N.Z. supermarkets ‘well up with U.S.’

Press, 8 June 1989, Page 25

N.Z. supermarkets ‘well up with U.S.’

New Zealand supermarkets are equal to their United States counterparts in terms of service, technology, and style, says a Wellington-based supermarket manager, Mr Kieran O’Sullivan. Mr O’Sullivan, the manager of Newtown New World supermarket, has just returned from a three-week study tour of American supermarkets sponsored by the Bestfriend Petfoods Grocery Scholarship for excellence in young managers. “The level of service is much lower in America. New Zealand is as advanced, if not more so, in supermarket technology such as checkout scanners, and the EFTPOS system,” Mr O’Sullivan said. Mr O’Sullivan said Americans were experiencing similar trends to New Zealanders in eating fresh foods but they were taking it a step further. “Whole sections of produce are devoted to organically grown foods since pesticide-use is now a big issue,” he said. The range of upmarket to budget supermarkets was more acute, although the advent of the European "hypermarket” concept, where anything and everything could be bought, was starting to appear, Mr O’Sullivan said. Animated displays, boutique sections and irregular aisles were new trends in the United States which would soon be

here, he predicted. Television sets at checkouts solved the problem of long, dissatisfied supermarket queues but, unnecessary queues in American supermarkets were often caused by staffing problems and the absence of packers to speed up procedures, he said. Ethnic-orientated supermarkets were becoming more commonplace and very successful in the States, Mr O’Sullivan said. ‘ln California, where there is a large Hispanic population, the supermarket chain’s cater predominately to that group from the types of food to labelling in their language,” he said. The ‘ethnic” concept is beginning to appear in New Zealand. Mr O’Sullivan said he had developed sections in his own Newtown supermarket for Asians and Polynesians. While New Zealand supermarkets average 14,000 square feet, and return an average profit of 14 to 23 per cent of that, American supermarkets averaged a massive 31,000 square feet and returned between 18 to 25 per cent of that, Mr O’Sullivan said. Average New Zealand supermarkets carried 14,000 grocery lines, while lines in the States could run as high as 28,000.