Originally Posted by
Raffles
That's not the point. People who watch their money will have worked out by now how Tesco prices their fruit and veg and they will have realised that Tesco is trying to leg them over. They have also noticed (as Clarke admitted yesterday, so this is not even up for debate) that Tesco plays games with prices to create 'pretend' discounts. There is not much trust left.
If you shop in Waitrose, you do get the impression that all the own-label stuff they sell is fairly priced for the quality. To go back to the Tesco story, I trust Waitrose not to secretly reduce the quality of a product just to sell it at 10% off.
And if I went to Aldi or Lidl, I would presumably feel that they were genuinely doing their best to produce acceptable products at a very competitive price - on every single item.
People don't feel that way about Tesco. Read the comments section on, say, the Guardian website about the Tesco piece yesterday. 1m people in the past 12 months have decided that 'enough is enough' and have stopped shopping at Tesco - presumably these people are still eating so you can't blame it on other factors.
I think that we need to inject a sense of proportion in here as well as reflect a little more before jumping to unwarranted conclusions as to the causes of the growth in market shares of Lidl, etc...
For a start, Aldi, Lidl and Waitrose are still minor players. None of them has more than a 5% market share. By comparison, Tesco has a little under 30% of the UK market.
Second, AIUI, the growth in market share is not so much people people suddenly realising now that they prefer Aldi, Lidl or Waitrose but mostly from these chains opening new stores. Aldi and Lidl had a relatively small footprint in the UK and decided to expand. Waitrose has also engaged in a significant expansion strategy.
So it is not so much that people no longer liking Tesco (or for that matter the other big players on the UK market, since all of them have seen their market share diminish) but rather that shoppers now have choices that they did not have before.
Clearly, Aldi, Lidl and Waitrose attract some consumers, otherwise they would struggle to grow, but there is no reason to assume a priori that they would not equally have appealed in the past and I would be rather wary to try to draw hasty conclusions on an assumed sudden disenchantment of consumers with the big players. The sector is certainly more competitive than it used to be but it would be rash to report an assumed terminal fall of the big players far too prematurely.