Duty manager: Scott Gregor
Store: Asda Milton of Craigie Road, Dundee
Opened: 1990
Size: 40,200 sq ft
Market share: 7.5%
Population: 168,710
Grocery spend: £4.522,186.94
Spend by household: £56.68
Competitors: 38
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.3 miles, Asda 2.4 miles, Co-op 1.1 miles, Iceland 0.6 miles, Lidl 0.3 miles, M&S 1.6 miles, Morrisons 1.3 miles, Sainsbury’s 1.5 miles, Tesco 2 miles, Waitrose 38 miles
Source: CACI. For more info visit www.caci.co.uk/contact. Notes: Shopper profiling is measured using Grocery Acorn shopper segmentation. Store catchment data (market share, population, expenditure, spend by household, competition) is within a five-mile radius. For CACI’s shopper segmentation of the other stores we visited this week see the online report at www.thegrocer.co.uk/stores/the-grocer-33
Did you always want a career in retail? I was an Asda colleague at university, then joined the graduate programme. I’ve been a GSM for 20 years, this is my seventh store and I’ve been manager here for just under four years. I’ve seen a lot of change: first with Walmart selling Asda, and the ownership change more recently.
What’s with the big glass pyramid? There are a few stores built around here to the same spec, with a big a frame at the front. We’re located in a very populated area: there are four big housing schemes surrounding us.
It’s been a difficult couple of years for Asda. What’s it been like for you? As a store, we’ve had great sales performance over the past three years – so it’s been good from that perspective. But it’s been challenging, and it’s been harder for managers to run their areas of the store as well as they would like to. It’s started to change in the past year. There’s been more positivity in the business, which has come from us going back to what we’re good at: the basics. Not just Rollback, we’re much more focused on the standards the customers expect. Tough times, but we’re moving in the right direction.
What’s been the most impactful change in terms of standards? We put some more investment into colleague hours in summer last year. That’s been massive because it’s given us more flexibility to fix and improve things that we maybe didn’t have the time to do before. It’s helped a lot with the tidiness of the store and the standard of cleaning – it’s just given us more time. It’s been back to basics: service levels, making sure people move through the checkout areas quickly, and lots of work on availability. We’ve got bits to do, but we are seeing improvement.
Rollback seems to have landed well… The new PoS package is fantastic. We had a number of different promotional mechanisms, but since the leadership change, all the clutter has been taken out of it, and it’s working a treat. Customers are now shopping promotional ends heavily – like it used to be! We’re seeing the impact in non-food as well. The momentum we’ll get off it is probably still to happen. Rollback is getting people back in the shop. But price is just the start. It’s my job, and my team’s, to make sure the customer experience is as good as it can possibly be.
Is anything else new in store? We did a full non-food refresh last year. Our George and GM departments were changed dramatically, with loads of stores within stores added. It looks really good, and you can see in the service metrics that customers love what we are doing.
What’s your next big focus for the year? Just focusing on the simple framework that the company have given us, doing the basics well every day. We’re a training store for new management coming through, which gives us the added intensity to be best in class. I’ve got an experienced team of 350 colleagues, and this win is recognition for them. We’ll enjoy the moment, but now it’s about day to day how we run the business.
What’s your one bit of advice for new managers coming through the training programme? Never be scared to ask for help or feel embarrassed. We’ve all been there. Pick up the phone, or send that email – there are no silly questions.
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