Tesco Lurgan: Grocer 33 store of the week

What has been your career trajectory at Tesco? I’ve done lots of roles in Tesco over a long period of time. I worked in international way back in 2001 in central Europe. Then I worked through many roles and stores and became a store manager in 2002, going on to manage seven different shops. Next I was an area manager in Northern Ireland, head of Commercial Northern, and then an area manager in the south of England. I wanted to come back to Northern Ireland and I joined this shop in 2020, and last year decided to have more time with family and friends.

How do you manage your job share with the other store manager? So I’m currently in a job share with a manager called Rachel. We’ve got a great handover system with each other. We know exactly what’s going on in the shop by using modern technology: WhatsApp, messaging, email, and phone calls if we want to. The good thing is that Rachel is an experienced manager as well, so we both know about running a Tesco store. Obviously we have different personalities and different ways to do things. But so far, and it’s been six months now, the team in the store aren’t really seeing a big difference. We’re driving the same priorities. For me, it was really important to step back a bit – you can’t control everything every day. If you try to, you’ll not succeed, so you have to really work together. So far, that seems to be delivering. Rachel’s situation is slightly different to mine – she’s got three young children, so it works for her as well. For me, it’s more to spend more time with my family – I’ve got elderly parents now, so it’s the right time for me to reduce my hours after 30 years of being a manager.

Could you tell me a bit about the store? The area where we live is what you would probably classify as mid-market. We get a lot of affluent customers, but also then a lot of more price-sensitive customers. Our community champion and our managers are always in the community, working very closely with the local schools. We’ve got three local schools within walking distance. At the start of every morning, we have 200 to 300 schoolchildren coming into the shop, so it’s always very noisy in the mornings. Last year we had a refresh in our store. We hadn’t really had a major revamp since it’s been opened, so we got a good refresh last year, which really made the store feel a lot brighter and welcoming. Because we are a superstore, the good thing is you can get everything under one roof – we’ve got the phone shop and a good range of food. Customers see this as the neighbourhood shop because it’s in the small town of Lurgan. There are probably 30,000 people here, which in comparison to a lot of towns in GB, would be relatively small.

How are you preparing for Easter? If we take the learnings that I’ve seen from Christmas, I still think people at certain times of the year will trade up – whether that be to our Finest products, or buying lamb – because people want to feel special even when times are hard. We foresee that in our plan, and we make sure that we’ve got that replenishment background, so we’re ready for that additional farm stock being pushed in and the additional sales. I foresee it being another strong period.