If anybody was to receive a royal pick-me-up, it was always likely to be Waitrose.
The upmarket grocer and holder of a pair of royal warrants revealed that the Jubilee festivities had sparked its biggest week outside Christmas and Easter, with sales up 19.8 per cent on last year at £123 million for the week ending June 2.
Waitrose supplied the hampers, filled with Heston Blumenthal sandwiches and tea-smoked salmon, for the 12,000 guests invited to picnic on the Buckingham Palace lawn.
But Mark Price, the managing director of Waitrose, believes the festivities will not only have provided a leg-up to Waitrose, which distributes the Prince of Wales’s Duchy Originals brand: “I have been saying consistently that the combination of the Jubilee, followed by the [Euro 2012] football, then the Olympics, would be a really good opportunity for a surge in confidence. People do want to celebrate.”
Ian Cheshire, the chief executive of Kingfisher, the owner of B&Q, also thinks the Jubilee will provide a stimulus. He said: “It’s more significant than just the extra day [of holiday], because it’s a genuine change in consumer sentiment.
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“There’s a slight sense of lifting your head up a bit. With the Jubilee and the Olympics coming up, I think it’s quite important that the mood music is more cheerful, because, like most retailers, we work on a combination of disposable income and confidence. This does help the national mood.”