Store: Sainsbury’s Lincoln
Store manager: Adam Bell-Eteo
Opened: 1991
Size: 100,000 sq ft
Market share: 18.5%
Population: 148,146
Grocery spend: £3,781,983.59
Spend by household: £60.74
Competitors: 42
Nearest rivals: Aldi 1.2 miles, Asda 1.2 miles, Co-op 0.6 miles, Iceland 0.1 miles, Lidl 0.8 miles, M&S 0.1 miles, Morrisons 1.7 miles, Sainsbury’s 2.2 miles, Tesco 0.8 miles, Waitrose 4.0 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
Tell us a bit about your career at Sainsbury’s: I joined in 2007 and I’ve been a store manager since I was 23. I started off in convenience, and I’ve been in larger format stores for the past eight years.
You became a store manager at a young age. How did that happen? I believe I was one of the youngest store managers at the time. I’d worked for a different retailer previously and worked my way up to deputy manager then moved across to Sainsbury’s. It was quite quick. I’ve definitely always been driven to be a store manager.
What stands out about the Lincoln store? I think the size of the store is a real selling point. It’s a large format store that has a super range across the board. We have lots of general merchandise, clothing, a great food offer, and we also have a Timpson’s and an Argos. Also I think the store has a really nice atmosphere. We’re doing very well from a customer service metric position.
What are your customers like? We have quite a mixed customer demographic here. It’s very mixed affluence, especially since we’ve massively invested in price with Nectar Prices. We are certainly seeing more and more customers starting to shop with us and switching to us.
What’s your focus in the store at the moment? My focus is always to make sure we’ve looking after our colleagues first and foremost, making sure this is a great place to work. That will ultimately lead to delivering the best service for our customers.
Your availability was really strong this week, and you were the only store to manage full availability on our Christmas basket. How did you manage this? Availability is very important. It’s something we always focus on but especially at this time of the year. We have a lot of processes in store to make that happen, and we make sure these are being done with integrity. Behind that, it’s a case of us reviewing from a leadership perspective every day – looking at how we are doing, how we are trending, and what opportunities we have.
What deals are you pushing at the moment? We’ve got some great deals on at the moment. We’ve got 25% off clothing and we’ve got some key Christmas deals. We have a beautiful sticky toffee rum liqueur, which is an exceptional product. That’s priced at £10 at the moment with a Nectar card, down from £15. We’ve also got some Taste the Difference shortbread rounds, which come in a nice little biscuit tin with light-up baubles. My favourite Taste the Difference line has probably got to be the prosecco that we have all year round.
What shopper habits are you noticing in the run-up to Christmas? Shoppers are definitely shopping earlier. We’ve also noticed an increase in weekend trade again – I’ve noticed that just in the past few months. That’s previously flattened across the week but now we have an uptick and Saturday has become our busiest trading day, which historically was always the case. I’m not sure why we’ve seen this change. Shoppers are also looking to buy the premium products – our Taste the Difference range is doing particularly well at the moment with customers wanting to treat themselves. Shoppers are also buying into frozen for Christmas this year, like they did last year.
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