Duty manager: Mark Jackson
Store: Waitrose Newark
Opened: 1997
Size: 27,500 sq ft
Market share: 12.7%
Population: 58,629
Grocery spend: £1,545,965.77
Spend by household: £59.49
Competitors: 14
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.2 miles, Asda 0.3 miles, Co-op 0.6 miles, Iceland 0.5 miles, Lidl 1.7 miles, M&S 5.2 miles, Morrisons 0.2 miles, Sainsbury’s 2.1 miles, Tesco 2.2 miles, Waitrose 16.4 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
Is this your first Grocer 33 win? Yes it is. I was part of the leadership team in Newark when we won in 2020, but I was appointed branch manager 18 months ago.
How long have you been in retail? More than 25 years. I started on the Debenhams management training scheme then did 10 years with M&S in my native north east. I’ve been at Waitrose 13-and-a-half years.
Tell us about the Newark store and what you’ve done with it. We are starting to attract a broader customer now. We see all types of customer mission walking through the door depending on the day, weather and time of the month. Because of our location we are we’ve always attracted bigger trolley baskets. Our range of wines and champagnes means it’s always been popular as a destination. The meal deals we do now are also increasingly popular. We’ve started to introduce new lines aimed at weekend shoppers, like Urban Pizza. Saying that, we’ve managed to retain quite a large proportion of our e-commerce sales since the pandemic, which represents around 30% of our business.
Why is it so big? We’ve got one of the biggest delivery fleets in the business, with our vans numbering the high teens. Newark’s location is quite fortunate in terms of the road network to get north and south. We’re also well positioned compared to other Waitrose stores. We cover several counties.
There’s been a lot of change at Waitrose over the past year. What’s had the most impact? It feels like we are gaining momentum. We have a leadership team we can feed into directly. We can voice opinion and get feedback a lot quicker than we maybe would have done in the past. It feels like everyone is motivated by the same thing, wanting to improve customer service. We’ve seen massive improvements in availability to our walk-in customers, but also to our online shoppers.
What have you made of Waitrose’s recent NPD? We were unsure whether some of the new lines like the Ottolenghi range and Zoe would be popular in Newark. It was new territory for us, but we’ve had the opportunity to promote it and really showcase it to customers, which has helped massively. We’ve had a good programme of supplier tastings over the last few months. Generally, customers now have different ways of receiving information than before. We’ve got a massive social media programme now, where we promote more from our branches.
What have you been promoting on your store channel? The business sets guidance on what they want us to promote. But partners can take ownership. Last year it was Little Moons that people really wanted to get their hands on. This year it’s Zoe that has featured, our pecorino dip, and Tru Fru in frozen. We’ve definitely seen a rise in customer queries for products they’ve seen advertised through the store channels.
Are you set to receive an investment into the store? Yes, in the next six weeks. We’re getting a Sushi Daily counter, a dry aged beef cabinet, along with some new fixturing. Sushi Daily is operated by a third party, so it won’t be a major change for us in terms of partners. But we’re looking forward to being able to showcase some of our customer service propositions.
No comments yet