ABSTRACT
The British grocery business illustrates the continuing struggle for market leadership and competitive positioning and repositioning in a large, intensely competitive and highly dynamic sector. Recent years have seen: major changes in managerial leadership at the top of most of the established companies in the grocery business; widespread public attacks on price levels and the frequent declaration of ‘price wars’ by the leading competitors; the entry of the US retailer Wal-Mart into the British market through the purchase of Asda; and the polarizing of competitive activity into large out-of-town superstores on the one hand, and local convenience stores on the other. We pick up the story of the grocery sector in the late 1990s and look at the strategic pattern emerging in the early 2000s.
