Winner: Sainsbury’s Street
Store manager: Dean Cogan
Opened: 1998
Size: 32,000 sq ft
Market share: 32.2%
Nearest rivals: Tesco - 0.8 miles, Morrisons - 2 miles
Store data source: Analysis by CACI. Call the market planning group on 020 7602 6000

Congratulations! How did your colleagues react to the news? It’s absolutely fantastic. They are over the moon. We have over 200 colleagues here and it’s great for all of us.

But it’s not your first G33 win? No, I won it in 2007 at a different Sainsbury’s store [Devizes, Wiltshire]. I’ve worked at Sainsbury’s for more than 30 years and have been at this store for nine months.

Our mystery shopper singled out the strong customer service. How do you keep standards high? We’re a real community store and a lot of the colleagues know a lot of the customers. Some even single out certain colleagues they know to be served by them. This really helps with great service. We also had a competitor [Tesco] open up down the road before Christmas, so worked really hard. We’ve kept this momentum going and have grown it. We put the customer first with everything we do. My colleagues genuinely love coming to work and this really helps.

How has trading been over Easter? We had a really strong Easter. We want to keep that going into the summer. The whole store has been doing really well. There’s not one particular area I could single out - they are all trading well.

Have you made any changes since arriving at the store? When the competitor opened we had a lick of paint. We also recently installed a pizza counter, which has been very well received by our customers and is growing at speed. In the next few years, I would like to extend the store, but nothing is set in stone yet.

You said you were a community store - what work do you do in the community? We have a charity of the year that we support, Martha Care, which provides help to families when their very sick children are admitted to hospital. We also do a lot of work with cubs, scouts, and schools. We’ve also obviously got Active Kids running at the moment too. It gets a lot of backing from our customers.

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