Adam Bye, Sainsbury's Islington: Grocer 33 store of the week

How do you keep up with demand and ensure you have good availability - even at the end of play on a Saturday? It has always been a challenge in store. Footfall is one of the highest across all Sainsbury’s stores. We deal with around 75,000 customers per week. And Saturday evenings are particularly busy. We’ve come on leaps and bounds on availability with the help of our logistics division in the past 18 months as well as our better forecasting capabilities.

You have a large number of rivals within close proximity; Waitrose is 20 feet away! How do you direct people to your store? Our whole area is saturated with rivals: Waitrose, M&S Food, two Tesco Express stores, and Iceland, to name just a few. But we go out to see what they’re doing. I’d say we have healthy competition and in fact having a lot of rivals close by is actually a good thing as it drives a lot of our footfall.

Have you set up the store specifically for commuters and office workers? Islington is highly diverse and we are very close to Angel Tube Station, so we have a mixture of commuters and people who rent flats locally to travel into the City, but essentially people who at peak time morning and evenings are in a rush. Last July we had a re-fit in the store to focus on trade from commuters and office workers and we introduced a lot of new ranges, including food to go, which had never sold before, and a food on the move area for office workers.

Your store is in a highly diverse area - what policies do you have in place to ensure you can cater for all socio and ethnic groups? We try to be all things to all people. So we turned some of our season-based area over to Ramadan and Eid earlier in the year and that really went well. We have a second Eid this week and then after that we have Diwali, so we will be dedicating space for that. We’ve done that for a few years and we’ve seen consistent growth year on year.