Operations manager: Amy Talbot
Store: Morrisons Failsworth
Opened: 2003
Size: 38,964 sq ft
Market share: 6.2%
Population: 866,359
Grocery spend: £19,778,163.40
Spend by household: £56.19
Competitors: 142
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.6 miles, Asda 0.5 miles, Co-op 2.4 miles, Iceland 0.5 miles, Lidl 0.5 miles, M&S 2.5 miles, Morrisons 1.3 miles, Sainsbury’s 3.0 miles, Tesco 0.6 miles, Waitrose 8.8 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 about your career: I’ve worked for the business for 22 years; I started when I was 17 and have worked my way up. I’ve done all department management roles and am now operations director. I’ve been at Failsworth for two years.
The store facade is quite distinctive. What’s the history of the building? It’s an old mill. Before it became a Morrisons, it was a department store. Morrisons had the top floor, then when it was demolished, Morrisons opened the full site.
Who are your shoppers? We are very much a ‘local’ shop. We’re not near any offices or workplaces. It’s a very mixed community of both young and older people, and many have been coming to this store as long as it’s been here. Pretty much all of our 112 colleagues are long-serving and live in the community. Our shoppers are typically price-sensitive, so new introductions like our WIGIG offers have gone down really well.
How is the WIGIG offer working in store? It’s like a little shop within a shop. We’ve got 25 pallets selling a vast array of things like pots and pans, cleaning materials, food storage and car accessories. It changes every couple of weeks, so there’s always something new in there. Currently we’re selling Tupperware for £1, and it’s doing really well. We were blown away by the demand for suitcases a couple of weeks ago.
The business is ramping up its More Card loyalty offers. Can you tell us about some of the offers? We’ve had offers on bakery where customers can get 100 More points if they buy certain products. Kids are off school, so we’ve currently got lots of stuff for them, like cookies. The products included touch every part of the store. The big offers, for example the ‘£10 normal, £8 on More Card’ deal, will change every week.
Morrisons has been deploying AI to improve availability. What has that meant in store? We’ve been rolling it out over the last couple of weeks. It means there’s now always someone monitoring availability. Optics cameras monitor every bay in the shop, and take a photo every hour. Those are connected to our handheld terminals. We have colleagues working through the app, who are physically chasing availability all day, throughout the day. Because it gives you an update every hour, it drives colleagues to the shelf to see what’s causing a gap. It might be that stock needs pulling forward, or we need to go look in the warehouse. Our availability is already much better. Our focus now is working to embed those routines and make sure that everyone is involved and can do that task.
What are you doing to celebrate the Olympics in store? During the Euros, lots of our offers were on beers and snacking and that kind of thing. The Olympics is pretty much the same. We’ve just gone for the summer of sport.
What’s been the biggest impact since Rami Baitiéh came in as CEO? He’s been so positive and energetic. As a store, we’ve always been really focused on our customer, but he’s given us the tools to request lines into stores that our customers are asking for. It can be a bit sporadic, but some examples are lime juice and lime cordial. Everything is for the customer – it’s been positive and a breath of fresh air.
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