Is the tide turning?

Re: Is the tide turning?

I’ve been watching this with a lot of interest as well Jim as, in retail, it strikes me that the supermarkets tend to lead the way. If you combine that with the likes of DSG’s moves away from the high street and onto the internet as well as other new markets you begin to get the sense that the UK retail sector may have had its fill of low cost goods.

I do think that price is important, but not the most important buying motivator.

In relation to our products I can’t see why the supermarkets want to sell them, I’m constantly being told of the dangers from the supermarkets selling, because our stuff takes up a lot of room, it’s bulky, hard to deliver, harder to install and just generally a whole heap of hassle when compared to selling even a range of foods. And not many people will ever call back to complain that their “Finest” lasagne broke down, most wouldn’t even complain if there were something wrong with it when they got it home. Different story with appliances.

Small appliances I can understand, large ones I cannot. Even the TV’s etc. that they sell now I don’t get, I certainly won’t be buying a TV from Tesco as they know nothing about them and the range that they can offer with the the space that they can afford to allocate is limited. Apart from which I’ve seenthe displays and they’re woeful, even the Hi-Def display/demo I saw in the local Tesco the other day was terrible.

With whitegoods they usually don’t even have teh product to display, it’s just a brochure with a couple of token machines there to tell people that they do it. How do the staff sell from that?

But then how can you expect someone with little product knowledge to sell such things? So the only weapon that the supermarkets have is price due to the massive buying power, trouble fro them comes if people are not buying on price alone.

K.

Re: Is the tide turning?

I wonder how the internet companies and the supermarkets will cope when the WEE directive comes into full force next July, will they offer a disposal service or will they just refuse to dispose of the old machines when they deliver new and leave the customer with the headache of getting shot of the old.

Don