Grocer Gold Awards 2022: Grocer 33 – service award

Winner: Waitrose

Widescale disruption, from lockdowns to staff shortages and supply chain issues, has been a real thorn in the side for grocers since last summer’s supply chain crisis. That’s reflected in lower service scores across the board in the past year.

Even for Waitrose, winner of this award for the second year running, its average score (out of 100) over the 50 weeks fell by an unprecedented 10.6 points to 68.5, with availability the obvious casualty (5.4 points), but all six metrics were in decline. And that’s against June 2020 to June 2021, which was hardly stellar.

Second-place Sainsbury’s lost less ground (8.1 points down on average to 64.5), followed by Tesco’s average score plummeted by a similar amount (10.5 down to 65.2). The worst decline in standards was Morrisons, where service levels fell 11.2 ppts to 59.3, while bringing up the rear, Asda’s score of 57.8 was down 9.6ppts.