Tesco South Wigston: Grocer 33 store of the week

How’s the year been for you so far? We’ve had a really great start. I’ve got a great team here who are very committed to delivering a great shopping trip for the customers and they keep rewarding us by coming back.

Tell us a bit about your store: We’re very much a mid-market supermarket on the outskirts of Leicester. We have quite a traditional shopping base with the traditional trade pattern, with a massive uplift at the weekend for the weekly shop. We feel we play a pivotal role in the local community. We support the local colleges by providing products for their breakfast club, and we work with the South Leicestershire Wombles, which is a volunteer group that does litter picking.

How did you end up as store manager here? I joined Tesco in 2003 in our convenience format and spent eight or nine years there. I’ve been a large store manager since 2012, working around Nottingham, Leicester and Oxford. South Wigston is reasonably close to where I live and when it became available, it was a shop that I was very, very keen to be a part of. I could see the opportunities here to really make it grow and be a key part of the community. I’ve been here since the end of 2019, and it’s one of those shops that you don’t really want to leave because it’s a great place to be. I’ve got a really fantastic team around me.

What changes have you seen in the store during those past few years? Obviously, the big thing would be that I joined just before Covid. The big change throughout Covid was we did a click & collect operation in the shop and the trade transitioned very much to that channel in that period. And then as we’ve exited restrictions, the trade has very much come back to the shop. What’s been most pleasing is that as click & collect hasn’t seen quite the demand, all of that trade has shifted back to the footfall through the door. We keep attracting new customers as well, which is fantastic.

How have you managed to keep availability high in store? When it comes to availability, it’s about the whole team understanding the impact. When I speak to my colleagues, they are also my shoppers as well. It’s that pride in your own store and they’re all encouraged to really, really push availability and have the knowledge of availability and challenge when there’s a gap themselves. So it’s not down to just the leadership, every colleague within the store buys into having greater availability. That’s the secret, essentially: 200 pairs of eyes is much better than five or six pairs.

How do you promote that culture within the store? I’ve got a pretty stable management team who know the colleagues very well and there’s an ongoing conversation. Essentially it’s an open door policy. Anyone can come and talk to anyone and give us feedback. We also have in-store forums where I’ll meet on a regular basis with a number of colleagues to talk about what’s going on in the shop. That’s something obviously Tesco does across the retailer, and it gives those colleagues the power to make the decisions that are right for the customer. And then when they do, it makes sure that they’re recognised – and not just recognised by the leadership team, but they’re recognised and thanked by each other. I think that’s really important.