Countdown: food worth
Are they looking for people like her? She's thinking the reverse of 'I love working here for these wonderful people'.
- From RobiNZ personal blog on the billion dollar supermarket realignment.I would think Foodtown is the better brand on service and price over Woolworths - at least in Auckland. I don't know what Countdown means these days, but it used to mean less than whatever Foodtown is - less in terms of price, but also less in terms of service and selection/range. Since they pulled the 3 Guys brand in favour of Countdown (as the final phase of the catchment rationalisation that began in the late 80s) we are left with a heritage for Countdown of no better prices with a reduced selection and service. Why would they opt for that?
From the maps we can see the Countdowns are mainly (but not exclusively) concentrated in the working class areas and the Foodtowns in the middle class areas.
It's not just about a unified brand it means unified standards of service and employment structures, pricing, supply, house brands etc. These are huge changes. Having lost the local smaller supermarkets in the 1980s and 90s the suburban population must rely on either the multi-national Progressive Enterprises Ltd or the Foodstuffs conglomerate that consists of three regional co-operatives of owner-operated stores including New World and PAK’nSAVE operations as well as 4 Square, Gilmours and Liquorland.
Auckland market (data from their respective websites):Foodstuffs:
12 x PAK'nSAVE
19 x New World
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31 supermarkets
Progressive:
8 x Woolworths
24 x Foodtown
21 x Countdown
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53 supermarkets
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84 total supermarkets in Auckland
--
c.1.3m pop ÷ 84 = c.15,500 people per supermarket.
If Progressive melt down to one how will the commerce commission respond?
It reads like a PR piece in the NZ Herald:
The man in charge betrays the agenda when he says "Countdown is what smart shoppers want." Smart shoppers, eh. 
In the same way it was smart of Progressive to kill off Georgie Pie? (You bastards!). What is smart for Progressive is not necessarily what is going to be smart for the customer, workers, suppliers etc. That's probably where he's confused himself because he almost came off looking like a patronising wanker then for a second didn't he.There is no way two supermarkets branded the same will be operating in the same location for very long. Big chains like the Warehouse can do it with an associate brand like Stationery, but how can Progressive successfully do that without the need to create another brand? If they don't retain a brand to turn in to a specialised associate unit then they can't be wanting to keep two at the same location can they.
The people at the levers have an efficient method in mind and a military outlook in which to frame the execution of this large scale manoeuvre.
Why anyone would want to deliberately set about rebranding anything as being of a lower or inferior class to the predecessor is beyond my comprehension.
Progressive has a 4.86b revenue and an operating income of $203m. Foodstuffs has a $7.6b revenue and a operating income $371m.Labels: $, Auckland/Tamaki
posted by Tim Selwyn @ 12:31 pm
8 comments
8 Comments:
Been pretty mystified by the whole thing as well, one would of thought that Foodtown was their optimum brand to go with if they were to focus only on one brand. Its set in the middle of the market.
Countdown has a coloured past and some of its current stores are really sub optimal. Guessing the decision was made to focus at south of the Bombays where Foodtown is less known.
A new brand would of been a better option me thinks. The cost of remarketing Countdown is surely going to be equal to launching a new brand.
Anyhow now there are three options, and New Worlds are hardly normally a quality store either.
Let it go Tim, Georgie Pie was shite and deep down inside you know it.
Besides with the growing obesity epidemic amongst Maori and PI's it's a good thing it was closed down.
Progressive Enterprise's stores vary in stock content and quality of service depending, it seems to me, entirely upon location and local demographic. If customers are demanding and stroppy; Greenlane, Browns Bay,
Newmarket and Meadowbank etc,the stores take notice and try to please.Shoppers in poorer areas sometimes have "different" requirements.
Sigh.. some folk want trimmed pork and caviar; others want pig heads and goat meat.Store branding fools nobody.
Anon 6:01PM: On the local demographic scenario -In Avondale, for example, they got rid of the local 3 Guys some years back - meaning those customers now either go to their big Foodtown in New Lynn, the much smaller and much shittier (ex-3 Guys) Countdown in Pt Chev, or the Foodstuffs Pak'nSave in Mt Albert.
All through Avondale are grocers with taro as their lead item. You go just 5 minutes down the road to the Foodtown New Lynn (the closest to the old Avondale 3 Guys) and I can't recall seeing any taro at all in their vege section. Do they not want PI customers? or do PI customers not go there? Is it too hard to source fresh taro? Can they not compete with the grocers?
Anon 3:42PM: "Let it go Tim, Georgie Pie was shite and deep down inside you know it."
- No. It was good - for what it was, at that price. I ate my fair share of those sweet pies. Progressive still puts them out under their own house branding. But they ended that brand, just like they are set to end Foodtown as a brand. These are bad calls.
" No. It was good - for what it was, at that price. I ate my fair share of those sweet pies. "
The seafood ones were disgusting.
Didn't they raise the price 50% which effectively destroyed their business.
Who eats bought fish pies - or chicken? Even the steak and oyster or steak and mussel ones are risky. As for the price point being jacked up - you may be right, but I thought the company's over-expansion with a plant that was too big and the value of the GP sites to other players like MacDonalds spelt the end.
I do concur that at a dollar their pies were an absolute steal but many agreed that at $1.50 things went downhill. It went from being a volume game to a margin model which is why they failed in my mind
Their fruit pies were the bomb.
You should try a makatu mussel pie. Excellent.
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