Sainsbury's Caldy Valley Road, Chester: G33 store of the week

The store has been around for 33 years but you’re relatively new to the team. How have you found it? I’ve been store manager for two years but we’ve got some great colleagues who have been here for a long time. It’s a priceless asset. We’ve got a real community feel.

How was the Christmas period for your store? We were delighted with it. We were really successful and we were set up to meet the demands of customers having recently introduced click & collect in November, which includes eBay pick-up. That helped bring in new customers.

How did click & collect perform? Sainsbury’s reported an increase in demand in the run up to Christmas. The Christmas food ordering service was superb this year. We were managing to serve each customer within a couple of minutes of arriving. We were just above last year in terms of volume, which we were really pleased with because we’re at capacity. What we did differently this year was to take out standard turkeys from the pre-ordering system because we were confident we had consistent availability so that gave us more opportunity to extend our ­premium range.

Were you hit by the technical problems with the text message alerts that directed click & collect customers to the wrong Sainsbury’s store? Yes, it did affect our Christmas food orders. We send out both a text confirmation and an email but we identified the problem with the text element within minutes and managed to retrieve it really quickly.

Are you all stocked up on healthy produce for the new year? Yes, we’ve got a great broad offer of products anyway so we’re promoting them as part of the healthy lifestyle drive. We’re just bringing them out of the shelf space. There’s a big demand for detox products at this time of year and we think we’ve got a great offer to share that message.