Investigating Business Unit One Task Two:
Business Activities
Introduction
“Business activity refers to the operations carried out by a business – the type of goods it produces, the service it offers, whether it provides only goods or only services or both. Many businesses are involved in more than one activity, but the main one is known as its care business. This is the activity on which everything else depends”
Business Activities of Sainsbury’s
Sainsbury’s is a large organisation. It is involved in a wide range of activities but its main activity is selling a range of goods and services to its customers. Sainsbury’s is in the Tertiary sector because it is selling its goods and services directly to its customers and it is also a part of the retail industry. This means that Sainsbury’s sells its products and services directly to its consumers. There are many different types of retailers. For example: markets, Internet, mail order and ect. Sainsbury’s sells a wide range of products including: Food & Drinks, Newspapers & Magazines, Dairy products and etc. Sainsbury’s have different types of stores such as Sainsbury’s Express, the larger Sainsbury’s stores provide more services and goods than the High Street Sainsbury’s provide. Sainsbury’s buys its products from suppliers located all over the UK and abroad. Sainsbury’s sell a wide range of branded products like Cadbury’s, Heinz, Colgate and etc. It also sells products with its own name. These usually cost less. Sainsbury’s do not make their own-label products but pay manufacturers to make the goods for them. Sainsbury’s main competitors are Tesco, Asda and Boots. There are many laws which affect Sainsbury’s. For example: Health & Safety Laws, Consumer Protection Laws and Employment Laws. New technology has affected Sainsbury’s. For example: on-line shopping, bar codes on the products, credit card payments and etc.
Main Activities of Sainsbury’s
Sainsbury’s provides home delivery service to its customers to make their customers life easier. They provide this service so its customers have facilities and this is a part of the activity of Sainsbury’s because its activity is to provide services and as we can see from the picture, a service being provided to its customers.
These are different types of stores of Sainsbury’s providing different types of services. The picture on the left shows a local Sainsbury’s which is smaller in size of the other Sainsbury’s stores, it also provides different types of services than the larger stores and has less activities to fulfil the needs of its customers. Customers go into these local Sainsbury’s to buy only a few amounts of goods. The picture in the middle shows a larger Sainsbury’s, which have slightly more activities and services to provide to customers such as car parks. This type of Sainsbury’s fulfils the need of customers who are buying more than a few goods. The picture on the right shows the large Sainsbury’s store, which has many activities and provides many services for the customers such as Public Transport and car park facilities. This type of large stores sells goods directly to customers similarly to the other types of Sainsbury’s (local, high street and etc.) but attracts more customers than the local and high street Sainsbury’s because of the services they provide which other types of Sainsbury’s don’t provide. This type of store fulfils the need of customers who are doing a large amount of shopping and therefore the activities for this Sainsbury’s is more than the activity of smaller Sainsbury’s stores.
