What’s causing the decline in customer service in our supermarkets? And should we be concerned?

The pandemic will rightly be remembered as the industry’s finest hour. Showing huge bravery, commitment, creativity, hard work and no little restraint, the empty shelves and panic buying scenes in the run-up to the first lockdown were overcome, and against all the odds, customer service generally, and availability specifically, somehow ‘normalised’.

The latest Grocer 33 annual results paint a different picture, however. Customer service levels have slumped.

The obvious culprit is availability, as where the industry was able to stabilise deliveries during Covid, last year’s supply chain crisis saw a sustained increase in out-of-stocks, from the early summer to late autumn, resulting in millions in lost sales.

But the decline in customer service isn’t entirely down to the shortage of truck drivers, or the delays at ports, or the increase in costs, or even, latterly, the war in Ukraine, as challenging as these issues have been and in some cases still are.

The results, from 250 shops, conducted over 50 weeks in the five fully-fledged supermarkets, show customer service levels have dropped across every metric we measure: the car park, store standards, store layout, shopfloor service and checkout service, as well as availability.

What’s causing this decline? Is it fatigue, after two brutal years? Is it labour shortages in-store? Or have supermarkets accepted lower standards on the basis that customers have put up with gaps on shelves and accepted that as a new norm?

Given the millions in lost sales it’s surprising. It’s prompted suppliers to actively question whether buyers are being overly cautious in their buying strategies to minimise waste. And as retail commentators Steve Dresser and Bryan Roberts point out, cost-cutting measures like axing night shifts mean replenishment increasingly takes place during normal trading. This means cages and pallets littering aisles in peak periods – even electric trucks. Indeed in the latest Grocer 33, one of our mystery shoppers openly questioned why Morrisons should undertake heavy restocking mid-morning on a Saturday. So is good enough now good enough?