People are still worried about job security and balancing family finances, despite the official technical end of the recession, according to Asda chief executive Andy Bond.
Bond said: “I believe this year is going to be tough for customers. That’s why as we entered the New Year, we renewed our focus on “every day low prices” and in January we launched our biggest and broadest range of Rollbacks for a decade. This was significant for a couple of reasons.
“Last year, we were still the clear price leader, but we allowed ourselves to become too promotional.
“As you know, there was falling inflation throughout the second half of 2009, so much so that by the final quarter it had all but disappeared.
“In times of falling inflation suppliers invest more heavily in promotions rather than investing in reducing the base price of their products.
“This type of promotional activity benefits high low retailers who are less interested in lowering real prices.
“Our EDLP model empowers us to do things differently at Asda. That’s why we are aggressively lowering prices across the entire store – as a result this year we have extended our price gap to all our major rivals, as demonstrated by mysupermarket.com.
“I firmly believe our everyday low price strategy is right for our customers, right for our suppliers, and right for our shareholder.
“It smoothes out the promotional spikes in supply and demand, improves availability, lowers operational costs, which in turn benefits our customers through even lower prices.”
