The cost of living crisis in the UK is set to get worse, according to Iceland boss Richard Walker. Mr Walker said the impact it was already having on his customers is giving him sleepless nights.
The managing director said: "What we’re facing is a challenge, not necessarily unprecedented. We have a real responsibility to look out for our customers. To be honest, some of our customers might only have £25 a week to spend on food so I was worried about them before this cost of living crisis but now it would give me sleepless nights because as we all know household bills are going through the roof, food is going up, you'll all have seen that.
"Therefore we've got an absolute obligation to look out as best we can for our customers. We're working day and night to get through this. As are our buyers, trying to keep prices as low as possible, but I think the reality is that official inflation figures are maybe just nudging 10%. The reality is it's more than that – we know that, our customers know that. And it probably will get a bit worse to be honest as the autumn bites.
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"I mean if you look at current trajectories of everything from fuel, gas, and commodity prices that is unfortunately where we're headed. The war in Ukraine, there's no quick fix to that, unfortunately, which is driving up lots of different prices of different things. So yeah it probably will get a bit worse."
Iceland, which has its headquarters in Deeside, Flintshire, has recently come under fire for branded items being found cheaper in other high street retailers including Sainsburys and Waitrose but he said it remains “value-orientated” and said the rollout of more copycat brands were likely to help customers.
"I think that there will always be different variations depending on whether those branded products are on deals or not in certain competitors. If you look overall at a basket you're absolutely right. You know, Iceland is definitely affordable. We're value-orientated and our customers absolutely depend on us for that and it's interesting to know our sales are quite good at the moment because no-one's trading up to Waitrose, everyone's looking for the best possible value, but we manage the margin and different products may be on different prices, different deals, and at different times. We're now going to bring in inflation-busting copycats and lookalikes – different, maybe tertiary, brands that offer pretty much the same quality but a lot more aggressive value because ultimately there is a brand tax on on branded items and that's why people are either moving to white-label products or indeed our own-label product," he told GB News.
Mr Walker also criticised petrol firms for "profiteering". "There's a lot of profiteering going on at the moment because petrol prices are through the roof. And they're making an extraordinary amount of money and I don't think any petrol retailer is passing on the full benefits to the consumer. It would be good for society if they were reinvesting that in food and everything else and maybe they will but it is a different business model. And sometimes it is hard to compete against it. We're a big little company. We've got five million customers a week, an army of 30,000 people in terms of our colleagues, and a turnover of about £4bn. So we're big enough to make an impact.
"Where we can be more effective is being agile and nimble as a private family business we’re the shareholders and we’re in charge. And therefore we can react a lot quicker with a lot of these deals. For example we've now started running a 10% saving for anyone over 60 every Tuesday they come in store and it's been wildly successful and we can just turn that on – we can do things like that and be there for our customers."
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