This year he’s investing more than £300 million in price cuts.
Other simple tweaks include more checkouts to make life less tedious for shoppers. Operational improvements like this win new customers and are a safe use of shareholders’ money.
The same cannot confidently be said of Sainsbury’s potential £1 billion risk on buying Argos.
It’s true that Potts is working with a far tinier business than Sainsbury. He doesn’t have a fleet of Mary Celeste hypermarkets with empty space that could be used as Argos concessions.
Steering the ship: Morrisons boss David Potts (Picture: Reuters)
Toby Melville/Reuters
It’s also worth pointing out that today’s improvements cover only nine weeks and follow no fewer than 16 quarters of decline.
Meanwhile, Amazon and the German discounters are just as big a threat to him as to his rivals.
But there is definitely promise in these early stages of the turnaround. Potts, to quote an old retail industry saw, is navigating by minutes rather than degrees. But that’s the sensible way to turn this battered ship around.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
One of the most charming pieces of footage from the David Bowie archive to emerge in the past 24 hours was an interview by Jeremy Paxman with the great man.
It was in 2000, and Bowie was, in vain, trying to convince a dismissive Paxo that the internet would utterly change how the media, business and art would communicate with the public.
Bowie had already been ploughing cash from the sale of his Bowie bonds into the Net, with his own internet service provider, BowieNet, for members to get exclusive access to his work and even chat to him.
More than most younger stars, he continued using the web to reach his fans for the rest of his life.
Let’s celebrate that technological prescience as well as his uncanny way of keeping a step ahead of the cultural world.
