Waitrose has picked up its third Grocer 33 win in five weeks thanks to its Newport, Shropshire branch. The store scored 74 points from our mystery shopper, who described her visit as a “really lovely experience”.
The shop floor was spacious, clean and well organised, while the layout was intuitive and the displays were fully stocked. The deli and hot food counter was extensive, although no obvious promotions were on. Overall availability was excellent – the Chicago Town pizzas were the only Grocer 33 item out of stock.
Staff were helpful, and our visitor particularly highlighted a friendly interaction with a customer service desk colleague. Most shop floor staff were busy restocking the first few aisles, but they were harder to spot as our visitor progressed in the store. One restocking trolley appeared to have been left abandoned mid-loading.
Morrisons’ Fleet store took second place. The branch felt new and clean, and was spacious and well lit.
Our shopper noted plenty of attractive displays, and said the shop floor was well used to create extra room for more – with smart solutions such as corner shelving and small fridges and counters in some of the wider aisles. The fresh food counters were particularly eye-catching.
Availability suffered slightly as three items were out of stock and two were not stocked.
The main downside to our visitor’s shop was the lack of staff members available. However, when she did interact with them, they were helpful and polite.
Third-placed Asda scored 64 points. Its South Shields store received the highest score on the customer service front in this week’s Grocer 33, racking up 18 out of 20 points.
Our shopper noted an interaction with a colleague in the fruit & veg aisle, who proved to be extremely helpful when she struggled to find figs and pomegranate seeds. Availability was also good, as only one item was out of stock (three items were not stocked).
But our shopper found the store’s size was too “overwhelming”, which made it “very difficult” to find certain items such as eggs. Plus, the checkout experience was described as “perfunctory”.
Next up was Sainsbury’s branch in Ottery St Mary, which scored a total of 60 points. Despite none of our items being out of stock – only four were not stocked – our shopper painted a different picture of the overall availability in some areas of the store.
Fruit & veg supplies were low and unappealing, with some items looking “rather old”. The food-to-go area was also quite bare, even though the shop took place around lunchtime.
Still, range variety across the rest of the store was good considering it was a small supermarket.
On the bright side, staff were friendly, attentive and went out of their way to check if some items were available.
Tesco was this week’s clear loser with only 40 points. Our visitor was unimpressed that its Portadown store shared the same driving entrance as the McDonald’s drive-thru, which resulted in some queueing.
Her biggest issue with her Sunday morning trip to Tesco was that availability was poor across most aisles, with evident gaps in certain sections like fruit & veg and bakery. All in all, she bought 26 of our list of items, as five were out of stock and two were not stocked.
There weren’t many staff on the shop floor, and the ones our visitor did approach were not helpful.
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