One in 10 products at Poundland no longer £1

Poundland has revealed one in 10 products on sale in stores are no longer priced at its traditional £1 price point.

The shift away from being a single-price retailer comes as the company behind the brand said sales continued to grow in the past six months, despite the Covid pandemic, and the rollout of chilled and frozen food is winning over customers.

Poundland owner Pepco added it has also seen success with new clothing ranges offered in 300 of its larger stores and has increased sales of products with higher profit margins.

The company moved away from a single price point in 2017 and now sells a range of items between 50p and £10 to take on the likes of other discount chains B&M and Wilko.

The news comes as bosses said they also managed to reduce rents by around 50% on 44 stores and look set to cut rental fees on a further 211 stores within the next two years.

Poundland and its European equivalent Dealz saw a like-for-like sales increase of 1.4% during the six months to the end of March compared with the same period a year earlier.

This was despite bosses saying stores, which remained open as “essential” retailers, were hit hard by the various pandemic restrictions.

Shoppers shunned its stores primarily due to their locations typically being in covered shopping centres or busy high street locations where the perceived risk of infection was higher, the company said.

But bosses remain confident for the future and highlighted that the introduction of frozen food in 50 stores, following a deal with Fultons Frozen Food last October, was working well.

Its frozen food offering is now available in 129 stores, with the intention to have it available in 700 within the next two years.

Profit margins increased by 60 basis points, with customers having stocked up on lower margin products the previous year, bosses added.

Poundland now has 917 stores in the UK and Ireland, with its Pep&Co clothes lines in 300 larger stores.

The parent company Pepco, which recently listed on the Warsaw stock exchange, said total sales across the business were up 4.4% to two billion euros (£1.7 billion), with pre-tax profits in the period up from 64 million euros (£55 million) to 96 million euros (£82 million).

Pepco chief executive Andy Bond said he expects to see improvements as customer behaviour returns to more normal shopping patterns.

He added: “We anticipate that the environment in which we operate will remain changeable and challenging in the short term.”