The Yesterday People (Morrisons)

Member Name: rdobbie

Product:	Morrisons
Date:	08/05/05 (1307 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Originality, fairly good prices on staple items

Disadvantages: Outdated presentation, concentration on unhealthy food, poor attitude of staff

I still can't decide whether I like Morrisons. But then I wasn't too keen on Safeway before the takeover either. Trouble was, Safeway was a bit too expensive and now things have swung to the other extreme. I wanted something in the middle, and I suspect I'm not alone on that.

Our local Safeway became adorned with the yellow and black 'M' insignia in February and for a few days the whole town became quite excited by all the '2 for 1' offers. But now the dust has settled, there seems to be a feeling in the air that Morrisons isn't that marvellous. I think all the excitement was just down to the fact we had a new kid in town.

Make no mistake, Morrisons is cheap and has a proliferation of own brand products that you won't find elsewhere. With cheapness of price, however, comes low quality and nowhere is this more evident than with Morrison's 'ready made' foods, some of which can fairly be described as muck. Certain ex-Safeway ready meals like 'Eat Smart' and 'The Best' have been adopted into the Morrisons portfolio but somehow it's not enough; you can't pick up something for your tea in Morrisons in the confidence that you're going to enjoy it.

For staple items Morrisons is pretty good. Fruit and veg is reasonable value for money although freshness can be a bit iffy. The freezer aisle food is particularly cheap and well stocked, and offers excellent desserts and frozen vegetables. Crisps, fizzy drinks and similar 'junk' is amongst the cheapest in town although aspartame, monosodium glutamate and beef gelatine are par for the course. Salt is something else you'll find in abundance in Morrisons products. It's a substitute for real flavour, you see, and it's cheap. There's no evidence, on packaging or marketing, that Morrisons give a monkey's about the nutritional value of anything. At least the other big players pretend to care.

The low cost 'Bettabuy' range is not as extensive, or as cheap, as Tesco's 'Value' range, for example, and seems to exist only as a begrudging acknowledgement that other supermarkets offer economy ranges. Toiletries, home wares and cleaning products are well priced. Alcoholic drinks claim to be cheap, and certainly taste it. But actually they're noticeably more expensive than Tesco or Asda, unless you enjoy White Lightning cider or sparkling pomaine with your smoked salmon terrine.

The whole Morrisons malaise is attributable to its Chairman, Sir Ken Morrison, a man who likes to do things his own way. All new ideas and products need to be approved by the Yorkshireman himself before they see the light of day. This can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand the customer feels the benefit of a no-nonsense approach to products and prices, but there's no finesse or genuine quality in anything. I think the decimation of the Safeway brand and product range in such a short space of time was reckless and hasty. Whatever we thought of Safeway, it offered a large portfolio of exclusive own brand products that painstakingly evolved over a long period of time thanks to great amounts of research, investment and skill. To wipe that out overnight and replace it with a hugely inferior own-brand range can only be seen as further evidence that Morrisons is ego driven and not business driven.

The in-store livery and own-brand packaging is garishly tasteless in a way that is only matched by Pat Butcher's earrings. The poor shopper is bombarded with ceiling-hangers every two yards that shout about special offers; the colours and typography couldn't be less subtle. The 'look' seems to have been conceived in a crack lounge by the set designers from Bullseye and Coronation Street. Not since the old Co-op superstores of the 1980's have I witnessed anything so offensively tacky. But why? Working class doesn't have to mean tasteless. Aldi, Argos, Asda (and that's just the A's) seem to pull off the whole 'cheap' thing with a reasonable dollop of dignity and taste. I feel, once again, that Sir Ken is making a few too many decisions himself without taking the advice of others. And what's going on with that Staff uniform? It's gone all 1970's and polyester, with frilly bows for the women and aprons for all the men. It's so bad you almost feel it's deliberately like that to belittle the staff.

Evidence of the store's obsession with old fashioned Northern iconography is all over the place. Apples are displayed on a fake greengrocer's cart, the fresh fish counter is adorned with plastic green leaves, and the store entrance is proudly announced as 'Market Street'. But it's all fake, fake, fake. C'mon - it's a supermarket. They're trying too hard to make their stores into some kind of romanticised theme park based on a bygone era where old women pottered around the cobbled streets of Yorkshire buying black pudding and lard.

I can't see how this format will work in former Safeway stores in the more affluent parts of the South of England. In fact I think it will be met with a degree of horror. Fresh salad bars which once sold olives, fresh blueberries and sun dried tomatoes are being heartlessly ripped out and thrown in the skip round the back, to be replaced by the Morrisons 'Pie Shop' selling every conceivable variety of sweet and savoury hot pie. What works in Yorkshire just won't work in Surrey, Uncle Ken. What you don't seem to understand is that Safeway's core shoppers weren't overly bothered by the price they paid. They may have even enjoyed paying slightly more in the belief they were getting that certain 'je ne sais quoi' (or should that be 'joie de vive'?). Yes, it's consumer snobbery, but it's also a business reality and it works for Sainsbury's and Marks & Spencer.

Customer service at my local store has also taken a nosedive since the men from Yorkshire came along. I always check my receipts with eagle eyes, and worryingly I have been overcharged on my last five consecutive visits to Morrisons. Mostly this was down to the checkout operator failing to notice the yellow "reduced for quick sale" sticker, but the most unacceptable incident was being charged £1.93 for two loose baking potatoes. Not a single one of my subsequent trips to the customer service desk earned me an apology or the slightest whiff of concern as to why the mistake happened. Once or twice is forgiveable, but you have to ask serious questions about the company's management regime when customers are overcharged with such frequency.

Most of the workforce seems to suffered a change in attitude towards the customer since the days of Safeway. Although you occasionally get a friendly checkout operator, rudeness and lack of care is fast becoming the norm. I have to assume that staff are not being given any training in customer service, or that monitoring of staff conduct is woefully inadequate.

While we're at it, here's another thing that bugs me... "More Reasons To Shop At Morrisons". You reckon so, do you Ken? Then why did you get rid of the fresh pizza bar, the dry cleaners and the in-store photo processing from my local Safeway? So you had more space to sell pies, that's why. More Reasons my arse.

There's also a distinct lack of innovation with Morrisons. It seems highly improbable that Sir Ken will ever want to venture into the world of online shopping, 24 hour opening, financial products or clothing departments - and you do wonder if they're going to retain their position as the third largest supermarket chain given the unstoppable expansion of their rivals into such areas.

All that said, there's something about the quirkiness and originality of Morrisons which I quite favour against the clinical, corporate shopping environment of Tesco or Asda. I like the way Morrisons doesn't always cave in to the anticompetitive bully boy tactics of its suppliers; unlike every other supermarket they don't allow Coca-Cola to monopolise the fridges near the fresh sandwiches, and they are the only supermarket to offer an own brand alternative to Nestlé's Shredded Wheat. Long may this defiance continue.

The original purpose-built Morrisons stores are a better bet than the converted Safeways; they are generally bigger and carry the full range of departments like the café, the curry bar and the in-store bakery. Sadly the conversion of the old Safeway stores was largely a cosmetic one so you'll find they weren't given any of these facilities if they didn't have them in the first place.

Morrisons does have its uses as a supermarket, but to do your full weekly shop there is not a particularly rewarding or healthy option unless you have the time and inclination to cook all your own meals from raw ingredients. Even then, you won't feel a great benefit on the price you pay since all of Morrisons' headline-grabbing special offers are concentrated on unhealthy processed junk food.

Morrisons are going to have to heed all the warning signs and modernise if they are to succeed. And this means investment in proper food development teams and a commitment to tastier and healthier processed foods.

Verdict: Approach with caution (and sunglasses).

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