Offer to relocate food giant ‘not workable’
Thursday 3rd December 2009, 5:00AM GMT.
Asda bosses today revealed the reasons for spurning an offer from the owners of Telford Shopping Centre to relocate the chain into a new £30 million store.
Hark Apollo, which owns the centre, unveiled plans to build an iconic timber-clad building on the existing Red Oak car park – directly next to Asda’s current store near Central Square.
But Asda has reiterated its desire to move to the site of Telford & Wrekin Council’s civic offices outside the shopping centre.
Asda today said a new store in the shopping centre would take at least 15 months to build and would have a negative impact on trading at its existing store while it was going on.
Asda property communications manager Chris Marlow said: “Building a store on Red Oak car park whilst our existing store remains open would have a seriously detrimental impact on our customers’ shopping experience and would result in significant, long-term disruption to trading.
“For those reasons, the Hark Apollo scheme is simply not workable for Asda.”
The news comes as the Labour chief on Telford & Wrekin Council today launched a scathing attack on the borough’s Tory leader over his handling of negotiations.
Councillor Keith Austin said he and fellow council members were concerned that Councillor Andrew Eade had accused developers Hark Apollo of “a puerile attempt to create mischief” over plans for a new Asda store.
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That’s right folks, you heard it correctly – use more scarce parking space to build on.
What nonsense.
There’s plenty of space within the centre itself, they just need to think about how to best market it and make it a pleasant place to shop, rather than leaving shoppers with the after-taste of being ripped off by a jaded mall and ever-rising parking charges to shop, a form of private stealth tax.
With a near monopoly on “the shopping experience” in Telford, it’s a shame that Hark Apollo never gave much thought to the customers’ point of view until they realised that Asda was on the way out in an effort to meet their customer demands and needs.
Additionally, whilst I understand why they may want to retain Asda, any mall owner worth their salt would be concurrently endeavouring to find another worthwhile tenant as well.
Problem is, (and this applies to much of UK management, especially where they have a dominant position in any industry), that most of the “management” have been there during the boom times only, when it was easy to make money and become arrogant and contemptuous towards customers who were spending easily-borrowed money.
Now that the cold chill of recession is starting to reach the bones, with no experience of succeeding in the lean times, their only ability is to run around like headless chickens.
Get over it chaps. Asda’s decided to do the best for itself and its clients. Just get on with your jobs and go and attract fresh new shopping opportunities to your tired, monopolistic shopping mall. Focus on the consumers who face such a dreary experience, look at what they want and work out how to meet their expectations – you never know, it may make your centre more attractive and help you cope better with recession.
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Wait, I’m confused. If this store gets built for another retailer en it will still cause disruptio to Asda customers. There store on the site of the civic offices can’t be built for several years either. They have to wait for the council to build new offices for themselves, then demolish the old ones and only then can they start building the new store. They state this themselves in the planning application and is the reason they are applying for 5 year permission rather than the standard 3. Surely it will be easier and faster to build on what is essentially empty space on Red Oak car park.
Personally I don’t have anything against them having a new store outsie of the box road but the submitted design really does leave a lot to be desired.
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Yes Grey, you have mentioned that once or twice!!!
Asda have been trying to get out of the centre since the parking charges, can’t blame them either. Both sainsburys and Tesco within 2 or 3 miles with free parking, profit took a massive hit. Only when they got the council site did Hark even think about doing anything, too little too late
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Sorry, I can’t help it. I’m just so shocked at how bad it is. I thought they would come up with something decent like in other town centres.
Atually Hark planned to build a new Asda when they first unveiled their masterplan and it was always going to be the next thing they built after Primark.
But as long as Asda get their cheap and ugly surface parking thats all that matters. To hell with the perceived quality or lack of that our town centre will have to continue to deal with.
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How come Co-op is so expensive?
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