Duty manager: David North
Store: Waitrose Newton Mearns
Opened: 2011
Size: 25,000 sq ft
Market share: 8.8%
Population: 300,182
Grocery spend: £8,136,078.41
Spend by household: £60.99
Competitors: 66
Nearest rivals: Aldi: 0.2 miles, Asda: 1 mile, Co-op: 0.5 miles, Iceland: 2 miles, Lidl: 2 miles, M&S: 1 mile, Morrisons: 2.7 miles, Sainsbury’s: 1.5 miles, Tesco: 0.1 miles, Waitrose: 6.9 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
Congratulations! Is this your first Grocer 33 win? This is the first one I’ve won and the first for the current team. I’ve been at the partnership for nearly 24 years. I moved over to the food side of the business during Covid, and have been here for two-and-a-half years.
This is the store’s second win in three years. What drives those consistently high standards? We’ve got 160 partners across the shop floor, foodservice and e-commerce operations. They have a real mix of experience and a wealth of knowledge. The partners take real pride in the atmosphere that’s created in the shop. We try to make the shop feel really local – we have a lot of customers who know our partners by name, and we try to know them by name as well.
How does location influence sales? We are a destination shop. We’re part of a retail park, so shoppers have to drive to us. We also have a lot of competitors on our doorstep, which is healthy as it helps to drive footfall. We have a large number of big weekly shops, but equally through midweek there are more people coming in for meal deals. There are no standout lines that particularly drive real volumes, but there are pockets of areas in which we tend to do well. For example, our meat counters, which are our point of difference. Likewise, we’ve seen a spike in our No.1 lines, and equally in our Essentials range. We also do really well on beers, wines and spirits. We have a fantastic wine specialist in branch. Customers will often ask for him by name. They actually ask when his days off are on the following week!
You had no out-of-stocks. Have you worked on that? Recently we’ve put a bit of work into driving availability in our fruit & veg section, and that’s worked well, particularly with sales of soft fruits like strawberries. As a team we’ve worked to ensure that every area of the shop is worked to the highest standard. We use our systems to ensure that we’ve got the depth of fill on the shelf and availability at all times, whenever a customer comes into to store. It’s been things like just ensuring that deliveries are coming in at the right time, and making sure we have the correct stock on shelf at the right times. As a business generally, improvement in availability has been one of the biggest impacts over the past couple of years. Whether it’s branch, regional or central teams, everyone is pulling in the same direction.
Summer is coming to an end. What’s your next focus? Being in Scotland, we’re used to wet summers, so it hasn’t really impacted us. It’s generally been the same products and volumes we’d usually sell. I mentioned fresh fruits, but ice creams and seasonal ranges have sold well. We typically also get a spike in footfall to our café during the school holidays, and schools in Scotland went back three weeks ago. We’ve got some live promotions running now. But next, we’re really excited about Halloween. We’ll have our pumpkins out. We’ll have treats ready to go on our seasonal aisle and at the front of store.
How will you celebrate the win? We’ll celebrate as a team with some cake and maybe some drinks later on. There’s been a lot of hard work that’s gone into this. Obviously, you don’t do it for the award, you do it for the customers, but we’re chuffed to bits.
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