Last Saturday the very first M Local opened in Ilkley (Yorkshire), the convenience store brand with which WM Morrison Supermarket wants to enter the growing convenience store segment. The new store is 275 m² in surface and will be followed by two more stores (Widnes and Wilmslow) this year. Afterwards the project will be evaluated and refined.
“As cheap as normal supermarkets”
Dalton Philips, CEO at Morrison, says the M Local stores will break with convenience stores’ traditions to be more expensive than their supermarket counterparts – even if it is only slightly. “We will have the same competitive prices for fresh food in M Locals as in Morrisons”, he said. The stores will put their emphasis mainly on fresh food and – uniquely – M Locals will receive their products from a nearby Morrison supermarket, called the “hub store”.
Supermarket giant in growing segment
WM Morrison is the fourth largest distributor in the UK, after Tesco, Asda and Sainbury’s. With M Local, they enter a booming segment of currently 50,000 British convenience stores, of which “only 15% is owned by major supermarket chains”, says Philips. Analysts expect the segment to expand to 42 billion pounds (47.3 billion euro) in four years time.
