We love watching programs on TV about retail and we really enjoyed watching The People’s Supermarket on channel four over the past few weeks.
If you didn’t catch the program it was all about a man with ideal of having a supermarket run by the people for the people, his name is Arthur Potts Dawson. His ideal was to have a supermarket that the customers worked in after joining for £25, they had to commit to working four hours a month and they would then get 10% off their shopping.
The programme followed the ups and downs of the first few weeks of the supermarket, from excitement to depression and a visit from David Cameron in between (not sure which that would come under).
As ever we at Urban33 were interested in visiting a store featured in a programme like this, so last weekend we headed down to London to find the supermarket.
I have to say I was really disappointed in the store, I know the story, I know that there wasn’t much money for it to start up but it was pretty rubbish if I am honest. Much smaller than I thought, but that is telly for you, the range of food was ordinary and really badly laid out. Good points would be the bread and veg selection which looked different and looked like I would want to buy it.
I suppose I believed that if this was going to be truly for the people then the selection of products would match this, similar to a farmers market type supermarket. Don’t get me wrong there was some products that came from ‘farmers’ but there was no information on the fruit and veg about where it came from or pushing the fact that it was ‘British’.
Another very odd choice was sugar in giant sacks that you weighed out yourself….really?
There was also a queue of some 6-8 customers waiting at the till as there was only one person serving there, yet two assistants seemed to be just wandering around the store?
For something like this to succeed in needs to be run as a real business, with business ideas and business promotions, not as a ‘please all’ charity store. I am sure if they went to suppliers and asked for display material, fridges and the like and told them they were going to be on channel four they would of offered to help. When we are contacting by programme makers we always offer free stock as we know the effects of products being featured on such programs.
The store needs to be run by a retail manager who can implement this, rather than run by 50 different people who all have an idea of what THEY want, but not always what IS right.
We will be watching the People’s Supermarket with a lot of interest to see if it can work and keep you posted!
You can visit their website The People’s Supermarket
