Sainsbury's Hessle: Grocer 33 store of the week

I understand the Hessle store has undergone quite a few changes since it first opened. Yes, it has been extended quite a few times in the past 33 years; we had a café built in and made space for a GM range, and we’re looking to extend again in the near future. I have worked for Sainsbury’s for 10 years and this is the best store I’ve ever worked in, which is down to our really fantastic, friendly colleagues.

What is the most recent addition to your store? Just before Christmas we introduced a click & collect operation, where customers can collect parcels from DPD, Argos and eBay as well as our own clothing range. That has gone down massively well. Over Christmas, we were doing 600 to 700 items a week and it continues to be popular. We have a team of four or five people just doing the click & collect now. It’s just a great service that people use.

You have lots of competitors nearby. What else would you like to see introduced to help you differentiate? I’m sure we will be one of the stores to get an Argos in the near future. It’s a format that has proven very successful in other stores. It would just widen our range of GM lines and opens up a whole new catalogue of shopping to buy, reserve or have delivered.

You scored well on shop floor service. What do you do to ensure this? We just talk to our colleagues about being themselves. At the start of the year we did a training session on ‘be yourself, be brilliant’ and we regularly talk about it in huddles. That is really working for us because they are great colleagues and it is showing in our mystery shop scores.

Are there any ranges that are proving particularly popular? We recently put in an Asian range with a lot of speciality products across different brands that has proven successful. We also have a Polish range that has done well. In our store, we tend to get a lot of confident cooks.