Grocery Theatricals Put Under the Spotlight
Stop and smell the coffee, roast chicken and freshly baked bread. Breathe deeply, relax, submit to temptation then walk around the aisles filling your shopping cart with wonderful food for yourself, family and friends. That's the theory. Enticing smells will increase spend and build loyalty. What you see, however, isn't always what it appears to be.
As The Independent newspaper in London reports, not all those warm loaves of bread lining the shelves are freshly baked from scratch. Some in-store bakeries are used "merely to warm up bread made in industrial units hundreds of miles away."
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently ruled against Tesco ads, for example, for "implying that its bread was baked from scratch, when most of its stores had done little more than pop near-finished loaves into the oven." While coffee beans can be seen whole and then ground, especially when customers do the work themselves, there is no guarantee that bread hasn't been prepared elsewhere and then finished off for show purposes.
Other accusations have been made by food and farming pressure group Sustain against stores whose meat and fish counters are allegedly "a way for supermarkets to demonstrate their stores offer all the benefits of a traditional high street under one roof."
The newspaper then explains why critics believe they don't always "match the high standards of specialist independent traders." Some supermarket fish counters sell "thawed frozen food that may have been caught 10 days previously, rather than bought that morning at the docks." Meat may be imported and butchered off-site. Fresh produce often goes to central distribution units before it reaches branches.
Food writer and supermarket critic Joanna Blythman is quoted as describing in-store bakeries as "nothing but bogus retail theater." The article's point, and the ASA ruling, concern transparency. There is nothing to indicate any objection or ignorance on the part of consumers, simply a demand that there be little or no likelihood of people being misled. Nor is there any indication that this is actually the case. Consumers may be perfectly aware of what they are seeing and buying. And they may or may not be unhappy about it.
Discussion Questions: Do you buy the argument that supermarket theatricals are a means of misleading the consumer or do you see them as an essential element of improving the shopping experience? What U.S. grocers are best at retail theater?