Bargain stores are proving the most popular for British shoppers, with sales figures reaching £5 billion, according to recent retail performance data recorded by Nielsen.
Over 50% of British households have purchased groceries from Poundland alone in the past year, with 2.2 million households buying bargain goods for the first time, meaning that 78% of Britons now favour discount stores.
Collectively, bargain stores are now outdoing popular value stores Aldi and Lidl, where 75% of households shop.
“The rising spend at bargain stores is driven by two things,” says Mike Watkins, Nielsen’s UK head of retailer and business insight.
“The huge rise in first-time visitors and, more importantly from a long-term perspective, shoppers buying a larger repertoire of products from bargain stores – some of which they previously bought from mainstream retailers.”
The most popular items being purchased are Household, Packaged Grocery, Confectionery and Health & Beauty, making up 63% of sales in bargain stores.
“Historically, shoppers visited them for household goods and other general merchandise, the type of ‘safe’ non-perishable categories that new shoppers initially limit their repertoire to,”says Watkins.
A shift from primarily non-perishable items being the norm for shoppers at bargain stores was also detected in the report, as fruit and vegetables have seen a huge rise in popularity over the past year.
Britons move away from the top four supermarkets accounts for 73% of the shift in spend towards bargain stores, meaning that 31% of the increase in annual spending comes from customers switch from supermarkets and health & beauty retailers.
© 2016 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Aoife Lawless. To subscribe to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine, click here.
