Having bought a caffe latte from McDonald's for £1.35 and finding its packaging was really neat and it tasted good, I have suggested that this sets a new benchmark for UK local retailers in terms of price and quality. This morning, fresh 'n' fine, a local shop that I pass by had a sign out front saying coffee and a croissant for £1.45. That's a good deal, I said, trying to work out how much the McDonalds' latte was if I bought six and got the seventh free (if they allow me a latte?) (it's £1.16). The croissant was excellent. The coffee unremarkable, perhaps even a little watery. The important thing is what sort of profit you can deliver at £1.45, and how much footfall you win. On balance, almost good enough!
“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
These sort of insights would work well within Better Retailing. The encouragement that they give to try something that you have not done before is the seed corn of enterprise.
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