Thank you for downloading the Bottom Line podcast. In this week's program, Evan Davis asks his panel

to imagine what the web will have in store for us in the decade ahead. Hello and welcome to the

bottom line. We often have people on the radio talking about business with perfect hindsight. Well, on

today's program, I'll be looking for 20-20 foresight from my guests as I ask

them to imagine how the web might have evolved by the year 2020. And also, once upon a time,

it didn't seem to matter, but now businesses like to tell stories, what's going on. More on that

later, but let's start by spending a few minutes meeting each of my guests.

And first up is Justin King, Chief Executive of the supermarket chain, Stainsbury. Justin, are you sort of satisfied with the place you've got it at the moment?

It had obviously a bad decade or two, didn't it, where it trailed Tesco terribly badly, really, didn't it?

Yeah, it was a bad decade in the 1990s and the early part of the new century. But yeah, we're happy with the progress we've made,

but I don't think you would ever ask a businessman if they were happy where they are now. They're

always going to say, no, there's more we can do, and of course there's more we can do.

Tell us about the positioning. We've had actually waitros on this program. They're clearly,

I think, at the sort of upper end, aren't there? And we've had supermarkets at the slightly

lower end of the spectrum. Are you very clear about what your pitch is, who you're trying to get

to, or is it a case of trying to appeal to everybody? Well, we have to appeal to everybody. We have

22 million customers every week. So we have to have universal appeal.

I mean, you referred earlier to the challenges of the business in the 1990s. We lost sight of that. We tried to appeal to some customers and not others.

And it is a difficult place to be because there's always the danger that some people think you're too expensive, some think you're too cheap, some think your quality's not good enough. Others think that it's too much and you're striking that balance. You could be stuck in the middle, couldn't you, to coin a phrase used by one great business guru some years back? Yeah, in fact, a former boss of mine, Alan Layton talked about being in the middle of the road and you get run over. But I don't subscribe to that. Actually, if you stand in the middle of most roads, people will swerve around you. So I'm not sure the metaphor works. But this is dangerous. It's a great place to be because it's where most customers are most of the time. But it's much more challenging to get it right. And it's even more challenging when customers have very

little money in their pocket which would cause the situation today. There were logistics

problems at Sainsbury's weren't there. The other supermarkets had just got their act together

in terms of advanced logistics management much better. Are you up there now?

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