Sainsbury’s Bradford: Grocer 33 store of the week

What has been your career trajectory at Sainsbury’s? I started at Sainsbury’s when I was 17. My mum worked there and initially got me the job. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my career or where I wanted to be. But once I started, I got the retail bug and absolutely fell in love with the company. I’ve worked my way around right through all the different grades. I’ve worked on fresh produce as a manager, ran my own convenience store, and then ran a supermarket. I’m incredibly proud that 10 years on from the start of my career, I went back to Dewsbury to be store manager where it all started for me. Then recently I moved here to Bradford in the last eight weeks.

How have you been settling into the store? It’s been great. Across Sainsbury’s we all have the same values, but every store has its uniqueness. It’s been really great to get to know the team and managers. I think a good thing is we have a very similar profile for customers and colleagues in terms of demographics. We have a lot of ethnically diverse colleagues and customers here. We are really diverse retailer and we’ve got the energy to bring to these events such as we’ve done for Easter this weekend, and what we’re doing for Ramadan. This year we’ve had quite a lot of overlap between Ramadan and Easter, so we’re serving two different missions at once.

What shopper habits have you been seeing in store? I think we’re seeing people buy earlier to get the best deals. We’re definitely seeing more planning and people are really thinking hard about how to get the best offers, availability and choice rather than the last-minute shopping we normally see. Because of that we’ve made sure to set up earlier and make sure we have that availability all the way through. We have also been really open with our pricing so that customers can see the great offers early on. We’ve also got the volume in store, so to use the example of Ramadan, we’ve got some fantastic offers on our world foods, on our oil, available in bulk so customers can buy at volume. For Easter too, customers have been shopping a lot earlier for eggs, just like we saw at Christmas.

How have the changes to Sainsbury’s Nectar been received? We’ve always done the Nectar scheme online and that’s worked really well for our customers. But we know that we live in a world where actually not everyone is tech savvy or has the opportunity to have an online presence. So we want to bring both worlds together and have an app but also have the physical card points for customers. We have some really phenomenal savings this week and it really drives loyalty. Our colleagues also love it. It’s really important to us that our colleagues shop with us and that they are brand advocates.

What’s your vision for the store this year? I think my vision for this store is that we set out to be consistently brilliant for our customers. We want to offer customers the same great experience, morning, dinner or night. Something I don’t think we talk about enough is how time-poor people are, and we really want people to not feel like it’s a chore to shop here, but that they can enjoy the experience as well as being able to get in and out quickly so they can go and do those bits of life they want to put their energy and time into.