambient to fresh (although I doubt they'll let suppliers off the shelf-ready packaging hook if it rolls out!), but you mustn't ignore the ambient departments. If this area starts to look scruffy, unfilled and unloved then that just makes more shoppers see Aldi as an acceptable alternative, no matter how many different SKUs of pesto you range.

The ambient area has also now been effectively sold off to suppliers with branded POS taking over two aisles, but in a standardised way which allows no sensitive care of a category's or shoppers' needs. And of course, is again liable to poor execution:

Events are also being sold off - Homepride Sauces somehow getting into two consecutive events this year...

Ok, so you might be able to justify "world kitchen", but Big Night In? Really? Expect them to also feature in the World Cup Event too!

This kind of brings me down to ranging and the cult of Dunn Humby that is killing off initiative and retail nouse in the trading departments in the same way that an out of control Support Office killed off spontaneous thinking in stores. I won't repeat my views on big data - you can read a previous blog for that - but the reliance on clubcard data is getting worse and the data is blindly followed, now also by suppliers coerced into buying the Shelf Review Tool. Two worrying facts - firstly, even with the larger samples of clubcard data now used for modelling, it is still dependent on Clubcard, a scheme where penetration never went far over 50% and is painfully low in Express and Metro format stores. Yet, this is still regarded as the best guide - and the appalling ranging in some categories in the smaller formats is testament to this. Secondly, the tool has it's final "need states" set by a supplier. If you have two suppliers involved, both will set it differently to meet their own objectives so it will be inherently flawed. But hey, they've paid their money, right?

Admittedly, the crazy city culture that puts quarterly growth ahead of long term thinking isn't helping Clarke. Tesco had what looked like the start of a pragmatic store/shopper led strategy with clearly defined mission based store formats, but to execute things properly you need a steady team at the top and a fiercely loyal team in the stores. You don't need a leader who comes over as flaky and seemingly powerless against discounters and the insipid yet cosy world of Waitrose. Tesco got to be so big through hard graft, a unwavering sense of self belief, an effortless simplicity of message and near worship of the shopper.

Now it's looking at the Dunn Humby tea leaves at "loyal" shoppers and increasingly desperate attempts to hold onto an unsustainable market share. 

As for Clarke, I actually like the guy - he is a good retailer, just a terrible leader. If Tesco get flounced during the summer (massive trading this year with World Cup and Commonwealth Games), then I wouldn't be surprised that he doesn't get the chance to oversee another Christmas.

Moriturus te saluto, etc

Shoppers don't exist in a spreadsheet

There seems to have been a lot of debate around number-crunching recently, including the need for "big data" to be able to have any chance of competing in today's market. Dunn Humby continue to offer ever more complex models and tools, there's an endless queue of data suppliers at my door and a worrying obsession with getting more data, more quickly and more often.

But does complicated data actually tell us anything? No matter how rich and detailed the data is - and we have lifestyles, life stages, affluence, ethnicity, regionaliy, mission, shopper behaviour and even actual sales to choose from - it's always using historical perform to try and predict the future. Unfortunately, shoppers don't act in a rational and logical manner - if they did, there'd be quite a few thousand less jobs in retail and FMCG overnight. I've worked on many ranging projects from different angles over a number of years and every one has had at least one major oversight caused by putting too much emphasis into the output of a spreadsheet and too little trust of retail instinct.

This manifested itself in being virtually lynched in a trial store in Sheffield for delisting Henderson's relish to seeing a SKU our modelling told us had 4 weeks cover on shelf sell out in 2 hours. Data suggested that a relatively expensive small bottle of fresh fruit call Innocent wouldn't sell while a tiny caffeine-packed chocolate bar called Go-co would, while the reverse was true. That was 10 years ago when data wasn't as all conquering and we found out what would actually work by taking a punt and giving them both a go.

But a reliance on data is gradually eroding the old retailer instinct. Young buyers now just point at a spreadsheet and seem unwilling or unable to take a gamble or even grasp the concept of "breadth not depth" when creating a range. Multiples' c-stores have appalling ranges created by just picking from a list of SKUs not even ranked by sales, but by profit contribution. 

And then there's clustering.

On one of my categories has 11 different clusters for a convenience channel in a retailer. Whilst shoppers do clearly shop differently along affluence, mission even ethnic lines, creating a cluster of stores almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and also assumes that everyone within a group behaves the same. At worst, an obsession with meeting a clusters' needs means you reduce the core range which serves everyone's needs. It assumes that because you are from an Asian background, you eat sweeter foods, it assumes that if you live in a lower affluence area that you will only buy the cheapest products and never ever trade up. It assumes because you're relatively wealthy, you want Bolivian baked beans in sundried tomato sauce rather than Heinz originals. Well, it does if you just read the data.

Aldi and Lidl don't use this data, don't cluster and are doing ok without it. They are the masters of identifying a core range and applying it broadly. The concept of the core range elsewhere seems to be lost - do you believe anyone in Co-op actually KNOWS what their core range is after several of various failed format options? Ranging processes have changed - most retailers have moved from a top-down approach to a bottom-up, but there's still relatively little time spent on the smaller store plans. The biggest plans may deliver the biggest sales, but your core range reaches all your customers so arguably should have the most time spent on them. This isn't just about looking at the top performers, even looking at complicated composite ranks - although both things are valuable inputs. It's about getting to know your shoppers, meeting your shoppers face to face, watching them in stores and learning about the choices made in front of the fixture. But most of all, it's about empathy - we're all shoppers, yet we seem to forget that when there's some sexy new charts on a PowerPoint waved in front of us.

Now, I'm no Luddite, in fact I'm quite a geek with data myself. However, I never forget that data alone cannot be used to make good solid retailing decisions. Compared to when I first started looking at formats 15 years ago, the available data is so much more advanced and often genuinely excited. But it is crazy to think we'll ever get to a position where it can fully replaced retail nouse.

That doesn't mean it won't - as each generation comes through more used to data, there's less and less real retailing knowledge out there, not helped by a generation of store managers who are great implementers of centralized plans yet have no ability or training to trade on their own.

Race to The Bottom That Benefits No One

Woohoo! Cheap milk! Kind of! Farmers moaning, so something must be happening in the world of retail. But, unlike previous incursions in the cold price war that's been going on for well over ten years now, this won feels like we're entering a Dr Strangelove phase, mutually assured destruction and all.

When you consider the catalyst for this latest round, you'd be forgiven for scratching your head. Across the top 4 multiples, there is clearly some loss of market share to the discounters and Waitrose happening, but they are still profitable and stable businesses. In a normal universe, they'd be keeping calm and holding their nerve through these tough times. Yet, instead, we seem to have some insecure CEOs acting like jumpy teenagers. And I would have loved to been a fly on the wall when Andy Clarke heard that the one SKU that probably saved him millions in Asda Price Guarantee vouchers had finally been price-matched!

With the notable exception of Sainsburys, who have so far kept to their sensible policy of doing simple things really well, the other three seem so obsessed with the rise of Aldi and Lidl that they are prepared to go hell for leather into a race to the bottom. And not once, are they seeming to stop and think about their shoppers! They'd need to look no further than Asda to see that suicidal pricing is not working in this new world and, from a growth view, even Co-op seem to have realised that Like for like growth is a much more sensible grail to chase. We have to accept that this weird version of city-driven capitalism demands growth in sales and profits at all costs, but surely only a fool would fail to realize that achieving this solely by adding new space is not a sustainable way to achieve this? 

I'm hearing some worrying things come from our retailers at the moment - talk of focusing on the core and driving value may keep city analysts happy with some buzzwords, but the danger is that the incredible choice of products that have been made more accessible to more people over the last 20 years will be removed as everyone tries to replicate the look and SKU density of the discounters. The affluent supporters of anti-"Tesco" will obviously cheer as it will mean the oiks will only be able to get focaccia and balsamic vinegar for bijou artisan stores in nice, twee High Streets, but of course those. It lucky enough to have access to that will be left with endless £1 deals of foods that hit lowest common denominator criteria.

The knock-on effects of a nasty round of price slashing and range rationalisation could be huge. Mainstream retailers depend on extended ranges to manage their margin mix, so proftibility will be hit - this could be a reduced number of store staff. Of course, reduced ranges will have huge implications on manufacturers. Large manufacturers will be able to survive without lower selling products, albeit with some potential lay-offs in their distribution networks and factories, but will really hit smaller companies who may suddenly stop being so vocal in their support of "localism"

Scaremongering? Exaggeration? Maybe, but if you look at what's happening in the last 5 years and then the clear lack of judgement and long term thinking amongst the two Clarkes then I wouldn't rule out movement some way down this path.

I've said it many times before - these are interesting times. Up until now, I've said that I'm glad that I'm no longer on the retail side of things. Now I'm also not so sure manufacturing is such a safe distance either.

A Retail Fable

Once upon a time, there was a High Street and 3 little pigs who owned shops there.

One day, word came that a big bad wolf was coming to town to open a big new store on the edge of the town. The local newspaper reported that the big bad wolf was a nasty person who’d eat everyone and anyone nearby so the little pigs all went back to their shops to make plans.

The first little pig covered his shop with paper leaflets trying to scare the local people about the big bad wolf. The leaflets were full of confusing numbers with no explanation as well as the word “local” spread all over them despite the fact he sourced stock for his shop from a 100 mile radius.

The second little pig added foreign sounding words to all his products, bought some second hand wooden tables and decided he would only worry about the rich people who lived in the town.

The third little pig, who’d always had had the best kept shop with the best customer service and the best choice of products, did nothing but carry on doing what he’d always done.

The day of the Big Bad Wolf’s opening came and the people of the town talked loudly as they walked to the big new shop.

They walked past the shop covered in leaflets and said loudly “Glad I don’t need to use THAT shop anymore – he never used to say a word when I went in and now it feels like I’m being lectured”.

Then they walked past the posh shop and said “I can’t afford that place anymore”

As they walked past the 3rd pig’s shop, they waved at the little pig inside “We’ll be back in a bit”, they said. And, after they visited the big bad wolf’s shop, they did go back.

Today, only one of the little pigs is still running his shop.

The moral of this story is if you have to wait for a big bad wolf to come along for you to make an effort with your shop, you’re letting your shoppers down. And when that big bad wolf comes along, they’ll remember and then let you down.

Let Them Eat Aldi

All the retailers I deal with at the moment are concerned with these days is how to stop their market share being eaten away by the discounters. And who can blame them - in the 12 weeks to January 5th, Kantar Worldpanel's data showed Aldi and Lidl had gained 1.3%pts of share compared to the same period in 2013. Combined, they're now at 7.1% market share - bigger than Co-op and with considerably less stores.

I must confess that I've become a convert myself - Aldi in particular is a great store which suits my top-up shopping ways. Their fresh food is good quality and, as a self-confessed Germanophile, I revel in the choice of imported cold meats and schnitzels. For top-up shopping, the alternatives are fighting my way round a 50,000 sq ft (or larger) superstore or a cluttered and poorly ranged c-store (independent OR multiple owner), the latter usually coming along with a price hike too. I've also mentioned previously that I rate Aldi's no-nonsense approach to their own-label products - match the brand or stock the brand if you can't - and this further boosts their appeal.

But, once you get past the basics, they aren't perfect. A bit like TK Maxx, you have to go in with a mindset that you might not get exactly what you want, but you will get something and that it will be a bargain. For example, I do a lot of stir-fries at home and Aldi sell incredibly good value straight-to-wok noodles at around 65p - none of the big four comes close to this price, and not all even bother with private label versions. I can also get soy sauce (though not the light one I prefer), good meat and veg but, I always sprinkle Chinese 5 Spices liberally over my creations and Aldi's small, confusingly mixed-case offering of herbs and spices doesn't deliver anything more exotic than chilli powder.

Discounters are full of these examples, and this is one of the problems facing the big traditional supermarkets. Shoppers who have enjoyed unprecedented access to the best ranges of food in Western Europe in some of the best looking and certainly most organised supermarkets in the world over the last decade are "down-sizing". They are happy to go into a small, cheaply-fitted store with a very edited range and checkout service that prioritises speed over niceties. Actually, on the service part, I have NEVER had a problem at the tills in an Aldi - the staff are consistently friendly, efficient and responsive to changes in queues. I certainly have not heard them moaning to each other about the unfairness of where they work, or a manager on the shopflooring wailing about his hours being cut to his team. If they roll-out self-scan, I bet the voice in the machine won't be as smug either.

Aldi and Lidl's share gains are a mix of "savvy shoppers",who are using them for their core basic shopping needs and using indies and superstores for the "nicer" things, and the poorer in society who are coming to depend on them - largely due to a well-thought out location strategy. This will particularly hurt Asda and Morrisons whose core shoppers are a very close demographic and lifestyle match to those flocking to the discounters. Morrisons probably have more about them to stem the tide, particularly as M Local expands and they move online. Asda, however, have already shot the online bolt and are cranking their one lever - price - so hard it's going to come in their hand soon. I'm hearing about more "value" bays and a policy that sounds like "Less is more" coming back to Asda - policies that lost them middle-class customers in the past and just make their stores look like larger and more expensive versions of Aldi. 

Tesco aren't out of the firing line, but they're also battling the High Street discounters. As I've mentioned previously, the High Street lobbyists always conveniently forget the huge investment Tesco have made into High Street sites, mainly through their Metro format but also with some Express stores and also as superstore anchors in town centre developments. Here, Tesco are battling with the likes of Home Bargains, B&M, Poundland, Poundworld, 99p Stores and so on. These guys are hard and fast to compete with. They trade with the industry very hard with all their focus on margin with no handcuffs of keeping shoppers happy through range choice. At best, we have price-marked packs engineered to hit a £1 price point to a set margin, at worst we have short-coded stock and grey-market imports.

Ironically, Tesco and Asda have both run trials in the past that could help them now. In 2005, Tesco setup Metro stores in Sheffield and Edgware as "discount convenience" concepts. This saw a dramatic cut in SKU count and staff and sought to address new insights from deep cover research into very low affluence households. The challenge as always when targeting these shoppers is that the tend to focus on core grocery lines which, due to their high volume status, also tend to have wafer thin margins. The "choice" lines that help create a better margin mix for retailers become far less relevant so you have to look at reducing store operational costs - less products to fill, less staff. 

The following year, with more shouting to the media, Asda launched the first 2 of a 200-strong chain of Essentials stores. These own-label stores were an unmitigated disaster with the Northampton store closing less than 6 months after opening amidst rumoured weekly turnover of less than £7000. The concept was sound in theory, but poor choice of locations and an own label offering nowhere near the strength of "Chosen by You" meant the enterprise was doomed from the start.

So perhaps the answer is already out there for the mults, possibly in the form of a new fascia that sets out a stall of a simpler "edited choice" range and a bigger emphasis on own label products. It would be a bold move, however, and you have to question whether any of the current chief execs would take the risk. Asda have the sites most suitable for this with their former Netto stores and a successful implementation could mean they wouldn't need to hide that group of stores' underperformance behind legacy stores roped into the Supermarket banner. I'm sure Tesco could do well too - stores like Edmonton Green which haven't been refitted or rebadged for over 30 years would certainly benefit from a lick of paint to stop their terminal decline. And what about Morrisons? Well, maybe Preston is a step down that very path.

Whatever the answer, the UK grocery scene looks certain to continue in an entertaining way indefinitely. We are seeing the biggest shift in shopping behaviour since the advent of self-service. These interesting times will show us who the best are at adapting.

The High Street Debate aka The New Class War

The #local hashtag is everywhere at the moment and is rapidly becoming the flag of convenience for the chattering classes who have decided that Tesco aren't de rigeur any more, conveniently forgetting that it was them pouring into the stores from the mid-1990s that made them the most successful retailer the UK has ever, and I'd say will ever, produce.

Numbers are being batted around and money staying in the local economy, warm memories of gran feeding everyone by shopping in the local High Street are being bandied around and everything that is big is surely bad.

Personally, I'm an advocate of a healthy mix of stores and sensibly-sized High Streets. But in an increasingly polarized and bitter debate, common sense is being left a long way behind, as is the idea of community that includes everyone.

The attitude of many pro-Indie/Local lobbyists is that everything needs to be local and small-scale in order to keep money in the local community. A widely varying stat is that 50-125% of every £1 spent stays in the local community compared to 1-43% spent with a mult (extremes taken from Twitter posts of pro-local lobbyists and MPs). Irrespective of the fact few can settle on a figure and even 

fewer are willingly to point to any data that can be checks, I have no doubt that shopping locally can keep money local. My problem is that so did the feudal system in medieval times.

Like it or not, multiple retailers provide one of the most consistent, meritocratic and transparent methods of social mobility in the UK. Working in a local shop won't give you the chance to better yourself, to learn skills, become a manager, change your life. That's what Tesco gave me and I owe my current comfortable lifestyle to them taking a chance on a council estate kid with a rubbish degree from a third rate university. 

But, of course, this whole debate isn't about people, it's about greed. It's about local businessmen not having to bother with building a good business through graft, rather more about easy profits in nice, pleasant middle class places. It's organic and worthy nonsense and you'll never see these lobbyists worrying about the access of poor people to hand-made Lincolnshire sausages sold from a farmer who travels over 100 miles each weekend to a "local" farmers' market to protect a healthy profit margin. Harsh? Maybe, but this one sided debate needs a more transparent view of the ethics behind it all. As it stands, the indie lobby attitude to the working class estates is "let them shop at B&M"

Retailing is a business. It is not a charity, but when done well it does benefit communities. That can be a sensibly sized mult employing and developing local people and using a corporate community budget or a successful indie getting stuck in with local events. Size means nothing, the quality of the business means everything. I wish the same effort of the lobbyists was spent on finding ways to incentivise retailers to take better shops into poor areas, the places that really do need them, rather than harping on about business rates for boutique stores with huge mark-ups.

Of course, mults are no saints and have become excessive themselves, but they are not in the same league as banking and, as I have pointed out many times, they never shut down a good business.

So, as we await a January of doom and gloom, once again I open this challenge out - will someone with genuine sway in the world please start preaching peace and harmony to get everyone in retail working together for the benefit of everyone? 

Yep, I'm a dreamer!

Merry Christmas everyone - hope your tills ring and we all have a prosperous 2014!

When You Aspire To Be What You Are....

It says a lot about Asda that there is no easy link from their Asda.com homepage to press releases and information about the business. They are a business that is built on spin – whether it be the internal brainwashing of their colleagues or the incredible lengths they go to in the stores planned for Wal-Mart analyst visits. And now, after using the expensive brains of McKinsey to come up with a new strategic  5 year plan, Andy Clarke is revealing his vision.

And to be honest, I’d be asking for a refund from the consultants!

As ever, price is at the heart of their response to the threat of the discounters with a £1bn investment promised over five years to make them 10% cheaper than their competitors and a dig at competitors’ “gimmicks” of price-matching vouchers. Of course, Asda have been “10% Cheaper Guaranteed” for a few years now, but that clearly wasn’t a gimmick. Actually, with them admitting to being 6% cheaper, it was a lie and goes some way to demonstrate their contempt for their shoppers. After all, the Tesco and Sainsbury’s gimmicks give you a voucher on the spot, while Asda disenfranchises those without access to the internet and their own printer when they fail on their promise. In other words, the people who need the cheapest prices can’t get them – this isn’t redefining value, it’s creating natural selection.

When Andy Clarke took over the top job back in 2009, he made a big fuss about the huge strides that Asda had made with the quality of its own label products, relaunched under the “Chosen by You” brand (or “It’s all YOUR fault, deal with it” as I call it). So, why the need to invest another £250million in quality now? Again, those pesky discounters could be to blame! Aldi have a very pragmatic policy towards their range – identify the foods that matter the most to shoppers, try to source a private label manufacturer who can match the quality of the leading brand and then, crucially, if they can’t then go and list the brand itself. This is a real game changer for the traditional mults and is at the heart of why the discounters are very difficult to beat once one turns up in your neighborhood. Asda have made some big strides in their own label offering, although their lack of ranging nouse means that they often create wonderful new niche foods while ignoring the core, in particular on fresh.

I worked at Asda for 5 years, during which time Andy Bond announced 100 Essentials stores, 200 “Market Town” small supermarkets, 200 Living stores and 5 C-Stores. In the end, there 5 market town stores and Living was up to 25 in total. Of course, that’s all in the past, so Andy Clarke announcing 1000 click & collect sites is entirely plausible – well, at least to my former colleagues in Asda House who are still under the spell of the Cult of Asda! They should be given credit for trying with Click & Collect, although my experiences with the non-food and clothing side have been invariably chaotic at store level, while the idea of a grocery van being parked up outside a store is ludicrous when you compare it to the smart little huts Tesco are using. I’ve used the PFS sites in Sale and Leeds and they are “ok”, but nothing to write home about and the store operation seems to be hamstrung by the usual Asda issues with ranging driven by dogma, rather than shoppers and availability. The plan for C-Stores that I mentioned earlier was brought to an abrupt halt just a month after their announcement after the realization that the Asda distribution model is designed exclusively around moving pallets of stock from big warehouses to big shops. I’m sure some improvements have been made, especially with the establishment of the Supermarkets format, but can they really service c-stores? And more importantly, can even their infamously creative store accounting procedures make a shop that just acts as a pick-up point appear profitable to the Bank of Bentonville?

Of course, Asda has a bigger need than most for a dot com grocery offer as it gives a unique benefit of not having to visit their stores. Morley in Leeds has recently had a refit and, apart from some green paint on the walls and black shelves replacing grey ones in the bakery, it’s the same old poor shopping experience with operational efficiency being put way ahead of shopper needs. Pleasant looking, well-lit Health & Beauty fixtures still have top-stocking shelves full of cardboard boxes above and merchandising is designed to hammer home “value” rather than help shoppers find what they’re looking for. The non-food area has been relaid with tangential fixture flows and rather than tempting shoppers in, it now heards them through and makes the admittedly good looking produce and counters area, virtually invisible. If your shops are actually worse than the stripped-down Aldi and Lidl stores, then why would you expect NOT to lose shoppers? If we believe what Asda are telling us about the performance of online and Supermarkets, then it doesn’t take a genius to work out that they’re superstores are failing desperately.

Ah yes, Supermarkets – the greatest spin of all! Andy Clarke has a lot to lose personally if the Netto acquisition was ever to be revealed as the abject failure it has been.  The Supermarket format is growing, but closer inspection of the detail generally shows that it is the pre-Netto stores that have been added to the format’s numbers that are driving the performance. These stores, many of which were former larger Co-ops, Kwik Saves and Sommerfields  acquired in the mid-2000s are good, compact stores in good locations – so it’s not surprising they are doing well in an environment where increasing number of shoppers are rejecting hypermarkets. Asda apparently had a pipeline for their “market town” stores which would have been a far sounder investment than Netto, but short-termism crept in and they’ve ended up with a poor portfolio of stores which, some might argue, dragged them down into the discounters’ arena.

The last time I offered an honest opinion to Andy Clarke, he turned red and shouted at me, but I don’t let things like that worry me, so here’s MY 3 point plan for making Asda a real success and stopping JS taking their number 2 spot:

1 – Get the basics right – that’s core range, shop standards, natural customer service, availability

2 – Leverage their hero departments – In-store bakeries head and shoulder over the rest, George clothing, Home essentials

3 – Dial down the price message – after 14 years of successfully manipulating the Grocer33, shoppers KNOW you’re cheap and don’t need it rammed down their throat

Of course, Andy Clarke doesn’t need my advice, not do they need proper growth as long as the profit margins keep skyrocketing. It would be nice to see some effort to contribute to a better retail environment though, wouldn’t it?