Abstract

"The Making of the Modern Supermarket: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975"

Andrew C. Godley, University of Sussex (acgodley1@gmail.com)

The impact of supermarkets upon the everyday life of twenty-first century Britain is a subject that has attracted a good deal of attention from academic and business commentators. But the historical trajectory by which ‘the Big Four’ (Tescos, Sainsburys, Asda, and Morrisons) achieved their dominance has been virtually ignored. The paper addresses this gap in the literature by exploring the process of how supermarket formats were adopted in postwar British food retailing. It draws primarily on the experience of Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd. Sainsbury’s was particularly important because by the early 1970s it had become the most successful exponent of supermarket trading in the United Kingdom and its format was becoming widely copied. The company drew on its long-standing reputation as a retailer of fresh meat and provisions to evolve a store format which, unlike its competitors, was capable of generating the profitable ‘one-stop’ shopping habits which underpin supermarket retailing today. It examines the company’s growing sophistication in the measurement of the productivity and profitability of its sales space to evolve a store format which, ultimately, became the model for the industry as a whole. It shows that the process of experimentation which accompanied this innovation to have been drawn out and costly, and to have relied on atypically high levels of labour input. The paper contrasts Sainsbury’s strategy of continuous experimentation and relatively slow, organic growth with competitors’ strategies, which can be related to the company’s trading practices, to the management style of the Sainsbury family, and to its brand identity.