Spar retailers to receive £2.3m investment and new rebate scheme

Blakemore Spar retailers are set to benefit from £2.3m in investment, easier access to leasing for store developments and a new scheme that will offer a quarterly rebate of up to 6%.

The initiative was announced by Louis Drake, Blakemore Trade Partners sales director, at the Spar Retail Show in Telford, Shropshire on Tuesday.

Previously Blakemore’s leasing services had only been available to retailers in the company’s ‘Flagship Store’ programme, which retailers repay each week on their invoice.

“This is the best and most flexible proposition we’ve ever put together. Developing your business will never have been easier,” Drake told the 1,100 conference delegates.

The investment has been made available to capitalise on research carried out by the company, which analysed 500 million transactions over the past two years to identify the six key reasons that shoppers visit their stores.

These are grouped into news & tobacco, grab & eat, store cupboard staples, making a meal, off-licence and occasion.

These missions have then been grouped into five store types that Spar shops fit into; Kiosk, convenience, big basket, fresh and on-the-go stores, which cater for different mixtures of these missions. For example, big basket Spar stores cater for off-licence, store cupboard staples and making a meal missions.

“We’ve done this research for all our stores behind the scenes and we’ll now be working with retailers to identify where the opportunities are for their business,” Drake told Better Retailing.

“We’re expecting the first question from retailers will be ‘what type of store am I?’.We’ll be able to tell them where we think they are but also what the opportunity could be to once they have educated their consumers.”

In order to receive the overrider rebate and access to leasing, retailers will have to sign new contracts with the company.

“We had a previous initiative called the Retail Partners Scheme, this supersedes that. The new contracts combine what would have been three or four different documents, so we’ve also used this initiative as an opportunity to tidy up our agreements,” Drake said.

The announcement comes off the back of Blakemore successfully delivering on last year’s pledge to grow retailers’ cash margin by 1% every year, investing £1.5m to achieve this in the past 12 months. This was achieved by rebating Spar retailers’ guild fees and removing drop shipment costs in 2018.