Duty manager: Mark Whittle
Store: Sainsbury’s Helston
Opened: 2010
Size: 30,000 sq ft
Market share: 34.8%
Population: 27,240
Grocery spend: £746,944.31
Spend by household: £65.76
Competitors: 8
Nearest rivals: Aldi: 8.5 miles, Asda: 7.8 miles, Co-op: 4.7 miles, Iceland: 8.5 miles, Lidl: 9 miles, M&S: 9.4 miles, Morrisons: 9.4 miles, Sainsbury’s: 8.9 miles, Tesco: 0.8 miles, Waitrose: 15.9 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
Congratulations, you must be happy with the win. We’re very pleased. We’ve been really focused on driving service and standards over the past couple of months. It’s especially pleasing that the win has come as we’re exiting summer, when we have a number of new customers, and a number of new colleagues we have to train. I’ve worked in stores since 2015 and this is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of winning this.
The store’s location is quite interesting. How does it impact sales? It’s a very unique location. We’re right next to both RNAS Culdrose naval base and a theme park called Flambards, which is a huge summer attraction. It’s a stone’s throw away from the main road into the centre of what is a growing town.
We’ve got a good breadth on offer in store, from hot food through to grocery, health and beauty, general merchandise and clothing. As we’re in Cornwall, we are a very seasonal store.
How busy does it get in summer? There can be a 70% difference in sales from a wet week in February compared to a typical summer week. The volume of online orders usually doubles, which means we have to employ more resource and have more vans to serve customers. The vans will also go further afield. It’s a flexible moving feast. Our staff numbers flex from a low of 170, then during summer we’ll usually take on at least 50 temporary workers, which proportionally is a really significant increase.
That must take some preparation as a store team. Thankfully our existing team are very settled – it’s not their first summer, it’s not my first summer. The starting point is that known unknown of how many people we think are going to come on holiday to Cornwall. You can almost always rely on it being at full capacity, so we know roughly what the uplift will look like on previous years. It is intensively concentrated on the six weeks of the school holiday, so we know we’ve got to be hitting the ground running when that starts.
How does the seasonality change the offer in store? What do you stock up on? Sainsbury’s has a specific coastal non-food range that goes into stores at the start of summer. It’s things like outdoor beach toys. That’s complemented here by products like Cornish cheeses, Cornish ales, lagers, ciders and maybe even scrumpy as well. That’s probably the most significant element of the range that changes, but because we’re also surrounded by campsites, we do rely heavily on a fantastic fresh food offer.
Has the wet weather made a difference this summer? Not particularly – we’re still seeing growth year on year. Depending on the weather, customers just buy into slightly different things. Providing it’s not raining, it’s still barbecue weather. Whether it is overcast or not, people want to enjoy their time in Cornwall.
What’s your focus now that summer is behind us? It’s a full-time role week in week out, it just gets particularly busy throughout summer. With people going off to university as well, there’s a lot of interest in our home range now. Then we’re into Halloween and then up to the golden quarter. We tend to plan a minimum of 12 weeks ahead. We want to land everything right for the customer first time.
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