He may even have quaffed a few of his former company Heineken’s beers in celebration of the like-for-like sales, which rocketed 9.5 per cent in the 6 weeks to January 6.
The barnstorming performance was down to a combination of new ranges, particularly fresh food, refurbished stores, aggressive promotions and a stellar celebrity-led TV advertising campaign, which all helped to attract an additional 4 million customers.
Performance was particularly strong in the south of England, signalling that Morrisons has well and truly put the trauma of integrating the stores it acquired from Safeway in the South behind it.
While Bolland has been crowned the Christmas grocery trading king and is ruffling feathers at Morrisons’ big-three rivals, there are still a couple of gaps in the retailer’s long-term jigsaw, notably e-commerce and non-food.
Regarding non-food, Bolland is right to tread carefully. His public message of not just doing non-food for its own’s sake is right. Morrisons’ newest and refurbished stores provide a compelling combination of its Market Street food section, promotional branded items and a small non-food offer. Eventually, though, Morrisons should go chasing the higher-margins from non-food, although this will require larger stores or a more aggressive strategy on extensions.
Bolland has started beefing up his non-food team and rivals will start to see a more aggressive non-food strategy from the Bradford-based grocer over the next 12 months.
A far more serious weakness for Morrisons for the foreseeable future is the fact it does not have an online grocery offer. Retail Week has learned that, internally, Morrisons executives acknowledge this weakness, although in public Bolland maintains the stance of “not yet”.
Morrisons has not yet started a search for an e-commerce director, but it is expected to do so in the next 12 months, although a launch is likely to take longer.
However, until Morrisons does have an online grocery offer, it will continue to miss out on the growing legion of consumers who now regard this form of shopping the norm and hate trudging round any supermarket. Bolland may have added 4 million shoppers over the Christmas trading period, but the number would have been higher had Morrisons been an online grocer.
For the foreseeable future, Bolland has bigger fish to fry, such as updating Morrisons’ rudimentary IT systems and refurbishing stores, but until it has an e-commerce offer Bolland’s revolution will not attract as many followers as it could.
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