It’s not squirrels that hoard in the Netherlands, it’s hamsters. And Albert Heijn supermarkets have now got just about the whole country ‘hamstering’.
In Dutch, the verb ‘to hamster’ refers to stocking up food – similar to what the endearing little rodents do before winter starts. Two weeks into Albert Heijn’s annual "hamster weeks" promotion, the hamsters have sparked a veritable run on some products. In fact, in a bid to live up to its Buy One, Get One Free promise, Albert Heijn is offering a comparable product if a ‘hamster product’ sells out. Or if they prefer, customers can ask for a promotion voucher and get the special deal at a later date.
Albert Heijn kicked off the ‘hamster promotion’ in mid-August with a buy-one-get-one-free range of 50 products that saw it notch up half a million more transactions in the first few days than in the entire week before. Dutch consumers couldn’t get enough of ice cream, soft drinks, cookies and biscuits, as well as vegetables and fruit (avocados, kiwis). With a number of products ringing up twelve times as many sales as in a normal week, Albert Heijn and its suppliers are pulling out all the stops to keep the shelves stocked. The chain expects to sell over one million bottles of coke, one million cartons of fruit juice and a million of the country’s favourite almond cake/biscuits. Ice cream is the undisputed winner, though: nearly 10 million ice cream treats were sold. Its supplier has now delivered 50 trailers of ice cream to the Zaandam-based supermarkets chain.
By the second week, the whole country seemed to have caught ‘hamster flu’: Albert Heijn tills rang up 150,000 more transactions Monday through Thursday than they did in the same days of the first week. Some products are so sought after that they’re really flying off the shelves: if customers find the Dubbel Friss fruit juice brand sold out in their local store, say, they can now buy Albert Heijn’s own brand AH Frisse Fruitdrank and get one free. But if they’d rather not settle for a different product, they can go to the in-store service counters and ask for a buy-one-get-one-free voucher that allows them to get the product at a later date.
"Our customers clearly love our Hamster Weeks, and we’re doing everything we can to keep our shelves stocked," Albert Heijn’s commercial director Albert Voogd says.