Store design and deep discounting needn’t be mutually exclusive, but they make unnatural bedfellows.

Store design and deep discounting needn’t be mutually exclusive, but they make unnatural bedfellows.

Walking into the Camden Town branch of Lidl the other day it was quite hard not be taken with both the product ranges and the prices.

There was a lot of fresh and if you like German or Italian cured meat, this was definitely a destination. Okay, so forget the fact that the presentation was, ahem, utilitarian, there was much to be pleased about as far as good food was concerned.

There was however a spanner in the store’s works and that was the matter of payment. The queue for the checkouts stretched the length of the front of the shop and snaked down along one of the aisles and seemed to be growing by the second.

If this had been a Sainsbury’s or Tesco convenience store, for example, this wouldn’t have been huge cause for alarm because the combination of manned tills and self-checkouts would have meant that things would have chugged along at pace. This, however, was manned tills only and not many of them were.

Life is short and the queue was long, so there seemed little choice other than to leave but there were plenty who were prepared to wait. But it’s a fine balance.

You can overlook a down-at-heel interior, you probably don’t mind forfeiting the comfort blanket of familiar brands, but if shopping a store means long lines, even the siren call of low price may not be enough.

Yet Lidl is one half of the German food retail discount duopoly that has Tesco, Asda and most of all Morrisons in a spin about low price and is the cause, in part at least, of the current price battle.

Now couple this with fact that all of the big supermarkets have been on a store design spending spree over the last couple of years as they tried to give shoppers reasons to frequent their emporia. Practically, this has meant improved graphics, a lot of wood cladding and, in the case of Morrisons, vegetable misting units.

None of this comes cheap and yet Morrisons seems set on meeting the challenge of the hard discounters head-on. In store design terms this equates to having your cake and eating it – it probably can’t be done and for Morrisons in particular it is quite hard to square this particular circle.

Meanwhile everything looks sehr gut for Aldi and Lidl, and while service may be almost absent in the Camden Town Lidl, the overall provision is good enough to have the UK supermarket majors running up and down the aisles with the red pen. The outlook is not entirely positive for those who want good-looking food retail interiors coupled with cut-price goodies.