Picture this – a radical new grocery concept designed to revolutionize how Americans shop. The store is much smaller than your typical supermarket, around 10,000 square feet and stocking an edited range of just several thousand products. The store doesn’t feature banks of traditional checkouts; instead it’s a heavily automated and efficiency-driven experience. There are no bakeries, butchers, or any of the counter services you’d find in most supermarkets.
Nope, I’m not talking about Amazon’s latest cashierless grocery format, Amazon Go Grocery, which launched in Seattle this week. I’m talking about the now defunct Fresh & Easy, Tesco’s failed attempt to crack the US grocery market.
In my latest piece for Forbes, I explore 3 key learnings for Amazon:
Subscriptions have become the holy grail for retailers as the sector moves away from competing purely on product and increasingly on service. Recurring revenue and driving loyalty with your most important shoppers—what’s not to like?
Tesco has become the latest retailer to jump on the subscription bandwagon. Britain’s biggest supermarket plans to bundle its grocery, mobile and bank offerings under a new scheme called Clubcard Plus. Here’s how it works: shoppers pay a £7.99 monthly fee in exchange for a 10% discount on two big shops in-store; 10% discount on select private label products; double data from Tesco Mobile and a Tesco Bank credit card with no foreign exchange fees abroad.
As lucrative as subscription models might be, they only work if customers see the value in them. Just ask Jeff Bezos. The aim of Amazon Prime, he says, is to provide so much value that shoppers would be “irresponsible” not to join. A scary thought for any competitor.
With Prime, the value is clear—sheer, unrivaled convenience layered with increasingly indispensable entertainment perks. With Clubcard Plus, the value exchange is a bit murkier. Firstly, if customers want low prices, they’ll head to Aldi or Lidl. They don’t need to fork over £8 a month and jump through a bunch of hoops.
Note: this is an excerpt. Continue reading Natalie’s full article on Forbes.
We all know it’s only a matter of time beforeAmazon Go reaches UK shores. Trademarks have long been registered, the rumours have been flying and, havingdebuted in New York Citylast month, it’s fair to say that Amazon has an appetite for urban expansion.
This explainsSainsbury’s recent scramble to open the first till-free store in the UK, a PR coup ahead ofAmazon’s inevitable incursion.
And they’re not alone – pretty much every grocer from Tesco to Marks & Spencer is trialling scan-and-go technology, self-ordering kiosks are now the norm at McDonald’s and Argosquietly launched its first self-service digital store last month. Time is the new currency.
Checkout-free shopping will particularly cater to busy city workers on their lunch break and it will undoubtedly hit travel retail hard – till-free will become the norm in airports and train stations five years from now. But is this really the future of retail?
The customer experience is paramount, but today ‘frictionless’ often translates as ‘soulless’. Most shoppersstill value human interaction in-storeand, as we’ve witnessed with self-checkout, there will be resistance among some shoppers to do the heavy lifting themselves.
Source: Sainsburys
Take the new Sainsbury’s trial, for example: for a store that’s all about reducing friction, there’s certainly a lot of it initially as shoppers have to download the app and get used to scanning QR codes.
Let’s not forget that, a few years ago,Morrisonsscaled back its self-checkout ambitions in response to customer feedback. There has been a lot of hype about automation, but when it comes to responding to disruption, retailers must not lose the human touch.
Defending cash
Checkout-free stores can be controversial. Not only because they will accelerate the number of retail job losses (according to the Office for National Statistics, 25% of supermarket checkout jobs disappeared between 2011 and 2017), but also because going cashless can be seen as discriminatory towards customers without bank accounts or smartphones.
This summer, Philadelphia will be the first US city to prohibit cashless stores, and a growing number of cities are considering a similar ban. Amazon has had little choice but to begrudgingly adapt, and its shiny new Manhattan store is the first Go branch to accept cash.
Lastly, we must acknowledge the elephant in the room: theft. Today, it feels unnatural to bypass the checkout, and Amazon says it takes customers several visits before they no longer feel like they’re shoplifting.
But theft is a genuine concern and was one of the reasons Walmart shelved its scan-and-go programme in the US last year, with a former executive joking that the scheme should have been simply called “‘go’ because the customers can’t seem to ‘scan’ anything”.
The biggest retailer in the world is now embracing a mobile point-of-sale solution. Equipping more staff with handheld devices so shoppers can pay on the spot is a solid compromise – you still provide a frictionless checkout experience while taking the onus off the customer and alleviating concerns over shrinkage.
I don’t doubt that the digital store is the future of retail or that checkout-free shopping will appeal to certain customers and shopping missions. But consumer adoption will be slow, and they will never replace manned checkouts entirely, which is why the hysteria over till-free stores is unwarranted.
Automation is coming but, in the process, retailers must ensure they don’t kill the experience they are working so hard to improve.
British supermarkets don’t have a great track record when it comes to running discount chains in parallel with their mainstream stores. But that’s not stopping Tesco from launching Jack’s – its final answer to the persistent threat posed by Aldi and Lidl.
Why now?
Aldi and Lidl have been trading in the UK since the nineties so why now? Well, shopping habits have evolved dramatically over the past decade. The 2008 financial crisis forced many consumers to re-evaluate their household budgets. Frugality went from being shamed to celebrated, and the notion of ‘smart shopping’ took off. What many didn’t realize at the time was that this would be structural, not cyclical, change. Some industry observers thought the discounters were simply enjoying their time in the sun, but the discounters recognized an opportunity to meet shoppers halfway, deviating from their lean operating model by broadening their ranges, investing in quality and the instore experience, and moving into better locations. As a result, Aldi and Lidl have become more credible, well-rounded competitors.
The launch of Jack’s is an admission that the likes of Aldi and Lidl have fundamentally changed the way we shop and there’s no sign of them abating. Tesco couldn’t pay the discounters a higher compliment.
Over the years, Tesco has attempted to stem the discounters’ growth through endless price cuts. They’ve reduced the number of promotions in a bid for more honest, consistent pricing, taking a leaf from the discounters’ book. They’ve launched their own discount brands and even created dedicated pound zones instore. The reality is that none of this has stopped shoppers from defecting to the budget supermarkets. Aldi and Lidl’s combined market share has grown by 80% over the past five years. Tesco has exhausted all their tactics – launching Jack’s is very much a last resort.
Will it work?
Let’s be clear – the odds are against them. But I’d argue that it’s better than standing still. Tesco needs 3 things to make this work:
Scale – you can’t run a successful discount chain with a handful of stores. If this is going to work, Jack’s will need to go big quickly.
Discount differentiation – ahead of launch, the biggest question for me was ‘What can Jack’s do that Aldi and Lidl can’t’? If Tesco wants to be a discounter, then they need to start acting like one. The model is based on simplicity and ruthless efficiency. So, Tesco must ensure that they distinguish themselves from the very well-established competition *but* without adding cost into the business model. Tesco has always had muscle but they’ve further strengthened their buying power recently, having acquired Booker and teamed up with Carrefour for joint purchasing. Tesco will differentiate by undercutting Aldi and Lidl on price. It really is as simple as that.
Distinct offer – some self-cannibalisation is inevitable, so it’s vital that Jack’s distances itself as much as possible from Tesco’s mainstream stores. To do this, and of course to keep costs down, Tesco’s own brands will feature heavily and all the traditional components of a full-service supermarket (loyalty scheme, online offering, counter service, etc) will be stripped back.
So, what’s next? At best, Tesco will have won back some of its more price-conscious shoppers. At worst, Jack’s becomes another costly distraction. Either way, Aldi and Lidl aren’t going anywhere. This is about co-existing with the discounters, not stamping them out.
For more, check out my interviews on the Today programme (15 min in) or BBC Breakfast below:
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One of the fundamental reasons for Amazon’s success is its unwavering commitment to a vision laid out two decades ago: to relentlessly innovate in a bid to create long-term value for customers. Amazon’s USP is disruption and they continue to finetune it. Every action is guided by a vision that hasn’t changed since Amazon’s inception.
Most publicly traded retailers aren’t afforded the luxury of such long-term thinking, and turnover at the top often brings a change in strategic direction. However, retailers can compete with Amazon by honing in on their own strengths and streamlining anything that does not add value to their core proposition. In this climate, it’s differentiate or die. Being ‘all things to all people’ is no longer an option.
The closure of Tesco Direct is an admission of defeat to Amazon: it was after all designed to compete with the behemoth head on by replicating their marketplace format, extending Tesco’s product range beyond the confines of their superstores. But if there is one rule in retail today, it’s this: you cannot out-Amazon Amazon.
Aside from racking up Clubcard points on big-ticket purchases, there was very little incentive for shoppers to choose Tesco Direct over Amazon. Tesco’s site in comparison was confusing and full of friction. Pricing was inconsistent, it lacked product recommendations and reviews, and the range was neither broad nor compelling enough to make it the go-to destination for general merchandise. Let’s not forget that many shoppers today begin their product search not with Google but with Amazon. Amazon has become the first port of call for even the most obscure products – from silicone wine glasses to cat scratch turntables – which when combined with Prime delivery becomes a very compelling proposition.
Tesco Direct was loss-making and contributed very little to the topline, which sparks a lesson to be learned from Amazon: admitting failure and swiftly moving on. Offering 94 types of treadmills online won’t help Tesco to retain its title as the country’s largest food retailer. There’s no time for costly distractions when Amazon is on your doorstep. Tesco will be far better off to merge grocery and non-food onto one platform, as some competitors did several years ago, and then focus on logical category extensions to mirror what shoppers would find instore.
There is a renewed sense of urgency to strengthen these core non-food categories and it actually has nothing to do with Amazon. A combined Asda-Sainsburys-Argos will create a retailing powerhouse in toys, baby, clothing and home. Tesco needs to up its game fast in these categories and leave everything else to the specialists.
The Direct business joins a growing graveyard of Tesco brands including Giraffe, Euphorium, Harris + Hoole, Nutricentre, Hudl, Blinkbox, Dobbies. What was once considered business-critical diversification is now seen as a pricey distraction. Tesco Direct won’t be the last of Dave Lewis’ and Charles Wilson’s strategic cull as they continue to tighten Tesco’s focus on food by offloading non-core assets. There is, after all, only room for one everything store.
