The management has been cooking up plans to revitalise the business for the past decade, yet the result has been relentless decline.
One of the reasons for this, according to analysts and competitors, is Sainsbury's stipulating that suppliers should deliver to its new warehouses only on specially designed pallets, markedly different in size to the industry norm. They question how so much faith could be placed in technology, given the vagaries of food retailing. And they ask whether it was advisable for Sainsbury's to place so much reliance on the management consultants who designed the new automated system.