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Editor's view: Shoppers may have changed for good
Archived article dated Friday May 15th 2009
It has to be said that some retailers are making a great job of surviving the current financial crisis, riding a wave of changing consumer demands with an assured air.
By Matthew Valentine, Editor
These companies know what shoppers want, and they are giving it to them in double quick time. Both Sainsbury's and Asda have this week announced sales figures that would be considered healthy at any time, and are doubly impressive when companies in other business sectors are announcing mass redundancies.
In their statements both companies made much of the new and improved promotions they are offering their customers. Rolled back prices, fixed price reductions, families fed for a fiver and taste the difference campaigns are really grabbing the imagination, and spend, of customers who are taking a new approach to the family shopping: waste is out, cooking is in. People are growing vegetables in their window boxes.In the long term, this raises an interesting question. Will customers end up insisting that these changes have come to stay? Like the generation who learned to live with rationing and have never been able to stomach waste since, we might become a generation who stopped wasting things because of a recession and realised that we didn't want to go back to our old ways.
Somewhere, at the back of their minds, most companies are surely hoping that when the recession is over and we feel safe in our jobs again, we will go back to being wasteful. It is in their interest that we buy yoghurt we will never eat, gorge on expensive ready meals, leave the lights on all evening and replace electrical goods that still work perfectly well.
But for many, that reversion simply won't happen. If that mood becomes widespread, the changes that the retail sector is going through now may well be the beginning of a far bigger change to the relationship between retailer and customer. Combined with increased online shopping, better delivery networks, environmental concerns and energy sustainability fears, change of that scale could mean retailers need to radically overhaul their business models.
When the green shoots of recovery do appear, they will not mean that retailers get a chance to relax. In fact they might mean that the real work is just about to begin.
Tagged as: matthew valentine | consumers | recession | economy | dynamics
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