Tesco Extra Gloucester: Grocer 33 store of the week

Congratulations! But you’re not the first person in your family to win this award.

My twin brother Stuart won it 10 or 11 years ago. He is also a manager at a Tesco Extra. I was pleased to join him.

It must be useful having a twin brother doing the same job.

Yes, we both started with Tesco on our 16th birthdays and we’ve been 23 years with the company. It’s very useful to be able to compare things we are doing and talk about issues we’re both dealing with.

What’ve been the big things going on in store?

We’ve just had a very busy bank holiday weekend. We’ve also had our range change - we de-range some products for the summer and bring others in. Because of the recent changes made to store layouts and the range resets that process is much smoother than it used to be.

Our shopper was impressed with a member of staff finding a product using their phone. How useful is that technology?

The Inform app is really useful, we’ve got about 40% of our staff using it now. I’d like to get it to 100% but not everyone is the best on their mobile phones. But it’s a great help to staff because its not easy to know where everything is on the shelf when you have 30,000 products. This app can lead you direct to the exact spot on the shelf very easily and let you know about availability.

How did the recent request for customers to give some of their change to charity go down?

We did it for a week as part of our health fundraising and it had mixed feedback. We had notices at point of sale but some people did just get on with their shopping. However, we also have the 5p Bags of Help, which has gone down very well.

Do you think people would like to see the end of 5p plastic bags, which Tesco is trialling?

More and more people have been bringing their own bag for life. I think people would like to see fewer plastic bags out there.