Grocer 33 Store of the Week: Waitrose Dorchester

Your manager is on holiday. What’s happened in his absence? Well, it’s great to have won The Grocer 33 after the week we’ve had! One of our customer lifts broke and the other one was being refurbished, so we had to carry customers’ shopping down two flights of stairs to the two car park levels below the store. The lift was broken for the whole week! We normally offer a carry-to-the-car service but this amount of extra work, with the hot weather, did make it a tough week for everyone.

You’re near Bridport, Weymouth and the coast, so was the weekend additionally challenging? We always have a huge amount of bank holiday trade at this branch and this weekend we had the Great Dorchester Steam Fair, which is huge, so we were exceptionally busy. We’ve also had the half-price sale we’ve got across the whole of Waitrose at the moment, on hundreds of lines, which has made a massive difference to sales as well.

With all that going on, has it been difficult to maintain availability? We’ve got a pretty good system going here and an overnight operation, when a lot of the restocking work is done, so we keep on top of it.

You had an aisle end devoted to gluten free, is it that popular? It’s definitely on it’s way up. We were talking about it today and wondering how we can make more space for it as well as take on more lines. It’s something we would like to increase.

How’s Waitrose 1 going? The new lines have gone down well and the individual variants are making customers want to try different things, as well as the latest lines we’ve got, which are generating added interest.

What about food waste? We have food banks we work with and Kingston Maurward College, which is an agricultural college, comes in every week to collect waste to feed to their animals.