Sainsbury's New Regular Price is a Price Rise

A._Badger wrote: »

They seem to stand around talking with one another while the queues grow ever longer in my local Sainsbury's, while a milk monitor type surveys the ever more frustrated customers, but never drives any of her brood onto a till.

If the bigwigs want to find out why their business is in trouble they could do a worse than shop there now and again.

I've tried asking the 'milk monitors' if they would open another checkout when there are queues. They look askance as if I'd made a ridiculous suggestion.

Their role seems to be (as in the banks) to encourage customers to self service.

When I was little my mum used to shop at Sainsburys, and when I was 17 I got my first job working there part time. I worked there all through uni and so have a bit of affection for the company.

But since then I've watched them go downhill. This isn't one particular branch because I've moved around the country a lot, and seen the decline in all the branches I've used.

My store was huge and I used to run the checkouts on a Saturday. On a busy day we could take £250k through my checkouts (and this was 20 years ago). My sole job was to keep the queues moving and make sure we never had more than one customer waiting behind the customer being served.

At the time we had enough staff to open every checkout, if we needed to. This would sometimes include the store manager opening a checkout, or relieving anyone who needed a break rather than close a till. We also had enough staff to deal with problems quickly (missing barcodes, items that wouldn't scan, anyone who needed a hand unloading their trolley or packing). Everyone's priority was keeping the queues moving.

Not any more - now queues a mile long and keeping customers waiting seems to be fine while the poor supervisor runs between the self service tills, the customer service desk, the cigarette and lottery kiosk and deals with any other problems.

prowla wrote: »

Sainsbury's used to be pitched at the more premium end of the market, but they shifted down for a while.


The thing about supermarkets is that we have a good choice in the UK and the merger block has been a positive thing on that front.


The big supermarkets have been bumping their prices up and that coupled with shrinkflation means some increases can be 50% (for instance chocolate bars).


The net effect is that they are less competitive and I will shop around.

The net effect for me with inflation of that magnitude is usually that i just stop buying the product!

There aren't many things as a general rule that we actually need, as opposed to desire.