When was the last time you went to a supermarket? If you’re like the majority of people, it will have been sometime in the last week.
You may be one of the urban metropolitan types who headed for one of the large convenience stores where all of the necessaries for a pretty decent evening meal are on hand, as well as some quilted Labrador-friendly toilet paper. Or you may have got into a car and headed for the nearest superstore.
Whatever the type of store you visited, it will have been recognisably a supermarket, big or small, and chances are good that you will have got what you wanted. More to the point, you’ll probably have treated yourself to a few impulse buys while you were at it – a halfway decent Chardonnay or perhaps some upscale chocolate.
And you will have done so in an environment which is considerably better than it might have been just ten years back, irrespective of the name above the door.
Multichannel grocery
But what about online shopping?
Well, what about it? It may be a timesaver but buying groceries online is in no way the same as a visit to a shop. For starters, there’s nothing like browsing a shelf-full of exotic goodies to stimulate the salivatory response and encourage you to dig deep.
”There’s nothing like browsing a shelf-full of exotic goodies to stimulate the salivatory response and encourage you to dig deep”
John Ryan
And then there’s the matter of heading down to a click-and-collect station to pick up the stuff you’ve ordered when you should have been working. This is a tawdry and unrewarding form of making sure there’s bread on the table and it’s likely that the time saved will be spent on something even more mundane than when wandering along the aisles of a supermarket.
On this reckoning, Asda’s decision to slow down it’s click-and-collect services makes sense. Currently, the big supermarkets are devoting a lot of time to getting their stores to look more inviting, so why would they want to undermine this by offering alternative ways of shopping? The answer is possibly because ‘that’s what everybody else is doing’.
At this stage, it is worth pointing to the success of a retailer in an unrelated sector. Primark does not do ecommerce. Instead, it lets its shops do the job. This may all sound a little Luddite, but there is much to be said for doing what you do best even better. Much of the ecommerce impulse in grocery retail has been a distraction from the main event: the shops.
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