The chairman of Leeds-based supermarket chain Asda has admitted the company’s stores are “not as nice as I’d like them to be” after the firm reported a fall in sales.<br />Former M&S boss Lord Stuart Rose is leading the business alongside ex-eBay senior vice president Rob Hattrell after co-owner Mohsin Issa stepped back from running Asda in September.<br /><br />He said Asda will spend £30 million on getting more staff on the shop floor at its more than 1,200 UK outlets.<br /><br />Lord Rose said: “We’ve slightly lost the plot in terms of giving (customers) what they want on a daily basis.<br /><br />“If you go and look at our stores, they’re not as nice as I’d like them to be in terms of the experience and the visuals.<br /><br />“They’re not as good as they should be in terms of the service we give our customers on availability, and we’ve probably lost a bit of sharpness on price.”<br /><br />He added those are “operational things” which the chain can fix. “It won’t be fixed in short order. But we’re on to it.”<br />On Friday, Asda reported a 2.5 per cent decline in third quarter revenues, excluding fuel, to £5.3 billion, as sales fell 4.8 per cent versus the same period last year.<br /><br />The supermarket recently cut 475 head office jobs as part of a major shake-up after the latest change in leadership at the private equity-owned retailer.<br /><br />Lord Rose said a focus on business transformation efforts have been a factor in issues with customer experiences in shops.<br />“We have undergone the largest transformation in our history during the last three years – doubling our store footprint, expanding into the strategically important growth markets of convenience and food-to-go, and overhauling our digital capabilities,” he said.<br /><br />"We have laid solid foundations to drive long term growth, but the unprecedented scale of these changes has absorbed a huge amount of the leadership’s time with a temporary impact on Asda’s customer experience in stores.<br /><br />“As a key priority, we have been investing further and taking the right decisions to deliver an enhanced and more consistent in-store experience for our customers, as we set out in our Q2 results in August.<br /><br />“Now it is time to deliver the best possible experience in our stores day-in-day out – and pull out all the stops for customers this Christmas and beyond. I would like to sincerely thank all our colleagues for their hard work and ongoing dedication.”
