Store of the week: Tesco Purley

You were The Grocer’s store manager of the year last year when you worked in Cardiff. What’s your secret? I’d have to say service is always the key focus. Creating that culture in store where staff are willing to say hello to customers. It’s not always easy in a store that is bringing in 40,000 people.

Purley is one of Tesco’s flagship hypermarket trial stores. How do you make sure service matches expectations? I took a view that the service matters as much as the new departments. We’ve been running a training programme that we call Putting the Pride in Purley. We held an event just before the launch of the refurbished store in August giving out prizes to our best-performing members of staff.

What changes have there been to the store? We’ve become very much a food-first store. We have introduced low-level produce aisles, a misting table and we have had a big increase in fresh food counters. We also have an island of counters serving things such as pizza, hot pies and jacket potatoes.

And has it worked? The main impact has been to create a much nicer environment. The non-food on the ground floor is much more geared towards cooking. The whole place is a food environment. I’ve heard the counters described as the ‘Harrods of Purley’.

What other changes have you had? The wines and spirits area now has low-level shelves, cocktail bays and an upmarket wine section. It has its own advisers. The bakery has a hot plate for making pancakes, which creates a wonderful smell in store.

How were you affected by the recent floods? We had significant disruption for two months during the floods as quite a lot of the surrounding roads were sealed off. The fire brigade used our car park to set up their local operations base. We also let residents whose underground car parks were flooded use our car park and set up a bus service to get local children to school.