Winner: Morrisons Bathgate
Store manager: Kenny Tragham
Opened: 2011
Size: 32,500 sq ft
Market share: 15.4%
Nearest rivals: Sainsbury’s - 0.3 miles, Asda - 0.6 miles, Tesco 2.9 miles
Store data source: Analysis by CACI. Call the market planning group on 020 7602 60000

You were on holiday last week. Is it good to see the store can cope when you aren’t there? It’s a testament to the efforts of all the staff that the store is functioning so well after just a year. It was great piece of news to come back to this week.

Our shopper was full of praise for the staff. Morrisons’ HOT training is obviously working, isn’t it? Absolutely. We just received the results of our most recent HOT mystery shopping report and we are consistently achieving the top scores, which is great to see.

And you achieved a full basket - how much work do you do on availability? A lot - in-store we like to challenge availability, then challenge it again and again. If a customer can’t get what they want, they’ll go elsewhere. We have gap meetings throughout the day looking at every section. These sections are judged bronze, silver or gold. We like to make sure everything is always gold.

How fierce is the competition locally? We had an Asda open in September and naturally some of our customers went and had a look, but we’ve seen them all come back again because our offering is really unique.

So what’s happening at the moment? We are getting the store ready for Christmas. A couple of weeks ago all the store managers went to head office to get a look at our new Christmas ranges. I can’t tell you too much about them but the focus will be on fresh food and great value. I’ve been working for Safeway and then Morrisons for 32 years and this is the best I’ve ever seen - it’s first class.

There’s a lot going on with formats and ranges at Morrisons - how is it affecting your store? As we opened last year we just missed the new fresh format, but we’ll be getting a version of it at some point. But the new ranges are doing very well - Savers, M Kitchen and NuMe. We introduced our new sandwich and salads range at the start of October and it is doing really well.

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