Waitrose Botley Road, Oxford: Grocer 33 store of the week

The store opened in October 2015. How has it been? We’ve gone through a phase of settling in. A lot of the partners were new to the business, so we spent time building understanding of the way Waitrose and John Lewis works and we’re now maturing as a store.

Who is your typical customer? We get a lot of workers of an evening at peak times. We also have a steady trade of local families and after-school shoppers.

You have quite a few competitors close by. How hard have you found it to gain market share? We’re close to the town centre and to start with the branch was quite nervous about getting new customers. But Aldi closed for a refurb in September and we picked up quite a lot of their customers. We’ve kept a lot of them and I think the biggest reason was our café. We also have the service counters, which Aldi doesn’t.

Are any of the counters particularly popular? We’ve had a meat and fish specialist in the branch for about a year. He can advise customers on produce and suggest different things they can do with it. The counter has got really busy and we’re helped by Fish Fridays, when there is 20% off fish.

What have you got coming up? One thing we really want to focus on is our community work, which is something Waitrose does really well. We’ve done a lot of work with the food bank and now we’re a year old, we want to do more with the local area, whether it’s a project for the care home or scout group. We want to not just give them money, but actually get involved.

Have you started making preparations for Easter? Yes, Easter produce goes on sale at the end of this month but as yet we’ve not seen any Easter merchandise, which is quite nice for retail! But we are thinking about it and making plans. We’re expecting a big campaign and it would be lovely to do in-store Easter egg hunts again.