Over the last 10 years I have watched B&Q grow from a couple of stores in Shanghai to a National chain of superstores.
Their growth fed on the property bubble and, for a while, their stores were busy as the emerging white collar middle class enjoyed the BIY shopping experience. (In China, "Do it Yourself" is an alien concept, but "Buy it Yourself" has resonated in a land of fake or low quality decorating materials...and then they pay someone else to actually do all the work using the materials they have bought).
However, today, their stores have more staff than customers. And yet the staff are unhelpful and lazy. Yesterday I had two painful conversations with two different B&Q assistants in the space of 5 minutes:
1. When I asked a nearby assistant if they had a smaller size metal clip than the one I had found, she said "No!". Then I eventually found it myself!
2. When I asked if a demonstration fan unit could be switched on, she said no because there was no power. I then looked behind the machine and showed her that it had simply been unplugged. She just shrugged.
With this complete disinterest in serving the few remaining customers that B&Q still has, I question how much longer they will last in China.
Their smarter global competitors, Home Depot and OBI, saw the writing on the wall years ago and exited before they grew past the point of no return. But B&Q may now be in that unfortunate position of being too big to leave - or at least too big to leave without their Kingfisher parent company shareholders asking the Board some very embarrassing questions. Let's wait and see. On the basis of what I can see, it may not be a very long wait.
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