Grocer 33 store of the week: Tesco Montrose

What has been your career trajectory at Tesco? I started working at Tesco when I was 16, right from school and through university. I did Tesco’s graduate scheme and I’ve been a manager for five years. This is my third store as a store manager, and I’ve been here for nine months.

What distinguishes Tesco Montrose? It’s a real community store and it’s got that feel. A lot of the customers know each other and know the colleagues that work in the store as well. There’s a lot of passion amongst the colleagues in the store for it to be an excellent place to shop for customers.

How do you cater to the local community? It’s about setting the bar high, and really being committed to delivering an excellent shopping trip for customers. What we do in here is focus on the basics and getting them right: delivering helpful and friendly service at all times, really strong availability of products, and ensuring customers are not waiting at the checkouts wherever possible. We are in a trial scheme with the local community in conjunction with the local council, where customers can come in and buy a gift card of the value of their choice to donate, and vulnerable customers are given one of the gift cards to use on any food products. We’ve raised £6,000 through this scheme so far.

How has the last year been for the store? Have you faced any major challenges? There have been availability challenges throughout the year, but at the moment they seem to have subsided and I think our availability is really strong at the moment, which is great. I’m very passionate about giving fantastic service to our customers, and equally passionate about making sure the store is a great place to work for our colleagues. It’s a bit of a cliché, but I do firmly believe if you look after your colleagues then they’ll in turn look after your customers. That’s something we’ve been focusing on since I began working in Montrose. It’s really important to recognise and appreciate the efforts your colleagues put in. Christmas is for me the best time of year to be a store manager in retail. It’s all action, and you know you’ve got a really strong, fun plan for the festive period. It’s always about having events that can keep morale high for what is a busy time of year.

Have you seen any shopper habits changing recently? What about Christmas habits? There has definitely been an element of people shopping earlier than they have done previously. I’ve seen more customers coming in earlier, buying and preparing for Christmas rather than buying in that one busy week before the event. It seems the trade has been a bit more spread out this year, with people buying earlier. This week it seems to be even more evident, but I don’t know if that stems partly from the weather and people worrying that might continue over the next couple of weeks. In terms of what people are buying, it’s mainly the same items that people would always buy in the festive season. The exception may be frozen foods – I think the cost of living challenges mean people are buying more things from the frozen aisles than they have done before. Something that we’ve done in Tesco is introduce 17 new Finest products in frozen foods to try to support that.