Store: Morrisons Cwmbran
Operations manager: Richard Morgan
Opened: 2013
Size: 28,500 sq ft
Population: 169,621
Grocery spend: £4,206,523.19
Spend by household: £57.41
Competitors: 29
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.3 miles, Asda 0.4 miles, Co-op 0.6 miles, Iceland 0.3 miles, Lidl 0.3 miles, M&S 0.2 miles, Morrisons 4.8 miles, Sainsbury’s 0.4 miles, Tesco 1.2 miles, Waitrose 9.4 miles
Source: CACI. For more info visit www.caci.co.uk/contact. Notes: Shopper profiling is measured using Grocery Acorn shopper segmentation. Store catchment data (market share, population, expenditure, spend by household, competition) is within a five-mile radius.
For CACI’s shopper segmentation of the other stores we visited this week see the online report at www.thegrocer.co.uk/stores/the-grocer-33
Tell us a bit about your career: I’ve been with Morrisons now for six years, and at the Cwmbran store for four years. Prior to that I worked for Tesco for 18 years, in various management roles. This is actually my second stint in Cwmbran. I really enjoy it, because it’s one of the biggest stores in South Wales with the highest footfall and it’s a great store to work in.
What is it like managing a large store compared with a smaller one? We get about 31,000 customers a week and the closest store to us in comparison is 24,000. We always have something going on, for example fundraising and working with the local community. We’ve got a large student college right next door to us, so our lunchtimes are busy. We’ve got click & collect here – we lost our home delivery operation about a year ago when it was amalgamated with Rogerstone, but it is still very popular.
How do you make the most of your high footfall? We’ve invested heavily in our Market Street offer. We benefit from having a wide selection of products on sale at good quality and great price, and we’ve put more hours into those departments to cope with the demand. We put an extra colleague in Monday to Friday to replenish all the sandwiches and we have dual manning on our oven fresh department. Most stores would only have one per counter. Our customers love the Market Street offering, and the interaction with the staff at the counter. It’s what sets us apart from our competitors. We’ve got a great butchery counter and fish counter, whereas in other stores its all pre-packed, and we also do tasters in store.
Can you tell us a bit more about your customers? We have a good mix. We have a fantastic brew bar, which accompanies our café, and we have a lot of elderly customers that come in and use that as a place to chat. We have a lot of families and couples too.
How are the changes you have made to your loyalty card being received? We’re doing the Morrisons offers, which are linked to the More cards, and that’s gone down really well. We had a big marketing package and our colleagues are signing up new customers on the app daily. Our customers are really buying into the new offers we have. Some of the offers are tailored to what the customers normally buy. This was brought in over the past couple of months. There are about five or six offers that are changed from week to week: on frozen items, grocery and fresh.
How did the coronation bank holiday weekend go? We had a fantastic range in and we had lots of our customers coming in asking for bunting and party food, and they told us there were a lot of street parties happening. We do food to go for lots of parties so obviously the coronation was massive for us. Customers can order food to go in store or on the app. We made over 200 platters for our local community. We also did a fundraiser over the weekend, with a virtual bike ride to London, which raised almost £2,000 for our local charity.
What have you got coming up in store? We’ve got a charity event coming up, which all the Morrisons stores are getting involved with. Then we obviously have our summer stock in, and another bank holiday coming up.
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