Re: Why has it been made so difficult?
"If you help the supermarkets to reduce their costs, they will reduce prices. It's a ferocious market, particularly in the UK."
It absolutely isn't. The UK supermarket industry has been a cosy little mudwallow of high prices, fat margins and bloated inefficiency for decades. Whenever UK chains (e.g. Tesco) have tried venturing abroad they have gotten their arses handed to them.
Whereas Lidl and ALDI are finally ripping into the UK market and thriving on prices and margins that would bankrupt a UK chain, even though they have ONLY MANNED CHECKOUTS!
Nothing sums up the UK supermarket industry better than the typical arrangement of:
- a massive area of expensive retail space filled with expensive manual tills, unmanned and idle
- another area of expensive retail space filled with equally expensive "unmanned" checkouts so poorly designed and configured they are unuseable by most customers
- a handful of minimum-wage peons desperately trying to help pissed-off customers battle through the "unmanned" tills
- lots of pissed-off customers in a queue
Biting the hand that feeds IT
