- Provisions are in place for disabled customers and staff receive disability training as part of their induction programme to make them aware of the needs of disabled customers. Sainsbury’s offer:
- Accessible toilets designed for disabled customers
- Designated disability parking spaces situated close to the main entrance
- Guide dogs for the visually impaired
- Assistance for the hard of hearing
- Service call in petrol stations which allows disabled drivers to ask for assistance without leaving their vehicle.
- Wheelchairs and specially adapted trolleys in all stores.
- Wide-aisle checkouts in all stores for wheelchairs.
A quotation from Sainsbury’s website states:-
‘We want all our customers to be able to shop at Sainsbury’s easily - including disabled people, the elderly and people with young children. We make specific provisions at stores for people with special needs but our home shopping service is also available for people who do not want or are unable to shop in our stores.'
*** { When we visited Sainsbury’s local we found that things were different from the big supermarkets and the information on the website wasn’t all correct.
The store is accessible if you live within the city or on one of the bus routes otherwise you are very dependent on family members, public transport and taxis to do your shopping. This can have an impact on people’s finances, as private taxi’s can be expensive.
For the elderly and disable; public transport can be a problem as not all buses or taxis are able to accommodate their needs. When you arrive at the supermarket it can be difficult for the elderly or disabled to manage the aisle, as they are not very wide. The shelves are extremely high and again if you had a disability or if you were in a wheelchair you would be unable to reach the top shelves.}
Food Availability
Sainsbury local supermarket offer a range of products such as Meat, wine, fresh fruits, sandwiches, tin food , as well as confectionary items. However they didn’t seem to sell much frozen foods. Sainsbury’s also sell ‘World Foods’ from countries, which include Indian, Chinese, Italian, American and Thai, Greek, British and this shows how globalisation has had a large impact on the food products the supermarket has started to supply as a result of growing customer demands.
Sainsbury’s also had vegetarian food. However they didn’t have any kosher or halal food for people with religion background.
Although Tesco’s metro do not offer as much products specific to ethnic communities, but the main tesco supermarket does offer many ethnic food to the minor community.
There was a good range of food in the shop even though it was such a small store. They also had a whole aisle just full of world foods which is good considering it is such a small store.
Food cost
Type of Food SAINSBURRY’S TESCO’S
Small loaf of wholegrain bread £1.25 50p
1 Litre of low fat milk 45p 45p
6 pack of low fat fruit yogurts
£1.00 98p
200g medium cheddar cheese
£1.77 £1.77
8 low fat pork sausages
£1.35 88p
1 Large tin of beans 57p 29p
Bag of apples £1.89 £1.38
Lean minced beef £2.20 Didn’t have any
2 tins chopped tomatoes Don’t have any 42p
Bag of onions (3) 77p 76p
500g of pasta 89p 84p
Chicken - diced £2 £2 (not diced, 2 breasts)
Porridge (Didn’t have a 500g pack but 12 packes of 27g) £2.09 £1.83
Medium jar of tomato based pasta sauce 2 for £2
£1.55 79p
500g basmati rice £2.35 89p (but only had white)
Thai green curry sauce £1.85 £1.49
Bag of carrots 49p for 500g 50p for 1 kg
Bag of peppers 3 peppers = £1.47 £1.38
Total £23.54 Total £17.15
Sainsbury’s local shopping basket totalled £23.54 whereas Tesco’s metro was £17.15 The food products such as cheddar cheese, chicken dived and low fat milk were very similar in price whereas staple products i.e rice, pasta, bread were much higher at Sainsbury’s local.
Healthy Eating
When investigating healthy eating promotion in Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s we looked on the Internet to see what information was available. Sainsbury’s had much more to offer customers as they had lots of information on their different healthy eating brands, the food plate and also information on reducing salt intake and looking after your heart/lowering cholesterol. The information was also very user friendly and included diagrams and easy to read chart. However tesco’s main focus was on lower price than selling healthy food products. After visiting to both markets we notice that they both have
- Fresh fruit in small packets that can be eaten on-the-go or put into lunch boxes
- Lot of offers on fruit
- All produce have a website of their packaging to allow the consumer to have more information
- It labelling tells you if it’s one of your 5-a-day
- It also says the nutritional information – the traffic light system
- On the back of food packets there is information about salt intake, calorie content, fat and saturated fat.
- Also shows the guideline daily amount for women, men and children aged(5-10)
- There is also information on the shelves about:
- allergies to nuts n seeds
- that they have checked food regulations
- The fruit and veg is washed
- More info:
- • Tells you how to cook on back of packet
- • Info about recycling
Overall Marks and Comments
Based on accessibility/food availability/food cost and healthy eating, we calculated the following marks:
Sainsbury’s Local 6 .0
Tesco’s Metro 8 .0
We arrived at these figures by allowing a mark out of 10 for each of the categories detailed above and then divided this figure by the total score available. Although Sainsbury’s were much better from an accessibility and healthy eating point of view, their low scoring for selling products expensive brought their score down below that given to Tesco.
Based on our findings, if the question posed were ‘How easily can a varied, balanced, ‘healthy’ diet be accessed?’ then the answer would be ‘very easily’. However, if the question was ‘How easy is it to choose a varied, balanced, ‘healthy’ diet?’ then this moves the responsibility of selecting healthier options to the consumer. Educating the consumer is the key and it appears that Sainsbury’s have taken this on board. With Tesco, although healthy products are available, we felt that they needed to improve their methods of educating the consumer, to ensure that the consumer understands how a ‘healthy diet’ can be achieved.
If we could do our presentation again we would make sure we had more time, as we only had a week which was quite hard, although we managed to still find out everything we needed, we could have gone into more detail if we had had more time to research abut both shops. If the whole group had gone to tesco’s together as well the whole group would have had more of an understanding about it.
Bibliography
- accessed
accessed
