Government and consumers should support wholesalers by keeping local convenience stores in business, Bestway managing director Dawood Pervez has said.
“People do not realise how important they are, and the role they play across the UK, until they’re gone,” Pervez told The Times.
Pervez said that society as a whole “needs to ask ourselves what it is we want to encourage in our society; do we want to encourage communities and flourishing high streets and support local independents?”
The country last year saw more independent shops shutting down than at any other point in the past five years. Pervez also raised some serious questions on business rates, saying how the whole system is unfair towards independent shop owners.
Pervez said that “society should look at the use class system for planning and look at the business rates system and say, is it fair? And is it fair that an independent, an entrepreneur, has to pay corporation tax on everything he does while Amazon transfers the profits abroad?”
He added that the government is “scared of big businesses and scared of losing investment”.
The Bestway empire has 1,500 stores under its Costcutter, Bargain Booze, Best-One and Wine Rack brands.
“We invented modern wholesaling as it is known today,” Dawood Pervez said. “In the Seventies and Eighties we gave a lot of people the opportunity to open shops and make a good living off the back of it. It’s a massive ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of people that have become entrepreneurs and gone on to greater things.”
Back in January, it was reported that Bestway has taken a near-£200m stake in Sainsbury’s and said it could increase its position further. It has bought almost 81m shares, giving it a 3.45 per cent stake in the UK’s second-largest supermarket.
Speaking upon reports of Bestway planning to bid for Sainsbury's, Pervez said that “it’s literally just that . . . an investment in a company that provides a dividend”.
Bestway has 57 depots across the country, accommodating a total selling space of just under six million square feet. Earlier in April, Pervez has promised that the year ahead will see Bestway continuing to invest in forward reserves of stock to counter forward inevitable price increases from suppliers and protect its customers for longer.
“The year ahead will see us maintain the best prices in the business,” he explained. “In fact, our obsession with price has been applied to the KVIs that drive 80 per cent of our business, leading us to benchmark these key SKUs with interrogation – looking at price elasticity and now feeding this into our promotional build," he said in an announcement at the time.
Brian McLister
