Asda in Strabane and Enniskillen have seen enormous jumps in southern custom over the past 12 months, in large part due to big differences in food prices, which many say have nothing to do with exchange rates
LISA IS A young mother. There is something lovely about her. She exudes charisma, or charm, in the aisle of a Fermanagh supermarket on a rainy afternoon. We are in the Asda supermarket in Enniskillen. “I’m looking for bargains, because we’re in a recession,” says Lisa. ” My work is after going downhill at the moment. I used to work in the training department of a factory, and I was made redundant. So then I was doing waitressing, but I’ve had my hours cut at the restaurant because no one’s going out. My husband’s self-employed. So . . . ” Lisa is from Castlepollard, Co Westmeath. She has come to Enniskillen today with her sister. The journey takes one hour and 20 minutes, and Lisa should know – they do the same trip every two or three weeks. “Ever since the pound and the euro have been similar,” she says.
In Asda, Lisa buys her groceries and some Nurofen for her father, who is waiting for an operation on his legs and gets through a lot of the painkiller, which is much more expensive in the South. “Last time I got Calpol and Nurofen for £2. They were on special.” Lisa’s children are three and five. As well as shopping at Asda, she buys toys at Argos in the nearby Erneside Shopping Centre. “The Sylvanian Families House – it’s a little house for girls – is £89 here, and it’s €120 at home. And we saved a good €30 or €40 on a PSP in Argos here.”
There are 32 checkouts at the Enniskillen Asda, with another two to be added in January. On Halloween weekend this was the second-busiest Asda in the UK.
When you draw into your parking space – and it is one of 560 spaces here, including the 110 added last week – the four cars in the row in front of you are from the South. An 06 from Galway, an 07 from Mayo, and 07 from Galway and an 01 from Meath. All big, prosperous cars.
“The changes since last year are just enormous,” says Peter Beckett, the general store manager, about cross-Border shopping. “It’s become this enormous animal.” Beckett’s local customers normally come between 6pm and 10pm, but Nicky and Catherine are here already. What do they think of the invasion? “We don’t mind it, only for the traffic,” they say graciously. “If it was the other way about we’d be down there.”
Later that afternoon, in the preternaturally quiet Tesco that stands nearby, Anne Beattie, who teaches at the local further education college, is doing her shopping in peace. “You should see the queues of traffic on a Saturday,” she says.
“But we’re not complaining. Traditionally the locals go into town early on a Saturday and get their fruit and vegetables and meat. A lot of the kids I teach have jobs with the supermarkets.”
GLYN ROBERTS OF the Northern Ireland Independent Retail Trade Association says the benefits of cross-Border shopping to the province are minimal. “The impact on the Northern Ireland economy is very small,” he says. “For a large part the shoppers are headed for one of the UK multiples, and the profits go to a corporate head office in the south of England. We do welcome cross-Border shoppers, but it’s a short-term phenomenon.” In the short term, Peter Beckett is getting 45,000 customers per week.
The average customer shop – or trolley, as it is known in the trade – is twice the normal size. Asda head office is so intrigued that managers came over from Britain with a film camera to talk to customers. “They were quite complimentary. Said they got good service and so on. It’s the cross-Border shopping, absolutely. That’s what makes it different.”
Beckett reckons “roughly 50 per cent of our trade is in euro. That’s gone up from 40 per cent last year.” These seem very conservative estimates indeed to those of us who were here 11 months ago and are watching the crowds today. Beckett says: “We have a 50 per cent growth on this week last year, and last year our growth was 100-150 per cent. Sales have grown phenomenally, especially in what we call health and beauty. In non-edible items like washing powder and toilet roll. The kiosk has gone crazy this year, with people buying cigarettes.”
Food sales have also increased, “especially items like pasta, rice, porridge oats. Dry goods, yes. Growth was not as strong in the fresh and frozen area, so three months ago we brought in a cool bag, which is 78p.” So now the southern shoppers can keep everything fresh on the long drive home.
Asda also has a clothes label, called George. In the women’s section it stocks a couple of fashionable items – a studded batwing top, for example – that are cheap enough to take a risk on. The studded batwing top costs £16. Beckett feels that the George section’s takings will grow even more when its floor space is extended in January. Asda Enniskillen is being extended, from 42,000sq ft to 55,000sq ft, and work should be completed by the end of February.
Beckett looks thinner than he did last year, but then he’s had 12 months of working very hard, trying to keep up with the bulk buyers from the South. “We’ve done a lot of learning from last year,” he says. “We’re doing more space-flexing for popular products. We’ve had to reassess bulk-buying. Normally it’s 10 per customer – 10 of anything, and we don’t mind 15. If someone comes in and wants 30 bottles of Smirnoff we would say no. But if a customer comes to us and says ‘Look, I’m having a wedding’, well, then we would see.
“What we don’t allow is bulk-buying for resale. For example, when we were selling baked beans in a four pack, a guy in a van came up and wanted two palettes of them.”
It is common knowledge that a lot of retailers came up from the South to buy for resale. And a lot of traders from the hospitality industry have done the same.
ASDA SUPERMARKETin Strabane, Co Tyrone, was built only four years ago – the old store was on a site opposite – and it measured 37,000sq ft. But it was extended and refurbished this year, to 52,000sq ft, as a direct result of the business it gets from southern shoppers. The official opening took place on November 2nd. According to the general store manager, Eugene Teague, "it's almost unheard of for such a new store to get such a big refurbishment. It's due to the success of the operation. People are travelling to Strabane who never travelled before."
According to Teague, people are travelling from Derry city, almost 32km away, because there is no Asda there.
Strabane is right on the Border with Co Donegal. Back in the old Asda, before this one was built, about 25 per cent of its trade was in euro. “But once we came across here , that’s when numbers increased. That’s when euro participation increased. It coincided with a climate change down South.”
The Strabane shop receives about 45,000 customers a week. “To be honest with you, it doesn’t really matter what measuring stick you throw at it, it’s a success,” says Teague. Interestingly, the southern drapery chain Heatons is due to open in Strabane on the site of the old Asda.
Northern Ireland retail is a small world, or at least it was until very recently. At one time Teague, Beckett, Simon Arlow of Belfast Asda and Angus O’Neill of Newry Sainsburys all worked for the Wellworth chain. Now all four are catering to the stampede of southern shoppers. Their bosses at Asda’sEnglish headquarters have never seen anything like it.
“Ourselves and Enniskillen are the talk of the shop,” says Teague matter-of-factly. He points out that Asda now has 2 per cent of the Republic’s food retail market, although it does not have one supermarket in the Republic.
Asda is such a huge organisation it even has its own radio station, pumped to Strabane from Britain. But its management style is very interesting to a southern shopper. Teague’s name is printed on every receipt that leaves his store. In the Asda restaurant, full of young helpers, he mops up a spill of water before we sit down. There seem to be a lot of women over 40 working for him. All Asda employees are referred to as colleagues.
SOUTHERNERS COMEhere both weekly and monthly. Eugene has one customer from Killybegs who comes every week, driving the whole way across Co Donegal. Eugene's southern customers come to buy the usual cross-Border combination of baby food, nappies, baby clothes and alcohol. Their reasons are no mystery.
“Food generally is 30 per cent cheaper up here,” says Teague. “My customers say that the savings in food prices are nothing to do with the exchange rates.”
This is Glyn Roberts’s point also. He says that cross-Border supermarkets, charging differently on either side of the border, must take some responsibility for this stampede. “There are serious questions here to be asked of Tesco,” he says.
'Their Parking!'; Driving Them Crazy
It is not difficult to spot the cross-Border shoppers as you travel through Northern Ireland. They’re the ones who do not indicate, who simply glide over the painted-on roundabouts, sail through red lights and settle comfortably on yellow boxes.
Southern driving is something of a legend among the locals, who are pretty polite on the road – there is much less road rage and aggressive use of the horn here than on roads in the South. That is not to say that our road behaviour is not noticed. “Oh, you know them by the driving,” says one local lady in Enniskillen. “And their parking! Oh dear.”
There is definitely a sense that a wild people are swooping through the countryside, and I say this as someone who unintentionally hurtled through Sion Mills quite a bit over the speed limit.
In the caution of the northern driving and the self-centred chaos of the southern driving you can read a lot about the two societies, now united at the till.
Series concluded
