My experience as a Woolworths Shopper

I thought some shareholders might be interested in the everyday experiences of someone like myself, a non-shareholder that has no interest at all in investing in retail shares but is a typical family with two kids that spends a lot of money on groceries each week. I want to emphasise that I have no vested interested and therefore no bias in any retail type company, I just want to buy food. Bias simply comes from my family's shopping experience.

Our family was once quite a loyal Woolies customer. We found the meat quality good and that we could get tailored service at the deli. I thought the shelves were always well stocked. Sometimes the queues were a bit long, but you kind of just accepted that this was part of the weekly shopping grind.

Over the past year or so, our shopping behaviour has changed dramtically. We began to find that coles were cheaper, especially with fruit and vegetables. While the fruit & Veg qualiy at Woolies remains generally good, we find it expensive compare to Coles and Harris farm and as a family in this day and age, you need to be wary of these things. Woolies, in my own view still provides the better quality meat and slightly better value in the meat product section.

For many years, my wife would buy thinly sliced mortadella at the deli, and Woolies were happy to slice to order. To her dismay, recently they stopped doing this, and only provided this in pre-packaged plastic. This is a big no-no to anyone that knows their cured meats. Freshly sliced - to order - is what we wanted, and we could no longer get. Instead, my wife discovered she could walk into our local Coles and they had no problem in doing it for us. One thing I want to say......if a supermarket loses the woman of the family, then they have lost the whole family. Further, my wife had the continual experiene of items being incorrectly labeled, or being placed in the incorrect position on the shelf and therefore were being charged for something we thought was a different price. That....leaves a sour taste. I am sure this does not happen at every Woolies supermarket, but it is our local experience.

While I am less 'emotional' and more practical with my shopping, one day I turned up to Woolies only to find that half of the checkouts had been wiped out, to be replaced will a self service area. I can assure you, this did not go down well with me. I realised that much of what was going on was cost cutting but with an effort to 'appear' quality. (e.g the presentation of the pre-cut deli meats).

I have found that I consistently do not have to wait very long at the local Coles queue at all, which makes a big difference with two young children.

I have also found that recently, there has been a problem with accessing some of our regular items. I would specifically go to Wooolies to get the Marinara mix, but oneday it wasn't there at all, but the next Woolies down the road did have it. How can one not have it but the other, about 2km away did?

I am always ready to change supermarkets based on price and accessing what I want to buy, but at the moment, we prefer Coles for the reasons explained above. I still think Woolies do some things well, such as the Macro foods (really like this) and the meats are generally good, but it is not enough to spend our big shopping mony there until we see a genuine change, not just one that uses marketing tricks to make it look like better value/experiences.....these days I think the average punter is much smarter and savvy than coys in general think they are. Customers know the difference between a genuine bargain and effort and the appearance of one, or a trick.

Today is the first time I have actually looked at Woolies shareprice in about 10 years, and I am not surprised to see the fall (I know the Masters thing is also part of it), but it does reflect my own experiences.

Unsure if this help you or not, but at least it provides a genuine family experience.