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Social dumping is not
good for consumer confidence: Lidl has the lowest quality by far in Swedish retailing, survey shows Lidl comes last among all retail chains in Sweden in a recent survey on consumer confidence. When more than 70 per cent were satisfied with ICA, the joint venture between Dutch commerce multinational Ahold and private Swedish shopkeepers, only 47 per cent of the consumers had confidence in Lidl. Customer loyalty in ICA was almost twice as high as in Lidl, almost 90 per cent against barely 45 per cent among Lidl-shoppers. The two other major chains, Coop and Axfood, place themselves very close to ICA. This makes the lack of consumer confidence in Lidl stand out even more clearly. Lidl far behind competitors also in Finland and Norway Also on its strongest declared competition factor, price value, the German hard discounter lost clearly to all of its major competitors. This confirms earlier observations from Sweden, as well as Finland and more recently Norway, that the social-dumping oriented chain is not as competitive as was though when it entered these markets. Also in these two other Nordic countries, surveys on customer satisfaction have shown that Lidl struggles far behind all its competitors. In the United Kingdom, Lidl has never done very well. Tesco, which is Britain's leading supermarket retailer with a large margin, has not needed to worry too much about its low-end German competitor. This shows that Tesco's positive approach to social dialogue and partnership with UNI Commerce affiliated shop workers' union Usdaw is good also for business and competition. At home in Germany it is management by fear At its home market Germany, Lidl's brutal employer policies - management by fear, they have been called - are exposed by the country's largest trade union ver.di, which is also a UNI Commerce affiliate. The Black Book on Lidl - Schwarz Buch in German, a reference also to Lidl owner Dieter Schwarz - has launched an avalanche of testimonies from former and present employees. Ver.di's web log has registered more than 7,000 of these within only a few months, and the union has announced that it will start to prepare a new report. UNI Commerce is also working on a global and international version of the Black Book, to be published in the near future. The devastating news about Lidl's poor performance in convincing the Swedish consumers come from the Swedish institute for quality development (Institutet för Kvalitetsutveckling), Statistics Sweden (Statistiska Centralbyrån) and the Stockholm School of Economics (Handelshögskolan i Stockholm). This is part of the work done by EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) and EOQ (European Organisation for Quality) to develop a common European index on customer satisfaction. |
