Sainsbury's Nine Elms, Wandsworth: G33 store of the week

I understand the Nine Elms team underwent a lot of change before opening last year. We’ve always had a store on this site, but the old one closed down four years ago and we moved into a temporary store in the car park. We went from 50,000 sq ft to 10,000 sq ft, which was very different for colleagues who had been used to working in a big store. Then we didn’t have a store for the 18 months leading up to the new store opening in August last year. To open with many of the same members of the management team was fantastic and quite an honour.

Mike Coupe showcased your store to the press as a “window into the future” of the business last year. Are customer numbers responding accordingly? Certainly the customer numbers are building, which is good. We can pretty much offer anything for any customer, whether it’s popping in for a quick snack or spending three hours doing your weekly shop and browsing Habitat and Argos. Plus, this area is being massively regenerated and the Northern line is being extended to create a new stop right outside our front door.

You have a number of concessions in your store. Which one stands out for you? The tie-up between Argos, Habitat and Sainsbury’s under one roof makes it a one-stop shop for all our customers. The click & collect proposition is a real winner. Being able to place an Argos or Habitat order online and pick it up in store makes it so straightforward to shop with us.

And how is your online operation going? We haven’t had our online service for long so we’ve started off quite small and are planning to grow the business to capacity over the next two years. We offer same-day delivery, which isn’t massively popular for us at the moment. It’s very inconsistent; some days we get lots of requests, some days we get very few. It’s certainly something customers will want more and more of in the future.