When we discussed Jamie Oliver’s parting of ways from Sainsbury’s a few years back, Justin King described it to me as the Gary Lineker school of retirement: “Quit while you’re at the top and people will remember you fondly”.
He’s done that today himself, as long as the legacy he leaves behind holds up better than Sir Terry Leahy’s at Tesco.
It should do. It’s hard to recall now the IT woes and supply problems that Sainsbury’s suffered from a decade ago. Rather than product or price — two key prongs of success for any retailer — what King brought to the supermarket chain has been reliability. Customers who have tossed ever more own-brand groceries into their trolleys have seen that on the shelves; the City has lapped it up in the form of like-for-like sales growth.
That growth won’t last much longer, contributing to the feeling that King has taken Sainsbury’s about as far as he could.
Mike Coupe, his successor, inherits momentum — but there are new battles ahead. Having overtaken Asda to become the nation’s second-largest supermarket chain, the challenge that Sainsbury’s and the rest of the Big Four felt at Christmas came from budget rivals Aldi and Lidl.
This is an industry that will fast reshape itself. The space race of opening new big box stores is over. Soon, Coupe and peers face closing out-of-town outlets as growth switches to online and convenience.
