Duty manager: Steve Ward
Store: Waitrose Meanwood Leeds
Opened: 2010
Size: 27,000 sq ft
Market share: 7.6%
Population: 533,143
Grocery spend: £12,074,570.71
Spend by household: £54.11
Competitors: 116
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.2 miles, Asda 1.6 miles, Co-op 1.1 miles, Iceland 1.7 miles, Lidl 1.2 miles, M&S 1.6 miles, Morrisons 1.7 miles,Sainsbury’s 0.5 miles, Tesco 1.3 miles, Waitrose 7.4 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
You’re new here, but this isn’t your first Grocer 33 win… No. It is my fourth since 2008. I’ve been with Waitrose 35 years and branch manager for 15. In April I was given the opportunity to join this store on secondment while the previous manager works on a different project. Lincoln is my permanent store, which also won recently.
Meanwood is the only Waitrose store in Leeds. Does that make you a bit of a destination? Definitely. Leeds is a tough trading environment. There’s a lot of competition from a variety of supermarkets, and lots of different customer types. We have a local walk-in trade, but we definitely have a high percentage of people who will travel, and bypass shops more local to them, specifically because they want to shop at Waitrose. What are people coming into store for? Are you showing off any local products? We don’t stock as large a range of local products that you might find in other Waitroses in other areas. But the Harrogate Cake is one that stands out. Fruit & veg is probably the area that gets the most attention, our sales are strong.
Our shopper described the checkout experience as a “letdown”. How do you stop the benefits of SCO tills coming at a cost to customer service? I’m disappointed to hear that. My expectation is that there would always be at least one manned till open, especially at busier times of the day. We’ve invested in self-payment as a way to support efficiency, but it’s also driven by a demand from customers who want to get in and out as quickly as possible.Waitrose is very different in that a number of our customers want that personalised service, so there’s always going to be the need for a manned till.
What work have you done to ensure customer service is consistent across the store? We’re always looking to evolve service. If you look at the things supermarkets compete on, be that price or product, service is the biggest difference Waitrose has. Where our competitors focus on service to try and catch up with us, we need to keep that gap. We’ve been piloting a new service training package with all 200 partners in shop. It’s based around the ‘Three Ps’: we want to encourage passionate, proactive, personalised service. Every customer should experience that.
What’s changed in store since our last visit? We’ve just finished three weeks of quite extensive rebalancing. All bar 15 bays of ambient home and food have changed. The shop was originally built as a test, and had the biggest non-food range in Waitrose, so now we’ve given more space to ambient, slightly less to home. We’ve also given more space to checkouts, increased our wines and spirits, and put a new bakery area in. Our range has increased as a whole.
We’re into the Christmas run in. How are shoppers in Leeds feeling? One of the biggest advantages of the rebalance was to our seasonal aisle. It’s been moved to the centre of the shop, and it has created a hub of excitement there. Christmas is about tradition – we all have stories of our Christmas dinner from our youth that we repeat every year. Everyone will splash out to make that one dinner so special, and that’s coming across in Meanwood, and every Waitrose shop.
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