** Take a good look at the empty shelves this Christmas **

The following article demonsrates why king has NOT gone back to basics. Stores given advanced warning of visits. This approach will never herald a recovery at Sainsbury. See highlighted section. ... but oooh he has got a lovely handshake

I wonder if the checkout lady would have been quite so welcoming had she been aware, that among Kings highest priorities last June, was the removal of a measly £100 staff Christmas bonus, which has been paid by the company for 25 years.

This after the company had just awarded Peter Davis a £2,600,000 Bonus....oooh i didn't realise it was him, it was quite dark



The Sunday Times - Business

December 19, 2004

King goes back to basics for Sainsbury revival
Richard Fletcher

The supermarket boss sets a lot of store by visiting his staff and checking the products himself

JUSTIN KING, chief executive of J Sainsbury, the troubled supermarket chain, is listening intently and furiously making notes on the back of a business card.
But the 44-year-old chief executive is not taking down the views of an institutional shareholder, member of the Sainsbury family or McKinsey consultant. He is listening to a checkout supervisor.



The newly installed till printers keep jamming, and King wants to know if there is a fault with the printers or whether staff are simply misfeeding the paper.

It is 8am on a miserable Friday morning, and while most FTSE 100 chief executives are relaxing in the back of their chauffeur-driven BMW7s, King is touring a Sainsbury store in southeast London in the run-up to the crucial Christmas period.

Having dealt with the tills, King is off to inspect the new potatoes. He scrapes the skin off one and then hands it to the manager. These are tip-top, but they are not always as good.

At certain times of the year supermarkets sell new potatoes that are anything but new — they may have been stored for up to three months in warehouses. It’s a practice King may soon scrap at Sainsbury.

“We have to decide whether to sell them 52 weeks a year or whether they’re not good- enough quality,” he said.

Grapes could also disappear from the shelves in October when they are almost impossible to source from anywhere in the world.

Getting down among the shopfloor staff is increasingly fashionable in the retail sector, and in the run-up to Christmas it is hard to go shopping without tripping over some ambitious executive stacking shelves or helping to pack bags at the checkout.

Sainsbury will send 2,000 head-office staff into stores this Christmas, while more than 1,000 of their counterparts from Asda will take part in what the group calls Team Christmas. Tesco virtually closes its head office and sends nearly 4,000 staff out to its stores in the two days before Christmas.

But for King, store visits are not just for Christmas. The former Mars trainee and Asda and Marks & Spencer executive spends every Friday of the year meeting staff and visiting stores. He has already met every Sainsbury store manager — twice.

“I don’t do desks. This is the bit of the job I enjoy,” said King as we toured Sainsbury’s Lee Green store. “It was part of the culture at Mars,” he said. “We spent a lot of time in stores understanding our customers’ businesses — sometimes better than they did.”

King has made many changes after store visits. For instance, having spoken to staff, he realised that products often ended up in the wrong place because there was not enough space on shelf labels to describe the items properly.

“It’s not fear of retribution that stops people speaking up, it’s futility — the belief that it will not be acted on,” he said.

Getting out into the stores was also an integral part of the culture at Asda. King may be keen to build on the Sainsbury heritage of “good food”, but behind the scenes there is an increasing amount of “Asdafication” taking place.

First there is the “Tell Justin” scheme for staff suggestions, which sounds very much like the “Tell Tony” scheme run by Tony DeNunzio, the chief executive at Asda. And there are many other examples.
For more than a decade Asda has encouraged staff — from the chief executive to store workers — to adopt a particular product, say Kellog’s cornflakes, and look after it. They check that the items are continuously on the shelves and promoted prominently. There is intense competition between directors to ensure that their line is the best-selling item.

At Sainsbury, King has introduced “bidlines” — products adopted by board members in the run-up to Christmas. Each board member had to “sell” the item to store managers in October and has been responsible for watching over it since.

King’s bidline — Dows Port — has already sold out. “We sold all the estimate in the first 10 days. They specially bottled some more for me last week.”

He has not just been pinching ideas from Asda — where he worked before joining Marks & Spencer in March 2001 — he has also been poaching former colleagues.

“We’ve nicked some good people,” he said. “Sainsbury is an exciting prospect. People know it’s a strong brand.” Hirings include Angela Morrison, former director of European strategy at Wal-Mart, who worked with King at Asda and is to sort out Sainsbury’s IT system, and Gwyn Burr, former head of customer service at Asda.

King has also poached Ken McMeikan, a rising star at Tesco, who has been appointed retail director. Another is Lawrence Christensen, the widely respected former Safeway operations director. He has been brought in to sort out Sainsbury’s supply-chain problems.

At Lee Green, King is as keen to see the warehouse as he is to see the store. In October, when he unveiled his turnround plan for the beleaguered group, he was forced to admit that the supply chain was failing. The creaking logistics left many empty spaces on store shelves.

And a Sunday Times survey of 20 Sainsbury stores around the country, carried out the week before King unveiled his plans, revealed that in the worst store more than a third of a shopping list of 30 items was out of stock.

So three months later, how is availability in stores?

“We are pretty pleased with where we are,” said King. The supermarket chain has now completed a stocktaking in every store, and finally knows what is actually on the shelves. “The IT can only work with the right data,” said King. “There is no doubt that it has got better in the past four to six weeks.”

The Lee Green branch is positively brimming with stock — not surprising given the advance notice of King’s visit. Nevertheless, his upbeat words will be welcomed by Sainsbury’s frustrated shareholders.

King has certainly won over the staff at the southeast London store. “Ooh, you’ve got a lovely handshake,” said one checkout girl.

Her manager was also impressed. “There’s a lot more focus on stores. It’s about listening and engaging. He’s the most approachable chief executive I’ve worked with,” said Neil Williams, who has been with Sainsbury for over 30 years.

The tour of the newly extended Lee Green supermarket complete, King was off to visit Waltham Point in Essex, one of Sainsbury’s main distribution depots, just off the M25.

This weekend he will be doing the usual tour of half a dozen stores near his home in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He said: “Unfortunately, I cannot get through the door now without being recognised by the staff.
“But it’s not just about visiting stores. It’s about whether you’ve talked to people, whether you’ve listened. It’s about creating an environment where people can talk to you.”

This is all very different from the days of Dino Adriano, a former Sainsbury chief executive. In 1999 he went back to the floor as part of a BBC series, but it was a disaster. Staff quizzed the former accountant about his salary as he blundered about, smashing bottles of salad cream.

The experience dealt a further blow to his already- tarnished credibility, and within weeks of the show being broadcast he had quit, to be replaced by Sir Peter Davis.

For King the challenge now is to memorise the names of at least some of the staff he has met. “I was always impressed that my head teacher could remember the name of every kid in school,” he said.

If he manages to pull off what many believe is an impossible task, few will care if he can remember their names.