Officials leading the Competition Commission's inquiry into the grocery market are considering ways to extract commercial information from small retailers who own as little as one store.

The inquiry team believes that it will not be able to gain a full picture of the market without engaging directly with the c-store community, but the move also indicates it will not restrict its investigation of anti-competitive practices to those allegedly carried out by large multiples.

With planning a central issue in the investigation, a Commission spokesman said the inquiry team would be keen to find out whether independent retailers - not just big supermarket operators - had ever bought a piece of land to prevent a rival building a store. Earlier this year, Booths chairman Edwin Booth told The Grocer he knew of Nisa-Today's members that had taken such an approach (13 May, p4).

The Commission spokesman said: "There are plenty of allegations along those lines, and if there are competition concerns about someone buying land for that reason they'll want to find out about it. If it's wrong for one person to do it, then it'll be wrong for everyone to do it."

The news that the Commission will engage directly with the smallest retailers appears to fly in the face of comments made by Office of Fair Trading chief executive John Fingleton. Speaking as the OFT referred the industry to the Commission, he said smaller retailers should not get involved in the investigation but instead focus on running their shops (The Grocer, 13 May, p4).

The Commission spokesman said: "Smaller retailers are part of the market and we need to make sure they can supply information. We're in advanced discussions on how to get that information. We're considering what we can reasonably ask for from them, given that many of them lack the resources of the big supermarket chains."

That the Commission is sensitive to their resources will be good news for small retailers, but will offer little comfort to larger supermarket chains and symbol groups who have begun the process of answering more than 130 questions posed to them by the Commission.

Covering subjects ranging from pricing policies to planning, the questions demand eye-watering levels of detail and are likely to need hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours to complete. The questionnaire has gone out to 21 retailers with a nationwide or substantial regional presence, including the major supermarket chains, discounters, smaller supermarket operators, including Booths, and the leading symbol groups.

One source at a major supermarket described it as a lengthy "number-crunching" process. "There are 131 main questions and then there are multiple sub-questions within those. They are asking for loads of detail, such as pricing, planning, supply chain, convenience and local markets."

She added that the retailer was also required to send off customer research it had carried out in recent years.

The deadline for responding, mid-August, gives retailers little time to formulate answers and is likely to be a headache for companies that do not have the capacity to dedicate teams to handling the inquiry.

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