Sarah Butler 

Live well with 50p less: Sainsbury’s sales strategy slip up

The supermarket is exhorting staff to get shoppers to spend an extra 50p on every visit – but it accidentally made the plan public
  
  

Sainsbury's nectar vouchers
Encouraging shoppers to buy a little extra is a common retail trick. Photograph: Realimage/Alamy Photograph: Realimage/Alamy

Would you like a crusty poppy seed baton with that? How about a delicious scotch egg or a pair of parsnips? This could be the new mantra at Sainsbury’s checkouts after a secret new strategy to boost sales was accidentally revealed by a member of staff at the grocer’s Romford branch.

The supermarket is exhorting its staff to get shoppers to spend an extra 50p on every visit – but the cunning plan was mistakenly made public when a poster designed for the supermarket’s staff room was instead pasted in the grocer’s window for all to see.

The “Fifty pence challenge” poster was snapped by passerby Chris Dodd, who loaded his picture onto Twitter . The image was then rapidly retweeted by more than 3,700 people. “Let’s encourage every customer to spend an additional 50p during each shopping trip between now and the year end,” it read.

Encouraging shoppers to buy a little extra is a common retail trick, famously employed by the burger chain McDonalds which boosts sales by asking “would you like fries with that?” and by WH Smith, which has long tried to force feed its customers with giant slabs of chocolate at the cash register.

Retail insiders said Sainsbury’s staff faced a trickier task, given that supermarkets are self-service.

But the wags on Twitter had a variety of suggestions: “When customers are not looking, just stuff a few extra items into their basket,” offered one. Another idea put forward was to “double swipe a 50p item at the checkout.”

Some, however, were outraged that Sainsbury’s was pushing staff to get shoppers to spend more, when the grocer’s new adverts promise to save shoppers money with price cuts and its slogan is “Live well for less”.

In a statement, the retailer admitted that the poster had been mistakenly put up on public display, but said the spend more strategy was supposed to spread a little joy into the lives of its store assistants: “We often use posters to make store targets fun and achievable for our colleagues.”

PR expert Mark Borkowski said the commotion on Twitter was “embarrassing and not useful” for Sainsbury’s, but he pointed out that the grocer has “got much bigger issues” as competition hots up in the grocery business.

Sainsbury’s is today expected to reveal a sharp drop in sales amid a bitter price war. All the big supermarkets are under increasing pressure as food prices are barely rising and shoppers are defecting in their droves to discounters such as Lidl and Aldi.

 

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