Duty manager: Nick Bennett
Store: Morrisons, York
Opened: 2007
Size: 35,900 sq ft
Market share: 7.3%
Population: 293,596
Grocery spend: £56,632,287
Spend by household: £463.05
Competitors: 93
Nearest rivals: Aldi 1.1 miles, Asda 0.3 miles, Co-op 0.2 miles, Iceland 0.1 miles, Lidl 0.3 miles, M&S 0.3 miles, Morrisons 2.3 miles, Sainsbury’s 0.3 miles, Tesco 0.3 miles, Waitrose 0.2 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
This is Morrisons’ first win since October, you must be delighted. We’re very proud. I only joined the store in mid-November last year – the team have done some great work since then and we’re very happy. I’ve been with Morrisons for 25 years. My last store was Lincoln, which helped me significantly coming here, as it’s another big student store and I knew what to expect.
What makes York such a challenging store? We see huge spikes in trade as a student store – even though we know the spikes are coming, we still have to react and make sure we’re looking after our core customers. Over 300 people work here and we may need to put 200 extra hours into the store, which equates to around 50 colleagues, in order to cope with the spikes. Another challenge is that because a lot of our colleagues are students, you’ve got to react to losing them when they go home. That’s the balancing act we’ve got as a student store to make sure we’re always one step ahead in planning the year out. On top of that, we’ve seen a huge increase in on-demand, and almost had to create a dedicated team just for those metrics. It’s almost a shop within a shop.
Is there anything that sells surprisingly well here? We sell lots of convenience food as you’d expect, but we’ve also seen a real increase recently in fruit and veg. We’ve got a couple of ends that are showcasing products from Yorkshire – things like ales, tea and biscuits. We like a scene in York and really like to do a bit of theatre with our single-stem flower displays. We’ve got some really skilled florists who have the ability to add a bit of extra flare.
It’s been a year of “urgent reinvigoration and positive progress” at Morrisons. What’s been the biggest change from your perspective as a store manager? Our NPS scoring and the customer. We’re talking to customers again and really reading into the detail of what they’re telling us. It feels like we’ve got more of a connection with the customer.
What are they telling you they want? Basically, it’s ease of shop. They want to be able to get what they’ve come in for, they don’t want to queue at the checkout, and they want to get around the shop with minimal obstacles. These are all things that are in my control to fix. Having extra colleagues in the right places fixes a lot of that. A lot of our service goes through self-scanners, so it could be a stressful area. Normally stores might have one colleague per corral, but we have up to three at a time to help manage the business.
Morrisons wants to grow the More Card – how are you trying to grow participation in store? If we do have a quieter moment in store, we try and use those extra colleagues I was talking about earlier as greeters at the front of store. They’ll explain what the More Card does for customers. Because of all the improvements in the More Card, it’s a case of helping customers understand the benefits of it.
How will you make sure high standards are maintained throughout the year? This is massive for us. We want to be really smooth through the transitions between when students go back and return. No customers should be disappointed, whatever the time of year. That consistency is massive for us.
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