Tesco Riverside, Dundee: Grocer 33 store of the week

I understand you’ve won the G33 before? We’ve won it twice in two years, which is brilliant. I’ve worked at Tesco for 23 years and have been back here as store manager for three. There are quite a lot of newer managers in our team, and this is the first time they have won, so they’re very proud. The fact we’re successful is down to our team – we’ve got 330 colleagues here, and all are striving to deliver their best for the customer. It’s something we’ve worked on during my time here, and we’re seeing that coming through in the numbers from our customer viewpoint.

Has much changed in store since your last win? There haven’t been any major changes to layout, and we haven’t had anything new stand out in terms of tech. What has changed in that time is that as a business we’ve revisited store standards and been really focusing on improving the shopping trip. In store, a big part of that has been on the measures we carry out, particularly inspections. We now have shift leaders who are consistent duty managers. It’s a new role in the business. Their day-to-day activities involve walkarounds to ensure our standards are consistent from the car park to the back of the shop. Putting the spotlight back on that has made a massive difference.

What’s unique about this store? Historically, this was the first large Tesco store built in Dundee, so we get a lot of loyalty. We’re right on the Tay Bridge roundabout so a lot of our clientele and dotcom operation also comes from the Fife area. We’re adjacent to three universities, so that forms a big part of our trade. Lots of our colleagues are students as well, which gives us a great dynamic of a change in workforce every few years.

How do you change your offer to cater to the students returning after summer? The biggest difference is that we manually order volumes to ensure we’ve got the right stock for that intense period of trade. We see a massive uplift in non-food and will add a lot of additional lines and volume in core things such as duvets, toasters and kettles. Our food lines are large enough that we can adapt and can take the extra volumes from the additional trade.

Has Christmas come to Dundee yet? We’re switching into full Christmas now. We’ve got Christmas gifting, our seasonal aisle is up and running – now we’re moving into what I call the ‘capture launches’. Those ambient lines, like Christmas biscuits, that people start to buy all year round. They’ll come into store next week. We’ll go full Christmas once Halloween is out of the way. We’re starting our seasonal recruitment too – we typically look for between 30 and 45 extra staff, depending on how much overtime our current colleagues want to work. Some will only be here for five or six weeks, but it’s a reasonable change in headcount.

That’s a lot of new faces to bed in, how do you ensure those high standards are maintained? I actually started in Tesco as a six-week Christmas temp in 2001 in this store. The most important thing for me is making sure we make them feel valued. Getting them trained early so they’re able to provide that level of customer service when we get that big increase in trade. It’s about getting them engaged with our vision – that will be the focus for me and my team.