The Russian Scene MARKETERS PREPARE FOR SUPERMARKET REVOLUTION

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 12

The Russian Scene MARKETERS PREPARE FOR SUPERMARKET REVOLUTION

[By the Soviet Correspondent of the “Financial Timc«”l (Reprinted by arrangement.) The supermarket revolution is coming to Russian food retailing. This is being made increasingly clear in a number of ways—by the actual opening of many self-service stores in the U.S.S.R., by the attention now paid to the development of the kind of pre-packed food which can easily be sold in supermarkets and by the expression of official policy.

The Soviet Union is still a long way behind the West so far as retail distribution is concerned, but it is catching up. A decade or so ago. when self-service was getting under way in Britain and Western Europe, endless queuing for all kinds of food was still the norm in the U.S.S.R.

Now, the number of food shops in the Soviet Union has grown vastly greater. According to official figures, there were 70 per cent more last year than in 1952. The shops are still generally crowded and service is not made any quicker by the practice (similar to that of some British co-ops) of making customers get tickets for their purchases and pay a cashier rather than the salesgirl. But at least prolonged queuing is now exceptional, and Russian housewives have

the advantage, compared with women in Britain, that the food shops are generally open until 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. at night. Self-Service Last month the Soviet Economic Gazette published an account of the proceedings of a meeting it had held, between a number of high officials concerned with retail trade, to discuss ways of improving the service to the public. One of the officials said that “self-service must become the basic form of development of food trading at the present stage.” Everyone present agreed with him. One of the participants at the meeting claimed that at the start of 1963 the Soviet Union had 16,000 self-service shops, which set it in the third place in the world, after the United States and West Germany. But it soon emerged that progress was by no means as great as this figure suggests. For one thing, most of the existing shops are too small to serve as food supermarkets, and can only be developed into specialised selfservice stores for, for example, bread or vegetables. Lack Of Packaging More serious that this, according to several of the participants at the meeting, is the lack of packaging. Even in Leningrad said one man, where the business is organised vastly better than in other towns, the supply of packaged goods does not exceed 30 per cent of the total. So far as grain sugar is concerned, the trade network of the Russian Federation last year received only 1.1 per cent, of its supplies in ready-packaged form. “Goods are brought into the shops in sacks and boxes. There they are opened and in storerooms which are often ill-adapted and badly equipped, people begin to weigh out the goods. These operations come out far dearer than In industrial conditions.” Another speaker claimed that, as a result of the lack of packaged goods, self-ser-vice stores became, in fact, no more than semi-self-ser-vice. Another said that, often, what packaged foods there were, went to shops with counter service.

Yet another speaker complained that the food machinery makers were producing no sausage-cutters, so that self-service shop workers preparing (sliced) sausage for sale had to do so with knives. This complaint produced a pathetic countercomplaint from a representative of the food machinery designing institute, who said,

"Abroad they are designing automats at full speed, and from us they want sausage cutters and other cutters. We can’t agree with that” All this presents a fairly dismal picture, but there is a positive side. At the moment vegetables are the worst feature of Soviet food trade — people often complain that potatoes and cabbage from the State shops are rotten from long and inefficient storage. Many housewives prefer to buy, at considerably higher prices, from the open barrows at the markets where the collective farmers bring in the produce from their own private plots. But at the Economic Gazette meeting it was stated that measures will have to be taken to wash, sort and pack vegetables for the supermarkets. British Sales

It so happens that vegetable processing machinery was one of the items in which the Russians expressed interest when a London and Birmingham Chambers of Commerce mission went to Moscow last year. That the Soviet Government should be prepared to buy such machinery from a Western country, for scarce hard currency, shows it must have a fairly high priority. There was also some talk at that time of possible Soviet purchases of machinery for the production of corn-flakes and potato crisps. Mr Khrushchev has expressed his approval of these things which he saw in the United States, and there seems to be little doubt that they will appear sooner or later. An important recent development is the Communist Party Central Committee’s decision to set up a highpowered committee, which includes President Brezhnev and Deputy Premiers Mikoyan and Kosygin, to consider ways of producing chicken and pork in industrial conditions. This will undoubtedly lead to the appearance of the broiler chickens and frozen packed pork chops and cutlets which are prominent items in the turnover of Western supermarkets. An enormous amount clearly remains to be done to improve the Soviet food trade. All the same it is clear that the same basic ideas are being worked out now by the Soviet retail trade planners, as were developed by British marketing men 10 years or so ago. In a few years’ time, Soviet housewives will no doubt be wheeling those large wire baskets around food supermarkets, filling them with more and more elaborately and alluringly packaged food.