Irish Consumers Prefer Traditional Supermarkets for the Christmas Shop

Data from Irish Startup Localmint suggests Irish consumers prefer traditional supermarket chains for the Christmas shop. They have published the month on month growth in page views for the 5 leading supermarket chains in Ireland for the 6 months to December 2014*. The data shows a dramatic difference in the December growth of Dunnes, Tesco and SuperValu when compared to the German discounters Aldi and Lidl (see Tables 1 & 2).

Table 1

* Data is in respect of like for like stores, with no new stores openings considered.

Localmint, which on average 300k Irish consumers used each month last quarter, makes it extremely easy to find key store details like opening hours and store locations. Oisin Ryan, COO and Co-Founder explains “Our figures are not representative of sales volumes per se, so we certainly aren’t saying that Dunne’s sales figures were up by 118% in December and Lidl’s were only up 13%. However, the activity of our users is a strong indicator of consumer behaviour and provides compelling evidence that more Irish consumers did some or all of their Christmas shop in Dunnes, SuperValu and Tesco rather than in the discount chains.”

Table 2.

About Localmint

Localmint was established in December 2013 by Ranga Vadhineni (CEO) and Oisin Ryan (COO). The company makes it extremely easy to find key store details like opening hours and location information from any device. In December 2014 around 1.75m users accessed the website across Ireland, the UK, Australia and the USA.