Within the ever-changing business landscape, the power shift in the supply chain enables larger suppliers to be more demanding and commanding. The focus is generally on costs of distribution and their impact on the ‘everyday low prices’ strategy. Also, the changing logistics and supply chain strategies are a result via the shifts in the balance of economic power. This change can be demonstrated by the “grocery relationship”. There was a four stage evolutionary process that took place, this can be seen in figure 3.
Fig 3: Where a four-stage evolutionary process took place.
Having considered the impact of the change in power within the supply chain where the customer has a wider choice as the market has become more commodity orientated. We can now see that each retailer, to remain competitive, has to offer quality products at competitive prices with high-quality customer care. This has meant the rise of big retailers who now have more influence, or power, over the manufacturer. This has shifted the emphasis via the traditionally dominant supplier to the consumer via the retailer.