NEXT SATURDAY MORNING, a week from today, the former taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, is due to launch his autobiography in the Waterstone's bookshop in the Quays Shopping Centre, Newry. Fortunately for Ahern, Irene from Darndale did her shopping in the Quays last Wednesday. "It's a shame he's not here today," she says. "I'd knock the head off him." writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
When Ahern arrives at the Quays he will have an opportunity to meet a lot of his former electorate, and indeed many of his current constituents from Dublin Central. In fact, he will be more likely to meet shoppers from the Republic than from Newry itself. One of the consequences of 250,000 shoppers from the Republic flooding the small towns and cities of the North is that local people have shifted their own shopping routines to accommodate and avoid the hordes.
Newry is a small town with two huge shopping centres, the Quays and the Buttercrane, on its southside. As Angus O’Neill, manager of the Sainsbury’s supermarket, which is the anchor tenant of the Quays, says: “These are very, very exciting times for retailers in Northern Ireland.” It is easy to describe what Southerners buy most of: booze, nappies, health and beauty products and, rather touchingly, an awful lot of biscuits and confectionery. We are a simple people.
It is difficult to describe the sheer scale of the shopping done in the North by southern shoppers, and the supermarket managers don’t want to be too specific. “Business is up substantially,” says O’Neill. “In 2008 it increased substantially and now we have double-digit growth on last year’s figures.” Put it this way. According to O’Neill, there are “700 Sainsbury’s in the UK, including convenience stores.” There are 12 Sainsbury’s in Northern Ireland, and the Newry branch is not one of the biggest, measuring 35,000 sq ft. Yet the Newry branch is one of the top performing Sainsbury’s in the UK. O’Neill won’t be drawn on whether Newry is in the top three busiest stores – but he does not deny it. Last month, Newry Sainsbury’s won the UTV Retailer of the Year award, and O’Neill went up to collect it. He has been in the retail business a long time. “Ten years ago, there was a similar situation with the punt and cross-Border shopping. But that didn’t have the longevity.”
Newry always attracted cross-Border shoppers. But not like this. Not like now. This doesn’t even look like shopping, it looks like a mass migration. Over the past 12 months, the massive herd of southern shoppers has galloped headlong, deeper and deeper into Northern Ireland along the M1, ending up in Belfast. They have given a whole new meaning to the term “bulk buy”. “Instead of 80 teabags, they will buy 440 teabags,” says O’Neill. He is stocking a new size of washing powder. It is twice as big as the normal large size washing powder. In fact it is catering size, and it has been swept up by the Republic of Ireland shoppers. They cannot get enough.
AT THE ASDAsupermarket in the Westwood Shopping Centre in Belfast, the manager Simon Arlow explains: "The custom is so intense that the forecasting system can't keep up with it. We've been having to go in manually."
Forecasting is a vital part of the supermarket system. As stock goes through the tills, it is re-ordered at a carefully calculated pace. “Say you have Jacob’s Choc Mallows,” says Arlow. “And the forecast has ordered 20 pallets of them. I put the 20 pallets out and they last an hour and a half. So I phone up and say I need 50 pallets. They say, “You’ll never sell them.” I say, “I’ll sell it, just give me the bloody gear.‘”
Like Barbarella with the Orgasmatron, the southern shoppers have simply blown the supermarkets’ supply system, have crashed through its parameters completely, with the supermarket managers panting behind them. In order to get enough stock out of their headquarters, the managers have been forced to use what are called disruption forms. Arlow explains: “Usually disruption forms are used, let’s say if the M1 is closed, or say a Tesco or a Sainsbury’s opens up or closes down right next door to your store. They’re used in unusual circumstances.” Now, the demand of the southern shoppers is so high that disruption forms are used to boost stock, says Arlow, “particularly for chilled product” – which of course has a short shelf life.
The Westwood Shopping Centre is at an unlovely roundabout where the M1 motorway hits Belfast and you turn towards Andersonstown. It has a Peacocks clothes store, a Superdrug and even a new Sainsbury’s. But Asda – which is cheaper than Sainsbury’s – is the real winner here, and the scale of its success is new. “We wouldn’t have been a destination shop,” says Arlow. “In 2007 we wouldn’t have been taking 1 per cent euro business. But that road now is just fabulous. As the year went on, there has been a steady progression. At Christmas 2008, the euro contribution to our business was 8 to 10 per cent. The last couple of weeks it’s been picking up, it’s 20 to 25 per cent. Maybe every week we’re talking €250,000 to €300,000. The overall store business is taking the guts of £1 million. Last week we took more than £1 million.” Above one of the exits from the Westwood Asda is painted “Go raibh maith agat as siopadóireacht in Asda”, which sums it all up really. The past 30 years of Irish history in one pert phrase.
On a rainy Wednesday evening, everyone in Newry seems to be from the south. Southerners end up asking each other for directions. The trolleys are taken out to the cars in shifts. Karen and Aideen have come up together from Kildare. “I’d say now between us we’ve spent more than €900,” says Karen. “And we’ve still to go to Argos and Sainsbury’s.” Aideen is renovating a house and she’s making a games room so she wants beanbags and mirrors and other such things. “I made up a list for what I need for the house and I priced it in Argos down south,” she says. “It came to €330. In the Argos here it’s £189.”
Karen has just had a baby and she’ll come again to visit Mothercare for baby things, including a car seat. Meanwhile, Aideen is on another mission. “I’m shopping for my mother. She has 13 grandchildren, and I’ve to get presents for them all.” This errand has involved shopping at Next, at Debenhams, which is having a 25 per cent off sale today, and at Argos for electronic toys and watches. Aideen and Karen do not feel badly about shopping outside the Republic. They have three children between them and aim to be back in Kildare by 9pm.
MARGARET IS FROMTallaght and shopped in Newry this time last year. She is here with her sister Joanne and her daughter Mairéad. "I always say, thank God I only have one, the price of everything," says Margaret, who is at the check-out in Sainsbury's presiding over a conveyor belt of drink. "This is our second time going through," says Margaret.
John and Suzanne live in Kildare and are at the check-out, loading up alcohol. Suzanne has just bought her mother six bottles of wine for £30. John has bought a two-litre bottle of Smirnoff vodka for the price of a one-litre bottle in the Republic. “The thing is,” says Suzanne looking at the bottles thoughtfully. “We don’t really drink. That would do us three years.”
This is John and Suzanne’s first time shopping north of the Border. They went to Lisburn Square, in Lisburn city itself, on the advice of a friend. But it wasn’t worth the trip, they felt – the traders in Lisburn Square do not take euro. The couple have three children between the ages of nine and one, and they came today “For [toys] and for kids’ clothes.” They went to a branch of Smyths toy shop, in the local business park, and found that it was 25 per cent cheaper than the Smyths shop they had used in the Republic.
John was one of the few southern shoppers who felt bad about shopping north of the Border. “Yes I did, initially,” he says. “I’m a public servant and I was talking to the lads at work about it. But there’s a budget pending and we’ve three small kids.” John and Suzanne don’t know whether they’ll be up again any time soon. “But,” as Suzanne says, “if you were a big drinker, you’d save a fortune.”
In Argos, Caroline is looking for “a mixture of toys and household goods. You save €10 on a €20 item. It’s a shame, I hate doing it. I’m from Dundalk and I find down there now there are bargains in groceries if you look around, so I try to do my grocery shopping at home. But Argos here is such great value and they have a great delivery service.” In a statement, Argos claims it has no way of monitoring southern shopping in the North, where it has 28 shops. It has 39 in the Republic.
Most shoppers have been to Newry, as Irene from Darndale puts it, “loads of times. There’s seven of us altogether and you can’t live down there. You can’t live.” But Irene, who is here with her daughter and her son-in-law, isn’t starry-eyed about Newry either. “I’m very disappointed in Sainsbury’s. Very disappointed. They were giving 84 pence for the euro and all the other shops were giving 92 to 94. So we went over to the other shopping centre, the Buttercrane, and changed our money over there and came back.”
A LOT OF WHAThappens in Newry is simply crowd control. In the past year, parking charges have been introduced at the Quays to discourage people from leaving their cars there all day. (Customers of Sainsbury's get two hours' free parking.) Last year there were fisticuffs over parking spaces and no one who has seen the hordes of people, the exhaustion and the stress, would be surprised to hear it. The congestion is so bad that local Newry people now go to surrounding towns, such as Banbridge, to do their shopping.
The results for the local small independent retailers are grim. They have just opened new parking spaces in the centre of town, but no southern shoppers ever go there.” We’re jealous of them, we want them,” sighed one local shopkeeper. But the southern shoppers just shuffle between Quays and the Buttercrane centre “like penguins”, as one local man put it. When southern shoppers change course, they change course altogether: some have moved just up the M1 to Sprucefield.Sprucefield is beside Lisburn, hardly half an hour’s drive from Newry, and very much quieter – at least on Wednesday.
Gerry Curtis, his daughter Yvonne Curtis and his granddaughter Aoife (3) have started to shop here because of the Dublin people in Newry. “Very arrogant,” says Gerry. “They’d push you out of the way.”
John Clarke is the manager of the Sprucefield Sainsbury’s, which is bigger than the one at Newry. “Probably about 40 per cent of our business is in euro,” he says. “It’s busier than it was last year. At the weekends I can tell how busy we are by the queue for our café. People have driven a long way, they’re hungry, they’re thirsty. Last Saturday it was bedlam, it was mental. On Sundays we open at 1pm and there’s a queue of Southerners outside, the whole length of the building.”
Under Northern Irish law, supermarkets can open only between 1pm and 6pm on Sundays, and for most of them this is the busiest day of the week. In Belfast, Simon Arlow of Asda has his full bank of 17 check-outs ready to go from 12.30, to cope with all the customers who have driven from the south. “I would say there are 150 to 200 people standing in the doorway, waiting. It’s like the Charge of the Light Brigade,” he says. “You can see the car park build from 11.30am.”
Into temptation: new ads to lure shoppers to belfast
TWO POSTERS, full of Christmas cheer and congratulations on the strength of the euro. The posters, inviting Southern shoppers to stay the night in Belfast, are part of a big advertising campaign which starts in Dublin next week. Some were to be placed at key shopping locations in Dublin city centre, but it is understood that this will not now happen,
“The outdoor space was booked on October 23rd and creative approval came through on November 12th,” says Anne McMullan, director of communications at the Belfast Visitors and Convention Bureau, which is paying for a multi-media campaign to promote Belfast shopping in Dublin, on the Luas, on the Dart, and on radio and television. There is even an outside radio broadcast, promoting Belfast shopping, scheduled for December 12th, right outside the Stephen’s Green Centre.
No wonder Dublin retailers are getting sensitive. It is estimated that one in five shoppers in Belfast City Centre at present is from the Republic, and one in three at weekends. A total of 1.1 million people from the Republic visited Belfast throughout 2008, up 200 per cent on 2007. The vast majority – 800,000 – visited in the last three months of the year, spending £94 million in that period. Belfast worked hard to attract them, starting from what Andrew Irvine, Belfast city centre manager, in a statement to The Irish Times, admits was a very low base. “You know, we had it so tough for so many years,” says McMullan, who seems rather shocked by the fate of the posters. “If there were a bit more co-operation, everyone would be better off. We’re all part of Europe.”
CBS Outdoor, the contractor who placed the posters, would not comment.
