Current trends in food retailing (New text added is in different coloured font)

Year	Number of stores	Average store size (1,000 sq metres
1970	30
1980	70
1982	65
1992	207	4.05
1994	202	4.03
1995	204	4.05
1996	207	4.1
1997	214	4.1
1998	218	4.2
1999	229
2000	236
2001	245
2002	259,	4.2
2003	265
2004	266
2005	283
2006	317
2007	336

P JONES, ‘Retail innovation and diffusion – the spread of Asda stores’, AREA’, Vol.13, No.3, pp.197-201, 1983.

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Booths

A family owned chain of supermarkets in the northwest of England.

1847 Grocery business founded by Mr E H Booth, with a shop in Blackpool

1855 Booths opened a shop in Chorley

1859 Booths opened a shop in Preston, where their present head office is (2002).

1884 Booths opened a shop in Blackburn

1922 Booths opened a shop in Leyland

1932 Booths bought a retail premises in Kendal

1952 Booths opened a shop in Ribbleton

1954 Annual turnover at Booths reached £1,000,000.

1962 Booths adopted self-service in six of its stores, Blackpool, Blackpool-South Shore, Fulwood, Penwortham, Leyland, and Ribbleton.

1966 Booths annual turnover reached £2,000,000.

1971 Booths annual turnover reached £4,000,000

1983 Booths new store at Clitheroe opened. This was the group’s largest store so far, at 1,300 square metres.

1997 Booths opened a new store at Ilkley.

2006, Booths had 26 stores in N W England.

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Budgens

3/2006, Budgens opened first store outside England, at Tonteg, Wales.

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Co-op

Set up in 1844 by 28 men from Rochdale, Lancashire, as the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers society, to make food available to working people at a reasonable price. Any profits were returned to members as a dividend, or ‘divi’.

2002, Co-op bought GTS Supermarkets, a small Yorkshire-based chain. Co-op also bought the Alldays chain of convenience stores.

7/2008 The Co-op took over Somerfield. This move doubles the Co-op’s market share top almost 8% and makes it the UK’s 5^th largest supermarket chain after the Big Four (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury, and Morrison). The UK now (2008) has around 85% of its grocery retailing in the hands of just 5 retailers.

Store numbers

2001, 1,297

2004, 1,746 (1250 are ‘convenience stores’).

2005, 2,312

2007, 2,488

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Farmfoods

2005, 295 stores

2/2006, 302 stores

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FreshXxpress

2007, A relatively tiny remnant of the old Kwik Save chain (See ‘Somerfield’, 2006 and 2007) has been reborn as the new Fresh Express chain. The entrepreneur Brendan Murtagh has picked 56 of the 251 Kwik Save stores that remained when the fascia finally ceased trading in 2007. Of these, Mr Murtagh will sell 32 and re-fascia the remaining 24 as ‘Fresh Express’ (The Grocer, 14 July 2007, p.28). These 24 stores are mainly in less affluent parts of the UK; in south Wales, the north and east Midlands, Merseyside, and the north-east. It is unlikely that Mr Murtagh, the 11^th richest man in Ireland, will be living too close to any of his new stores, but his biggest problem may be overcoming the bad legacy Kwik Save left with its suppliers, many of whom were unpaid for months before Kwik save collapsed.

29 March 2008 – The jinx of Kwik Save lives on…..

FreshXpress went into liquidation

In July 2007 FreshXpress began with 56 old Kwik Save stores but only 24 were ever opened under the FreshXpress fascia (the Grocer, 29 March 2008, p.5). However by March 2008 the total number of FrteshXpress stores trading was down to 9. FreshXpress staff were taken by surprise by the closure, which seemed to have echoes of the confusion surrounding the last days of Kwik Save.

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Gateway

1989 The Isosceles Group paid £2.3 billion for Gateway in 1989.

10/1990, Gateway had 732 stores.

1993, bought by Somerfield. See SOMERFIELD for more details

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Iceland

Iceland is part of The Big Food Group, which is based at:-

Second Avenue, Deeside Industrial Park, Deeside, Clwyd, CH5 2NW, 01844 830100

www.iceland.co.uk, www.thebigfoodgroup.co.uk,

Iceland was established in 1970.

Year	Number of stores	Average store size (square metres)
1970	1^st store
1973	2^nd store opened
1975	18
1988	275 inc Bejam stores
1994	752	478
1995	750	476
1996	766	477
1997	766	478
1998	770	478
1999	760	478
2000	760	478
2001	770	487
2002	764
2003	754
2004	748
2005	730
2006	695

Source primarily Eurofood, 24/1/07, p.16

1970 Founders Malcolm Walker and Peter Hinchcliffe opened their first frozen food store, in Oswestry, north Wales. Prior to this the pair had been selling strawberries from the roadside, effectively moonlighting from jobs they found unfulfilling at Marks and Spencer’s. M & S found this out and dismissed them.

1973 Iceland opened its second store at Rhyl, also in north Wales.

1975 Iceland grew rapidly as more UK homes acquired freezers. By 1975 Iceland had 18 stores in north Wales.

1977 Iceland opened its first supermarket-type outlet, in the Arndale Centre, Manchester.

1978 Iceland moved to its present head office at Deeside, north Wales.

1982 Iceland introduced its own-label frozen food lines.

1983 Iceland bought the failing 18-store frozen food chain, St Catherines, and revived the stores.

1988 Iceland took over its larger rival, Bejam

9/1997, Iceland began its Home Delivery service.

1998 Iceland banned GM (genetically modified) ingredients from its own-label foods. At this time public distrust of so-called ‘Frankenstein Foods’ was growing rapidly.

1993 Iceland frozen food went on sale in Littlewoods stores.

1999 Iceland banned artificial colours and flavours from its own label products

2000, Iceland rebranded itself ‘Iceland.co.uk’.

5/2000, Iceland bought the Cash and carry group, Booker, the wholesaler for 100,000 independent retailers.

2001 Iceland entered a difficult period; intense competition from the UK’s large supermarkets was hitting Iceland sales and profits. See 2005.

2002 Iceland was renamed as The Big Food Group. High Street stores retained the Iceland fascia.

6/2004, sales at Iceland’s 748 stores fell by 1.9% over the past 12 months, due to intense price competition from Tesco, Asda/Wal Mart, and Morrison/Safeway. Iceland was turning its mainly frozen food stores into more of a convenience store format, selling vegetables, alcohol, and tobacco; by 8/6/04, 100 shops had been altered and 150 will be changed during the rest of 2004 (Daily Express, 8/6/04, p.2).

2005 After 4 years of sharply falling sales and profits at Iceland, the Baugur Group took over Iceland. The product range was rationalised and overheads cut; this restored the company’s fortunes.

1/2006, Iceland sold some stores to Marks and Spencer, reducing its store portfolio from 703 to 675.

2007 Iceland saw strong growth in its home delivery service. The store sponsored the TV show ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’.

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Jacksons

Jacksons Stores were founded in 1991, and have (2004) their head office in Melton, near Hull. They form part of the larger William Jackson & Son business, founded in 1851 and still 80% family-owned in 2004 (Guardian, 17/8/04, p.18). In August 2004 the Jackson chain comprised 235 convenience stores across Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and the north Midlands; at this time Sainsbury made a bid for Jacksons (see ‘Sainsbury’ below).

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Kwik Save

After 2/1998 see Somerfield

1958 –6 July2007 RIP passed away after a lingering malaise that began in 1998

Founded as Value Foods in 1958 in Wales by Albert Gubay. Gubay gained some notoriety amongst other retailers by infringing local laws on shop opening, for example by staying open till 9pm on Fridays (for the legality of this, see the 1950 Shops Act, under ‘8/2000’, Tesco), and by his aggressive price-cutting. Some manufacturers refused to supply him. In 1964 Gubay visited the USA and decided to try a strategy of selling a limited range at very low prices. This produced more sales than the existing Gubay supermarkets and by 1970 Kwik save Discount had 24 stores. By 1980 Kwik Save had over 200 stores. Kwik Save grew strongly due to its competitive prices until the early 1990s when Asda’s low prices policy, as well as the entry of the discounters Aldi, Lidl, and Netto, curbed this growth.

1989, Kwik Save bought the Victor Value chain of discount grocery stores from Bejam/Iceland.

5/1989, Kwik Save had 630 UK stores.

12/1989, Kwik Save had 618 UK stores.

10/1990, Kwik Save had 600 UK stores.

3/1991, Kwik Save had 670 stores.

7/1993, Kwik Save had 780 stores.

10/1993, Kwik Save had 815 stores. Kwik Save opened its first store in Scotland, at the Pollock Centre, Glasgow. Kwik Save, late 1993, aimed to open one store a week.

4/1994, Kwik Save had 840 stores.

5/1996, Kwik Save had 980 stores.

6/1997, Kwik Save had 900 stores.

7/1998, on merger with Somerfield, Kwik Save had 900 stores. This number fell in subsequent years. For later developments see Somerfield.

6 July 2007 Kwik Save formally went into receivership. The administrators KPMG have sold 56 of the last 146 remaining stores to FreshXpress, salvaging 600 jobs (source, Eurofood, 11/7/07, p.21).

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Lidl

1930s, Lidl and Schwarz Grocery Wholesale founded in Germany.

1973 First Lidl store opened, in Germany.

1994. Lidl entered the UK in November, with 40 stores opening that year.

3/1995, Lidl bought 5 ‘Penny’ stores from Budgen.

2003 Lidl had over 330 UK stores.

5/9/2006. Lidl is to experiment with selling cut-price flights (with Air Berlin) at its UK checkouts. Lidl claimed there would be a natural match between cut-price grocery shopping and cheap flights; other rival airlines said air travellers would tend to look for good flight deals on the Internet, not at a supermarket.

2006, Lidl plans to double its current portfolio of 77 Scottish stores by 2016 at a cost of £200 million. Its competitor Aldi is also expanding in Scotland at this time, see Aldi above. 22/6/2006, Lidl opened a store in Orkney.

9/2007, Lidl had 7,271 stores in Europe

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Londis

A federation of small shopkeepers, formed in 1959 by the independent retailers of the London District of the council of the National Grocer’s Federation (Guardian II, 19/1/04, pp.2-3, Independent Retail News, 9/1/04, pp.16-17). Londis shopkeepers originally paid £50 for their share.

Towards the end of 2003, Musgrave, Ireland’s largest convenience retailer, and the owner of Budgens stores in the UK, bid £40 million to take over Londis. Londis’ 2,000 small shopkeepers stood to receive £10,000 each to sell to Musgrave the £50 share they had bought when they joined Londis. The rub was that the other £20 million of this £40 million would be shared between the four executive directors of the Londis group, and in addition they would receive a further £7 million between them as compensation for the termination of their contracts. Shopkeepers were tempted by the £10,0000 for £50 deal but were uneasy at the apparent end of the mutuality aspect of Londis, with the size of the payout to the directors. The Big Food Group, owner of Iceland stores, also made a £40million bid for Londis but promised a more equitable share out - £20,000 each for the shopkeepers and just £600,000 apiece for the directors. Some small shops are barely profitable but other Londis members can make a profit of up to £100,000 a year, albeit with long hours. On the other hand, Tesco’s purchase of the T & S convenience store chain in 1/2003 signalled more fierce competition for the small shopkeeper. The shopkeeper members of Londis therefore face a dilemma, and more bids may emerge. Somerfield and the Co-op may also bid.

1/2004, Londis had 1,933 - 2,232 member shops (reported numbers vary).

22/6/2004, Londis shopkeepers voted to accept the Musgrave takeover of their chain (The Guardian, 23/6/04, p.25). By a margin of 1,583 to 43, at a vote in Birmingham, Musgrave’s £60m offer was accepted, subject to a High Court hearing in July, Londis shopkeepers will each receive £31,000 in August. Londis shops will gain greater economies of scale.

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Marks and Spencer

In 1884 a Russian born refugee from Poland called Michael Marks took on a trestle table stall at the Kirkgate Market in Leeds. His slogan was ‘don’t ask the price, it’s a penny’. In 1894, by which time he had a shop in Manchester, Mr Marks entered a partnership with a Tom Spencer, former cashier of a wholesale company. The company continued to expand, buying the London Penny Bazaar Company in 1914. In 1920 M & S adopted the then-revolutionary practice of buying direct from manufacturers, a technique used today by the large supermarkets to keep costs and prices down. Marks and Spencer’s flagshi

Year	Aldi stores in UK
April 1990	1
October 1990	10
March 1991	16
December 1991	37
1993	63
1995	70
1996	150
1998	195
1999	225
2004	278
2005	289
2006	332
2007	328