Duty manager: Adam Truscott
Store: Waitrose Portswood
Opened: 2006
Size: 17,581 sq ft
Market share: 2.4%
Population: 252,562
Grocery spend: £15,723,362
Spend by household: £156.98
Competitors: 58
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.5 miles, Asda 1.4 miles, Co-op 0.8 miles, Iceland 0.3 miles, Lidl 0.6 miles, M&S 1.4 miles, Morrisons 5.6 miles, Sainsbury’s 0.3 miles, Tesco 0.3 miles, Waitrose 1.5 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’ve recently joined the store? I’ve been here eight weeks. I’ve spent seven years with Waitrose but I’ve been a [John Lewis] partner for 22 years. I started at John Lewis in Southampton, and moved around the John Lewis side of the business quite a bit. My health took a bit of a downturn after I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, but the business – being the business it is – got me a role much closer to home, and that’s where my Waitrose journey started.
Did your condition have implications during the pandemic? I was on the clinically vulnerable list, and had to furlough during that time. I’m very grateful for being in a business that just got it and helped do the right thing and supported me.
Who’s coming into store? Portswood is just on the outskirts of the city, and there are very affluent areas within a couple of miles. There’s a huge uni campus nearby, so as a result we have a real mix of shoppers. Our on-demand services have really grown. We are near enough in the top 20 in Southampton for performance on both Deliveroo and Uber Eats, and that is 100% down to uni students. The pace can be relentless.
What are they ordering? All the stuff you’d expect students to get, in terms of confectionery and top-up shops. It’s both baskets and trolleys. Lots of fruit & veg, fresh produce, and you always have soft drinks, including lots of water. The reason it’s so popular is the convenience. If the weather gets worse, I’d expect it to pick up further. For example, after the last England game on Saturday the weather wasn’t great but lots of people still wanted to celebrate.
Has the wet summer affected sales of seasonal lines? People still want to have the best possible summer they can have, rain or shine, so they’re still stocking up. Seasonal is doing really well, be that fresh produce or things like charcoal. We have a three for £12 BBQ offer, which includes products like steak and beef marrow burgers. It’s great value and people are buying it..
There are lots of promotional displays around the store. What are your favourites? Our beer and wine offers are fantastic. As soon as you come into the shop, we have a promo display pushing a magnum of prosecco for £14.99. Products included in our £2 a portion recipe ideas are also flying out.
Our shopper was impressed by how proactive staff were. What drives those standards? We had our annual partnership week last week. I gave out a 35-year badge and a couple of 20-year badges. Fundamentally, people have been here a very long time, we have a huge amount of experience and brilliant retailers, all across Southampton generally. And new starters pick it up quickly. We have 140 partners and are recruiting for more permanent roles now. We want to introduce some short, sharp shifts that can help us cope better with peaks in demand, to ensure we deliver the best service and availability, even at pinch points.
What do you want to see from incoming JLP chairman Jason Tarry? We’re in a good place at the minute. What we now need to do is build on it, remain absolutely obsessive about delivering the best service in the market, keep the value messaging going and keep availability absolutely tip-top.
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