It's 10 years since we launched The Grocer 33, and every year the cheapest supermarket has been Asda. What an achievement. Since 1998, the Leeds-based group has been bought by Wal-Mart, lost Norman and Leighton, and hit some fairly hard times prior to its recent recovery, but throughout it's stocked the lowest-priced groceries in the land.
A similar doffing of the cap should go to Morrisons. As well as winning The Grocer 33 Gold Award for service (for the third year running), Sir Ken's team will, on Wednesday, pick up a second Gold: for availability. When one considers the painful integration of Safeway, the tricky appointment of a new chief executive and subsequent resignation of Marie Melnyk, and despite all the criticisms of its supply chain and IT (set, let us not forget, for a £200m investment following Marc Bolland's business review), it's a tribute to their residual strength.
In the same week we pay tribute to these team efforts, we have also attempted once again to highlight the most powerful individuals in the grocery industry. So why, you may ask, are both Andy Bond at Asda and Bolland at Morrisons quite low down our lists? We explain this in more detail in our Power List (see pp40-50). But commendable as these achievements are, in getting the basics right, when it comes to measuring power, it's not stability you're looking for. It's about change. Spotting and seizing opportunity on a grand scale, making change work for you, that's what singles out the No1s in our lists. No surprise who wins that award in our multiple retailer Top 10, and few can begrudge Leahy a bigger bonus if he makes Tesco US work. More revealing, we think, is the inclusion of a new Top 10, in our list, for the money men. Bond, Bolland, even Leahy are no longer calling the shots to the same extent. They're doing the bidding of the barbarians.
No comments yet