Duty manager: Richard Thomas
Store: Tesco Neath
Opened: 1999
Size: 37,000 sq ft
Market share: 21.4%
Population: 151,794
Grocery spend: £3,785,158.55
Spend by household: £57.01
Competitors: 29
Nearest rivals: Aldi 3.5 miles, Asda 3.9 miles, Co-op 1.4 miles, Iceland 0.8 miles, Lidl 0.8 miles, M&S 0.7 miles, Morrisons 0.8 miles, Sainsbury’s 5.6 miles, Tesco 0.7 miles, Waitrose 21.2 miles
Source: CACI. For more info visit www.caci.co.uk/contact. Notes: Shopper profiling is measured using Grocery Acorn shopper segmentation. Store catchment data (market share, population, expenditure, spend by household, competition) is within a five-mile radius. For CACI’s shopper segmentation of the other stores we visited this week see the online report at www.thegrocer.co.uk/stores/the-grocer-33
Is it right that this store is where you began your career? I’ve been a manager in this store since last October. But I’ve been with Tesco for 25 years. I started my career in the shop. I was a general assistant on BWS before I went on to my management career. So it was really nice to be asked to go back and manage the store where it all started. I’ve got a great team and a few of them were here when I first started. I’m quite humble to be here, it’s a great shop.
What’s been the biggest change since then? The business has changed a lot, obviously, it changes rapidly every year but retail is retail. What hasn’t changed is that we put the customers first.
Did you always have ambitions to be a manager? Not really, it was just a weekend job I was doing while at university. I got asked to go on the bakery as a trainee baker, so I went in there and trained up and from then went on to night as a team leader. I didn’t have ambitions to be a manager but I think I was talent spotted a bit. I’ve always enjoyed playing sports and leading teams and I think being a store manager is in many ways a bit like being a team captain.
It’s National Apprenticeship Week. Do you offer them at your store? We offer the graduate scheme. One of my colleagues has just been on that as a team leader and she’s just come back to go to a graduate scheme to hopefully be a store manager as well. It’s important we look after the future talent for the next generation of Tesco leaders.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom around retail. Would you still advise people to take up the career? The advice would be to stick to your core values, believe in yourself, be brave and be humble. If you stick to those values, you won’t go far wrong.
It’s the 30th anniversary of Clubcard this week. Do you have anything special in store to mark it? We’ve got some exciting new prices and price matches coming up. We’ll have a new PoS package that will go out to launch the Clubcard anniversary and I believe there are going to be some rewards for the colleagues in the store, and some for the customers as well.
How much time do you spend taking care of PoS and making sure that side of it is firing on all cylinders? We’ve got a price integrity team that does the price change and looks after the promotions every day. But I spend time every day walking the shop floor looking at quality, looking at price and with my managers and colleagues talking about the offers – and with customers too.
What else is new in Neath? We’ve got the Whoosh service launching within the next month. It was rolled out in convenience stores and we’re in the next wave. So from 15 March, customers who live in the catchment area can order online from my store and get it delivered within 30 minutes to their house. I think our customers are going to love it. There’s also a massive focus on freshness and fresh food in store at the minute, where we are working hard to make sure our products are the freshest quality they can be. And we talk about availability daily. When customers come into the store, they want to be able to get the products they want. So we’ve got some really good processes to make sure the products are on sale for the customers.
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