Morrisons Bedford: Grocer 33 store of the week

Your store is only three years old. Are there any plans afoot for changes? No. We’re a lovely, fresh store, very bright and airy, about a mile-and-a-half from the centre of Bedford, on a main road, the A6. We don’t have any big plans for changes at the moment. We are doing a few small things, one being to upgrade the coffee machine at the front of the store and introduce hot snacks for customers. That’s coming soon.

Do you have any room for franchises like Doddle or Timpson? We don’t have Doddle but we do have a Timpson dry cleaning franchise. There’s no spare space for anything else.

Our mystery shopper commented on how helpful your staff were. How important is personal service? It’s a point of difference for us and we work very hard to look after our customers. It’s good to get the feedback of colleagues by name so that I can pass it back to the team.

Our shopper also mentioned a person picking and wrapping flowers for customers at the entrance, which he hadn’t seen before. Is that unusual or is it Morrisons’ policy? Quite a lot of Morrisons have a flower wrapping service, I believe. Ours is well-used when people want to buy a special bouquet - and then we will wrap it for them.

How about food waste? What do you do with stock you can’t sell? We have a community champion who deals with about three charities in Bedford. She liaises with them and they come in and collect our surplus food from our charity shelf on a weekly basis.

You’ve been with Morrisons for just over 20 years, since you were 18, but this is the first time a store you have managed has won The Grocer 33. Has it made a difference to your week? Yes, absolutely! It’s a great result, really positive and it shows a great effort by all the team.