Duty manager: Dawn Milne
Store: Sainsbury’s Bishop Auckland
Opened: 2010
Size: 60,000 sq ft
Market share: 18.6%
Population: 83,573
Grocery spend: £2,036,724.69
Spend by household: £54.22
Competitors: 13
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.5 miles, Asda 1.6 miles, Co-op 2.4 miles, Iceland 0.4 miles, Lidl 0.3 miles, M&S 0.3 miles, Morrisons 1.5 miles, Sainsbury’s 3 miles, Tesco 0.3 miles, Waitrose 23.4 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
I understand you’re relatively new to the store? I’m very new to the store, it’s amazing to have won this within my first six weeks. I’ve worked for Sainsbury’s for eight years – I started in the HR talent team, as working with people is my biggest passion in anything I do. I’ve been in stores for five years, and store manager for four.
Did you know the store before? I live locally and have shopped here since it opened, I was also previously a deputy manager here. The team have made me feel really welcome coming back. It’s a very ‘local’ community. It’s a big town, but we also serve a lot of rural farming communities that come and shop with us. This town has every supermarket apart from Waitrose in it, so we have a lot of competition. We are the biggest store so play a pivotal role on the retail park. We’re a high-range store and offer a range of different services to customers.
Do you see that broad range as your main point of difference in the town? We’re quite unique as we have quite a large non-food participation. Our clothing department is one of the biggest in the north. We’ve got one of the new shop fits on beauty, so we stock a lot of branded lines, and our beauty department is manned by colleagues. It’s very service-led. We’ve also got one of, if not the, busiest petrol station of any Sainsbury’s store in the north and are very competitive on petrol prices. Saying that, our food offer and newly refitted online department takes a lot of money. Shopping habits have changed – customers want to be able to come to one place and get everything under one roof. We get a lot of feedback from our customers that they appreciate being able to get everything in one place.
What have been the bestsellers recently? Customers will always come to shop for fresh products, produce, frozen lines. We had an amazing summer on our seasonal ranges too. It’s been one of our most successful school shop periods and we’ve taken market share from other retailers.
Are you getting in the mood for Halloween? We’ve got full Halloween frontage within our seasonal space. Within that there’s dress-up, there’s nightwear, food and the Halloween specials on drinks like Tango. Availability is absolutely amazing at the moment. Within that we’ve got a couple of value offers on home sales, and have started to introduce the first Christmas lines into store.
How is Christmas prep going? I think we will have the best Christmas ever this year. At the moment we have a small selection, which will be expanded throughout October. Then once Halloween is out of the way it really kicks off. Food ordering has already launched, meaning customers can order what they need already. We have very good systems in place to make sure we don’t let customers down. The range this year looks absolutely fantastic. Something that’s absolutely vital for us is that if we don’t have a non-food product available in Sainsbury’s, our store Argos will usually have it.
Sainsbury’s seems like a great place to work at the moment… It feels great – we’ve got the ‘food first’ strategy and there has been real traction with market share. It just feels like we’re really on a great journey. I love that it’s clear where we’re going.
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