Sainsbury’s Upton, Birkenhead: Grocer 33 store of the week

Tell us about your career with Sainsbury’s. Later this year I’ll be celebrating my 30-year service with Sainsbury’s. I started my career as a training manager, actually at the Upton store, and I’ve now returned as store manager. I’ve been here for two years after having been a store manager at a few different stores for about seven years prior to that. But I’m really proud and privileged to go back to the store where I started.

What is your biggest concern or priority as a store manager looking forward? We can’t talk about challenges without talking about Covid, even this year. But I think we’ve now got an equally sizeable challenge ahead of us with the pressure on household budgets, and obviously that’s at the forefront of everyone’s minds. We’re really serious about investing in value at Sainsbury’s, especially with our Aldi Price Match campaign. It’s been recognised recently that we’re the most competitive we’ve been in years and it’s something we absolutely have to deliver for our customers. Certainly with the most recent campaigns, like the addition of all the summer lines and the variety across the store, trying to take some of those pressures away from customers is our focus.

What methods are you using in store to highlight value? We have a plan for all our stores and it’s really important for us to be clear with our value message. We want value to be forefront in our stores, so we’ve got really clear point of sale materials highlighting all of our Aldi Price Match lines. They start as soon as you come into the store with fabulous offers in produce, and they go right across the store. We aim to give the same message to the customer in every store by using our layout, our availability and more importantly our colleagues. I have over 200 colleagues in my store and they need to be the ambassadors of our value and be able to tell every customer about it, whether it be Price Lock, Aldi Price Match or our Hubbard’s range.

Sainsbury’s has recently added 150 new fresh lines to the Aldi Price Match campaign. Has it resulted in an uptick in sales? Absolutely. I think whatever situation customers’ personal finances are in, everybody is looking for value. Adding those 150 fresh lines has given fantastic value for our customers and it’s been received really well.

Tell us about your demographic and why the recent changes have gone down so well. We have a really diverse customer base at Upton. We are a big, busy store and we don’t have an online operation, so all of our customers are walk-in customers. The [shopper demographic] is a real mix – we have some affluent customers, young families, and a large percentage of customers looking for value, so we need to appeal to everyone. With our investment at the end of last year, where we brought Argos, Tu and Habitat into Upton, it really is a one-stop shop that appeals to our local community.

Do you have any plans to limit cooking oil sales? At the moment we don’t have any plans to introduce any limits. We’re working closely with our suppliers to make sure our customers continue to have cooking oil. If there is ever an issue with availability, we do our best to offer alternatives, and that’s what we’re doing currently.