Sainsbury’s Bourne: Grocer 33 store of the week

Is this your first Grocer 33 win? This is the first Grocer 33 shop, let alone win, I’ve had in my five years as store manager. I’ve been with the business since 2005. This my second time around in Bourne. I was deputy manager for a spell, then came back two months ago as manager. So credit where credit’s due to the team.

How does the store reflect Bourne as a town? Bourne is a reasonably small town, and our customer base is quite affluent. The store has a proper local vibe from both the customer and colleague base. Every store I’ve worked in has its regulars, but one of the biggest things I’ve noticed here is how many of the shoppers know my team members by name. There’s a lot of loyalty here – this store has one of the highest Nectar participation levels in the area.

Simon Roberts wants to attract more big trolley shops, is that what shoppers in Bourne are coming in for? We’re certainly a big food shop, you can say that. I pulled some data from Uber Eats, and the most popular line in Bourne is cucumbers. Half of our top 10 lines are fruit & veg, so I like to think we’re a healthy town. On the flipside, we’ve just gone live with the Nectar wine stunt, and we tend to punch above our weight in terms of wine sales. Our shoppers are very mission-focused. We always try to go big with events, be that Mother’s Day coming up or Easter. Our customer tends to want to get their entire shopping mission in that shop, and then may come back for their regular shop later.

Why is your Nectar participation so high? Have you done anything to drive that as a store? We haven’t needed to because of the positive impact that’s been flowing through the business. We have so many years of brand loyalty with Nectar, people are now naturally drawn into the ‘Purple’ Nectar offer. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, like the wraparound of Nectar personalised offers. You can see them shopping for those items.

100% availability is uncommon. Is that something you’ve worked on as a store? Over the last 18 months we’ve spent time trying to simplify the process. We call it our One Great Way process. If we follow it to a tee every day, it will deliver the stock and output. There are always challenges implementing any new processes, but we’ve worked to make sure the team are able to support each other. That’s through being flexible enough to work across multiple parts of the store. Systems should forecast and order what we need for the next day or the day after – all we’re doing is clarifying whether what the system thinks is out of stock, is or is not out of stock.

You’re big on events. How are you preparing for Mother’s Day? We’ve got our floral bouquets coming through. Because of our customer base, we tend to sell a lot of seeds or cut flowers anyway. We’ve got six floral lines coming through, ranging from £10 to £25, and I know they’re going to be big sellers. A great thing about Bourne is the space that we have for display at the front of store – we keep the customer mission all in that area. Then naturally you’ll walk down our power aisle, which will showcase some of our chocolate lines. I’m going for a bottle of champagne for my mum, and if I buy six I’ll be able to keep one for myself as well!