Superstore service station road maps - UK

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Brief History of Supermarket Petrol Retailing

In Britain the main supermarket companies started experimenting with petrol sales in the mid-1970s. Initially they sold major branded petrol, with Asda retailing Texaco or Esso and Tesco selling Gulf, Texaco or BP. But J. Sainsbury (then the largest supermarket chain with a powerful own-brand range of groceries) decided to sell its own-brand fuel and the much smaller Key Markets also experimented with its own brand. It was not until almost a decade later that Asda and Tesco followed suit, preceded slightly by the fourth big chain, Safeway. Fifth largest Morrisons sold Shell and then Texaco right up to 2002, when it finally removed third party branding from its yellow and black service stations. Somerfield (including Food Giant) and the Co-op also started selling their own brand of fuel (the latter sometimes under the Pioneer name), and eventually even the upmarket Waitrose chain added some stores with attached petrol stations. British superstores rapidly took over 15% of the total fuel market, although unlike in France they rarely priced more than a fraction of a penny below the major company competitors, except when offering money-off vouchers to foodstore customers. By 2006 Supermarkets collectively operated over 1,150 service stations representing over one third of the market by volume.

J.Sainsbury

J Sainsbury started from a single shop in Drury Lane, London in 1869, and rapidly grew to become the English middle classes' favourite chain of food stores. It pioneered grocers' own-brand products in the late 19th Century and by 1939 most of its products carried it own brands. So when the first petrol station was opened in 1974 it carried the Sainsbury's brand: however a few of the SavaCentre hypermarkets have sold Jet-branded petrol.

	Sainsbury's first known maps were in a large format spiral bound atlas from the early 1990s with a simple orange coloured cover. In 1995 ML-Design prepared a sheet map (left) with clear simple cartography covering England, Wales & S Scotland for the petrol station chain. By 1999, when they produced a slightly larger scale map (right), the chain had expanded to N Ireland and Central Scotland. 350,000 copies of this map were printed for distribution to Fuelcard holders.The 2000 and 2001 editions used a similar design by the AA. Sainsbury's also prepared map booklets showing all stores, including Homebase outlets. The example (lower left) dates from 1997, uses cartography to a simple design by Ordnance Survey, and has 28 pages (including 15 of maps). The 1998 edition changed two of the cover photos and had 19 pages of maps with the same Bartholomew cartography as Tesco (Northern Scotland was omitted). Sainsbury's booklet carried fewer adverts so takes only 36 pages.

For 2000, Sainsbury's switched to Oxford Cartographers who drew a more detailed map and reduced the adverts to allow 21 map pages in a 32 page booklet. All the booklets locate J.Sainsbury stores and petrol stations with numbers.

Others

No maps are known from other UK supermarket chains, although Waitrose issues a rudimentary location map showing inter alia its stores selling petrol (and its few petrol stations have been known to give away the Q8 location map).