Australia’s favourite discount department store has been named
Who doesn’t love a bargain? With one store standing out amongst the rest, Australia has spoken and named their favourite discount department store – and it’s not Kmart.
Beating the likes of Target, Big W and Best & Less, Costco has been named as Australia’s leading discount department store with a score of 88.6 per cent in customer satisfaction, Roy Morgan’s latest research shows.
With Target at 88.5 per cent and Kmart on 88.4, Costco just squeezed out on top.
CEO of Roy Morgan Michele Levine said that Costco is the third discount department store to be awarded the prestigious title after Kmart and Target, which highlights the intense amount of competition between the stores.
“Costco’s victory came by a whisker with a customer satisfaction rating of 88.6 per cent [which] was only a hair’s breadth ahead of rivals Target and Kmart,” she said.
“It comes as the American retailer has unveiled plans for an ambitious expansion with a huge new distribution centre set to open in Sydney’s west next year signalling an expanded online retail presence.”
The biggest improvement was from Best & Less which scored a customer satisfaction rating of 86.4 per cent, which is a growth of 1.8 per cent in the last 12 months.
Costco improved by 1.7 per cent and Target rose by 1.5 per cent.
Levine said that the high scores reflected how seriously the department store giants took to the threat of Amazon.
“Amazon recently became only the second company to top a market capitalisation of $1 trillion,” she explained.
“In an increasingly competitive environment with discount department stores facing increasing competition from online retailers such as Amazon, the big two department stores Myer and David Jones, specialist niche retailers and of course each other, maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction and building a reputation of trust is key.”
The results are compiled after extensive research which consists of over 50,000 Australian’s taking part in a face-to-face interview, including more than 9,000 interviews with people who shop at discount department stores.