Nakumatt: It was a mistake, please forgive us

Following my Column today in PD Weekend and which is republished here, Nakumatt PR manager, Mr Alfred Ng’ang’a, sent in the reponse below from the retail chain’ management defending the supermarket against accusations of price mismathcing.

I’ve just noted the article on Nakumatt in today’s People.

The true position is that the whole episode was a mistake and could never have been a deliberate system fix.

Let’s take the case of the popular Maziwa Mala pricing. The fact remains that KCC issued a price change advisory sometime in Mid March. Back then, the price for a litre of Mala was Ksh119 but with the price change, the new price was set at Ksh125. Effectively, that price was changed from the central server and across the point of sale terminals (tills) in all the Kenya branches. This is automated process which takes effect at 6am on the next day.

Once price changes have been done at the HQ, the branch teams proceed to print new stickers once they report to the branch which is at about 7:30am. The printing is done from a file downloaded from the central server. Here, sometimes you may suffer a slight delay due to internet connections meaning by the time the store opens, an older sticker will still be on the shelf. However on a clear internet connection, the printing goes on smoothly.

After printing, the stickers the back office team hands them over  to the shop-floor supervisors who proceed to distribute the same to the respective aisle attendants. Its worth noting that on average, you may have at least 50-100price changes every day. For a retailer handling an average of 75,000 Store Keeping Units (SKU’s) this is quite the norm and nothing out of the ordinary.

Once delivered to the aisle attendants, the old stickers are removed and replaced by a new sticker reflecting the price at the POS. Now, if a customer happens to pass by an aisle and pick an item before the stickers are changed, the price will definitely be different once he/she gets to the POS.

This appears to have been the case with the Mala price issue.

However, the aisle attendant at Village Market where Marcus Olang would have made the purchase swears he placed the new sticker. Not that it matters much, but in terms of personality, this particular guy is born again, very diligent and therefore credible. However, he also notes that he may have forgotten to remove the older sticker and therefore placed the new one on top of the shelf sleeve.

From an internal perspective, this is wrong as with cleaning and constant wiping in the dairy section, the sticker will definitely fall off within no time and for that normal disciplinary action has been taken.

You can therefore note that there was no deliberate effort to fleece anybody. indeed, given the margins on dairy products, and the low volume of Mala sales at a branch like Village, it would be quite unwise to be fleecing customers on such a product. God forbid but taking the full margin and perhaps sales of about 10 Mala cases, its means Nakumatt would only enjoy at most Ksh240 based on a calculation of Ksh4x6x10 cases. It beats all logic that Nakumatt would want to deliberately gain Ks240.

I am disturbed that hundreds of honest Nakumatt staff have been made to appear thuggish. For such a vice to exist where some margins are allowed, it would take the collusion of no less than 68 Staff members from procurement, IT, marketing, Operations and branch management…Keeping such a secret within a universe of more than ten people, is undoubtedly a hard task….

This clearly shows it was an inadvertent mistake and the company has apologized for the same. In the kind of operation that Nakumatt runs, such mistakes are bound to happen as 100% efficiency is not possible in retail or any other sector. Indeed, I remember seeing newspapers with a wrong dateline on the masthead. It would be simplistic of me, to imagine that the media house is out to fleece me, by offering yesterdays news, for such a printing mishap.

We’ve also seen reports of people claiming to have been given sweets as change. That may happen in other supermarkets but not at Nakumatt. Any due change can be easily loaded on a customers Nakumatt Global Card…”