Waitrose Solihull: Grocer 33 store of the week

This store won in March 2022. How does it feel to win again? It’s nice. I hadn’t been in branch very long when we won before, only two months. I’m two-and-a-half years in now, so this one feels more like my ‘own’. I’ll have been with the partnership 21 years in September. Fundamentally though, it’s the partners that win this.

What’s changed in store since then? We’ve got some different ways of working that have really helped to drive efficiency. We’ve also had a till rebalance at the front of shop. We’ve doubled the amount of self-service tills, which has helped our lunchtime trade become more efficient and helped the flow of customers through the checkouts.

You’re right in the centre of town. Who’s coming into store? We’re surrounded by offices, which gives us quite a lot of lunchtime footfall, which goes nicely alongside the more traditional customers. Generally, our customers love food, they have the passion for quality and are interested in provenance.

Nearly a third of your customers are on a budget. That’s a bigger proportion than a traditional Waitrose store… The investment made in lower prices has helped. We’ve also got the Essential Waitrose range which is excellent value, and offers really high quality. I think customers just appreciate the level of service they get when they come in. The MyWaitrose loyalty scheme also helps.

What has been the impact of the latest round of price cuts, which included counter products? It’s probably too early to get true trade patterns. But I would say that generally in Solihull we’re incredibly busy across our counters, especially the fish and meat counters. The one-to-one interaction with customers that they provide is what makes Waitrose quite unique.

Is there much crossover with the John Lewis next door? You could probably count on one hand the number of Waitrose stores that have a John Lewis close. In many ways there’s some real threads of what we do that are the same. Both the way we lead our teams, and the service we offer is identical in both brands and it’s important we have that identity. That said, we sell different products, and we have different needs of our partners at different times.

Does it have a noticeable difference in footfall compared with other Waitrose stores? I don’t think it necessarily affects our buying habits any differently compared to what you’d see at other Waitrose stores that don’t have a John Lewis close. What it does do is give us the opportunity to drive loyalty across both brands. Working together and having some of that cross-functionality probably helps grow loyalty to both brands.

How do you ensure you don’t lose the personal touch to service? Culturally it’s just really important to put customers first. From my perspective it’s just trusting partners and giving the freedom to say ‘it’s OK, you do what you believe is the right decision for the customer’.

What’s your immediate focus beyond Easter? With Easter being so early, the start of the year has been really condensed with a lot of trade and a lot of events. What that does do is enable us to have a bit of a run into summer without a lot going on. Our focus in branch will be doubling down on serving customers brilliantly and ensuring the best availability.

Store: Waitrose Solihull

Store manager: David Smith

Opened: June 2016

Size: 18,664 sq ft

Market share: 7.9%

Population: 468,395

Grocery spend: £64.62

Competitors: 71

Nearest rivals:

Aldi 0.2 miles

Asda 1.9 miles

Co-op 1.3 miles

Iceland 1.8 miles

Lidl 1.6 miles

M&S 1.6 miles

Morrisons 0.5 miles

Sainsbury’s 0.3 miles

Tesco 0.3 miles

Waitrose 2.6 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