Metropol

thegeek wrote:Also, my local BHS appears to be getting a food store - nice mix of branding here.

If you look very closely at the above picture, you might be able to make out that the window decal says the foodhall was due to open on "Tuesday 24 September". The 24th was, of course, a Thursday.

Anyway, the old blue ribbon-h sign on the exterior has been replaced with a new-style logo, but the old one remains on the inside of the mall, along with a more recent logo:


I had a look at the food hall itself, and it's pretty underwhelming. It's been nicely fitted out, but most of the branded goods are Happy Shopper and Euro Shopper; and the endcap with a 'dine in for £10' deal was mostly full of reduced-to-clear items. The reduced tags were hand-written, which doesn't suggest they've got a particularly sophisticated stock control system.

There was a lot of promotion around the shop with arrows pointing towards 'food hall - on the ground floor' (as well as the Dorothy Perkins and Wallis concessions, also 'on the ground floor'.) This store only has one floor. It just feels a bit cheap, but what do you expect for a chain that was sold for a quid.

It does seem odd that they'd pick this store as one of the first to have a foodhall: the mall also has an Asda (and a Sainsbury's not far away); it's also surprising that Arcadia are happy for them to have a DP concession when there's a full DP/Burton store about three doors down.

rob wrote:

barcode wrote:Is morrisons getting a complete overhaul?

https://twitter.com/merrioncentre/statu ... wsrc%5Etfw

https://twitter.com/teamfishtank/status ... wsrc%5Etfw

I take it you haven't looked in the Morrisons thread...

No

barcode wrote:

rob wrote:

barcode wrote:Is morrisons getting a complete overhaul?

https://twitter.com/merrioncentre/statu ... wsrc%5Etfw

https://twitter.com/teamfishtank/status ... wsrc%5Etfw

I take it you haven't looked in the Morrisons thread...

No

Rookie error.

As reported in The Unofficial Sainsbury's Thread:

Martin Phillp wrote:Tomorrow's The Times reports that Home Retail Group are in talks with an Australian company over the sale of Homebase, which would leave Sainsbury's to acquire Argos.

A lot of Australian media outlets have been reporting on Wesfarmers bid for Homebase, also reporting:

news.com.au wrote:"The acquisition would be the first step in a program ... to reinvigorate core Homebase assets to build an exciting new Bunnings-branded business over three to five years," a statement from Wesfarmers said on Thursday.

"The UK home improvement and garden market is an attractive and growing market."

A return of the stencil text?!


Update: Details of the £340m offer (PDF)

The trouble with renaming/rebranding a DIY chain is that many of the own brand products, particularly the more obscure tools and fixings, have a very slow turnover. They hang around on shelves and in warehouses for years.

I remember it took a long time for Focus to flush out all their Do It All, and later on Great Mills, branded stock. Even now in Wickes there's a fair bit of stock with the 3D letter W on the logo, which they got rid of at least 6 years ago.

There is still stock of Ant Powder in B&Q with the red logo

Pete wrote:There is still stock of Ant Powder in B&Q with the red logo

Which red logo? The one with the ampersand or the one with the chubby backwards 3?

I think the ampersand. I can't remember. I used to hide all the new stock in the overstocks and try to get rid of the old stuff but it shifted so slowly I could never get rid of them all.

B&Q of course is the graveyard of old in store signage. Endless ill thought out rebrands litter the stores and only a few that were converted to the full Port Glasgow style. They likely all have old rubbish sent into them due to the incompetence of the marketing dept.

One of our stores here still had the red & black border around the inside with the old circular B&Q logo at various intervals right up until it closed last year! For whatever reason they never took it down over the years even though that logo was taken down from outside the store around 1996-ish.

The store I worked in had a massive all caps Sainsburys logo inside the plant room from when it was a Homebase

Having read a bit more about the proposed takeover, if Wesfarmers are going to go ahead and replicate the Bunnings business model in the UK, then it will likely be more of a direct competitor to B&Q - going back to "traditional DIY", with homewares, duvet covers etc. probably getting shunted out of Homebase:

The Times wrote:Bunnings is the largest DIY chain in Australia, a country that loves home improvement almost as much as rugby and cricket. Its low-cost “big box” stores can be found across the nation, known as either “Bunnings” or “Bunnings Warehouses”, and are famed for their “sausage sizzle” barbecue fundraisers at weekends.

Might be an odd decision, as some analysts think the DIY market in the UK has shrunk - with people doing small, odd jobs, rather paying tradesmen to do anything more substantial. This has previously been cited as one of the reasons for Homebase's current decline, and Kingfisher's own recent change of strategy to close some B&Q sites full of tools, building materials and equipment - choosing to invest more in Click-and-Collect by expanding ScrewFix.

Could be some pressure coming then for B&Q, or a new entrant misreading the UK market. Anyway, it looks like B&Q has already been peeping over at the chain: