Asda, Tesco, Waitrose: the best supermarkets for price and customer service

Which supermarkets deliver consistently when it comes to price, customer service and product availability?

So which are the best supermarkets when it comes to delivering competitive prices? And which provide the most pleasant experience?

The results of an exhaustive new study offer a pretty good insight.

Supermarket loyalty schemes: what rewards can you get?

What is the Grocer 33?

The Grocer is the industry bible when it comes to the supermarket trade, and it has been carrying out a regular mystery shopping exercise on the nation’s grocers for more than two decades. 

Each week, mystery shoppers head to an individual Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco or Waitrose store, and judge their experience based on a range of different criteria, from the standard of the store and the car park, to the price and availability of the items on their shopping list, and even the length of the queue.

Each week, the five big supermarkets are scored based on how that shopping trip goes, with an overall winner as well as winners being identified for individual categories.

In other words, it’s a pretty thorough rundown of everything that makes up a trip to the supermarket.

The big winners

The Grocer has now published the collected results of the last 50 Grocer 33 mystery shopping exercises, to give us an idea of which stores have been strongest in particular areas over the last 12 months.

On price, Asda took the top spot. This perhaps isn’t hugely surprising given its reputation as being a little more budget-friendly than the other supermarkets it’s being judged against, though it’s notable that it worked out cheapest on 33 out of the 50 weeks.

Interestingly, there have been weeks when ‘guest’ rivals have been included in the study and they have tended to do well on price.

Aldi and Lidl featured three times and won on each occasion, while Iceland and Amazon also worked out cheapest on two occasions.

On customer service, Waitrose was the top dog. It scored an average of 79.1 out of 100 ‒ up from 67.7 last year ‒ on customer service, and took top store of the week for the category on 21 out of 50 occasions.

Meanwhile, on availability Tesco was the top performer, averaging an impressive 95.9% availability.

That’s an improvement on the 93.5% registered last year, while it managed to rack up nine full baskets in mystery shopper tests, compared to four last year.

Waitrose came second in this category, with 93.4%, while Morrisons was the worst performer at 90.9%.

Of course, it’s worth remembering that these mystery shopping exercises are based entirely on in-store experiences.

And while that’s a traditional way of shopping for many people, equally there are swathes of shoppers who couldn’t care less about the car park facilities or lengths or queues, since they handle all of their shopping online.

Where are we shopping?

The last couple of years have seen interesting changes in where we choose to do our grocery shopping.

Before the pandemic hit, increasingly shoppers were starting to move away from the traditional big-name supermarkets, with the deep discounters of Aldi and Lidl the primary beneficiaries.

Things changed somewhat though once Covid-19 arrived, though, and the prospect of shopping in person became less appealing.

As people instead opted for deliveries or click and collect services, it was the big names ‒ who are the ones offering these services, after all ‒ that benefitted, and saw their market share rise.

That shift is being reversed though, with the smaller names once more seeing an increase in popularity.

According to the latest data from Kantar, since the start of the 2021 Tesco has seen its market share drop from 27.3% to 27%, while Sainsbury’s has fallen to 15.1% from 15.7% and Asda’s has dropped from 14.6% to 14.4%.

Meanwhile, Aldi’s has raced from 7.4% to 8.1% and Lidl’s has moved from 5.9% to 6.2%, taking it level with the Co-op.

The big supermarkets are well aware of the challenges the smaller outfits present to them, which is why they’ve come forward with price-matching schemes or announced the stripping back of product ranges in a bid to compete on price.

But the data suggests that when shoppers are looking for more bang for their buck, they are heading to those deep discounters.