Mobile by Sainsbury's

» see mobilebysainsburys.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Buying a phone network from a grocery chain is a British habit, and it is one of the cleanest examples of something that never crossed into my part of the world. In Turkey your number came from one of three operators, and the supermarket's part in telecoms was a rack of prepaid top-up cards by the till. In the UK, Tesco had a network and Asda had a network, and by 2013 Sainsbury's had one again.

Mobile by Sainsbury's was announced on 1 July 2013 and opened for business on 24 July, running as a virtual operator on Vodafone UK after years of circling: the plan was reported as far back as September 2008 and got its internal go-ahead in October 2011. SIM cards went into most of the stores, handsets into more than three hundred of the larger ones, and the tariffs were deliberately plain, starting at eight pounds a month for 300 minutes and 500MB of data.

On 13 October 2015 it stopped taking new SIM orders, and the BBC reported the closure the next day. Pay-as-you-go customers could keep topping up until 14 November and then spend down whatever credit they had left. The service ended on 15 January 2016 with somewhere around 150,000 customers on it, and none of them were transferred to another operator. It was not a rebrand or a handover, it was a disconnection with a date on it.

~ the record ~

~ sainsbury's one ~

The first attempt is the part most write-ups skip. On 18 October 2000 Sainsbury's announced a virtual network called Sainsbury's One, running on BT Cellnet, built around a promise to undercut everyone on price. It started service on 2 January 2001, and the One name was quietly dropped along the way.

It did not work. By autumn 2002 Sir Peter Davis was writing to a complaining customer to admit the service had not met the standard expected of it. One of its commercial partners went under, and the subscriber count topped out near 60,000. On 18 July 2003 Sainsbury's announced its mobile customers would be moved onto O2 tariffs, which ended the venture. Two months later Tesco Mobile launched and spent the next twenty years doing the thing Sainsbury's had just failed at twice.

~ nectar points as a tariff ~

The 2013 product was really a loyalty scheme wearing a SIM card. Every plan paid double Nectar points on Sainsbury's shopping and fuel for the thirty-day life of the bundle, and a household could link four phone accounts to one loyalty card, which the company reckoned was worth around 180 pounds a year to a family of four. The marketing was aimed squarely at mothers and families by an agency that leaned on the supermarket's reputation rather than on anything technical.

It is a sound idea and it is still the only reason a grocer sells airtime. The airtime itself is a commodity bought wholesale from whoever owns the masts, so the margin has to come from the trolley.

~ the fallout ~

The joint venture is what ended it. Sainsbury's and Vodafone arrived at October 2015 unable to agree on how the thing should continue, and rather than restructure it they closed it. Vodafone UK lost a wholesale client and the supermarket went back to selling other companies' networks in its bigger stores. 150,000 people spent the first fortnight of January arranging their own phone service.

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