Oxford Institute of Retail Management blog

From just after the Second World War until early in the 1980s, my Uncle Sam had a small grocery store in north east London. When he first opened the shop, after his ‘apprenticeship’ with Jack Cohen and his time as a desert rat, the area was largely Jewish and so he stocked jars of gefilte fish and packets of matzos alongside the 57 varieties of Heinz and the staples such as the rice, flour, tea and sugar that he weighed into paper bags.

He knew most of his customers by name and reputation.

In the 1960s, the demography changed to include a greater West Indian population and so he included salt cod and Jamaican dry crackers. In an area of London that included pockets of real deprivation and before the invention of credit cards, he gave credit to regular customers.

Paramount Fruiterers, Stoke Newington

He knew most of his customers by name and reputation, and although by nature he was rather taciturn, he became a well-loved character along with Queenie from the flower stall and Sonny the barber.

The Stoke Newington of today provides a retail environment that Uncle Sam would barely recognise, with its delicatessens, bars and restaurants. Fresh & Wild is busy with the wealthy, middle class packing organic produce into cotton bags. The few remaining residents who remember Sam call these newcomers ‘Stokies’. The Victorian school has been converted into luxury apartments, the large houses around the common have been refurbished and the Peabody blocks that housed most of Sam’s customers demolished and replaced long ago.

It leads me to wonder how Uncle Sam would have responded to the challenge of Fresh & Wild and Sainsbury’s Local on his doorstep, with Tesco Extra a short drive away. In one way, he was ahead of the game – he delivered. He took orders over the phone or in person, from scraps of paper or repeats from previous weeks. He delivered to tenements and rooms in houses, to grand Georgian mansions, to blocks of flats where the lift never worked and to local businesses. In the early days he used a sack barrow and then a bike and later a Ford Cortina estate. Reflecting on Sam’s home delivery service, I decide to put the UK’s many online grocers of the 21st century to the test.

[If you want to read Christine’s detailed assessment of the comparative merits of each online grocer, please let us know! The full review will appear in the next edition of the Retail Digest, and will be posted on the blog soon.]

It is remarkable that in the UK I have such a choice of online grocers, and although I live in the populous south east, it’s a service available to almost every household. Ocado are the only online grocers to use a custom-built warehouse, while the others continue picking in store. One of the big four UK grocers is notable for its absence in online delivery -Morrisons. There is also much more than grocery shopping to be done at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose – though not Ocado, who are specialist grocery.

There are diets and contact lenses, pet insurance, furniture, recipes, competitor price comparisons, electronics, ‘green’ tips, community projects, special interest clubs, – all over and above the separate wine and flowers offers.

While I wonder about who to settle with, I continue to receive plenty of offers in an attempt to grab my loyalty. There seems very little in the way of barriers to switching between online grocers now that navigation, speed and payment systems are so slick. They have had plenty of practice at getting the service right since their experiments with online grocery in the mid to late 1990s. Ocado’s attempt at providing a barrier is a yearly subscription charge that gives free delivery no matter how many times you order (providing orders are over £40). At first, they offer membership for half the usual price of £99.99 per year, and then a free two-week trial. Almost immediately, Waitrose become the first online grocer to offer free delivery on orders over £50. Next, Ocado offer Waitrose own-label for less than Waitrose offer in-store or online. And Ocado then send me an email when it is voted Which? Magazine’s best online supermarket6 – just ahead of second-placed Waitrose. There’s quite a battle ensuing and I wouldn’t like to try and predict a winner – unless it’s the consumer. And to be quite honest, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to trail around a supermarket on a weekly basis any more.

And finally I discover that Waitrose is delivering by bicycles. Yes, I think that Uncle Sam was definitely ahead of the game.