Waitrose Stowford Rise, Sidmouth: Grocer 33 store of the week

Tell us about your career path with Waitrose? I’ve worked for Waitrose for 20 years. I started as a weekend assistant and worked my way up. I’ve been a branch manager for the last six years, and I joined Sidmouth in the summer of 2019.

What’s been the biggest challenge of managing the store over the last couple of years? The rate of change has been difficult at times to keep on top of. As a branch manager you want to look after your team and customers. They’ve all had challenges they’ve had to face personally and professionally in the last few years, so it’s been harder at times to really look after your team in the way you wanted to.

What are your key priorities as a manager at the moment? Trying to make sure everybody is empowered to do the right thing for customers, whether that be making sure we’re looking tidy and organised in the morning or whether that be making a decision to delight a customer for a particular reason. If the team feel they’ve got the freedom to make the right choices for the customer, often we get it right because our partners know our customers the best.

Your score would have been ever better but for availability. Is that a challenge? It’s disappointing that we didn’t do better at that time. We’re not immune to absences and bits and pieces caused by Covid that at times put a strain on the operation. We’ve got a key routine of activity that we work through and over the last few years that’s been disrupted by various factors and it’s had an impact on availability at times. But we’re committed to keep working to give our customers as good availability as we possibly can.

Have you been struggling with increased staff absences lately due to Covid? Covid levels are high across the country and no one is immune to that. We try to keep our routines and processes going as well as we can, but yes, in recent weeks we have been affected a little bit by that.

Are there any categories that are being more affected in terms of availability? Covid impacted lots of things in various ways at various levels of the supply chain, so it is quite transitional when things are affected at different times. There’s no one specific or regular area that we’re necessarily suffering more than any others, but there’s still a fair bit of disruption at the minute.

Our mystery shopper noted attractive seasonal displays. How has Mother’s Day and Easter trading been? I think customers are looking to spend more time with family than perhaps they did last year, so we certainly saw that during Mother’s Day. Likewise, our Easter display is strong and we’re seeing customers really taking advantage of our good range. Our No.1 range of Easter eggs is always very indulgent and the Heston from Waitrose Golden Apple range has also been very popular. We have really strong seasonal trades. We did particularly well last year with the amount of ‘staycations’, and so our trade through May, June, July and August is very strong.

Our shopper also noted displays catering for a range of budgets. Is that something you’re doing deliberately at the moment? We’re doing everything we can to work with our suppliers to offer as good value to our customers as we can, so we’re really focused on prices, not just for seasonal things but basic staples too.

Are you trialling any layout changes in preparation for the upcoming HFSS legislation? We’re not trialling anything in particular right now. But we are actively working with our central teams to make sure that our store is compliant with the new legislation.

Tell us about your local shopper community in Sidmouth. We’ve got good links with our local community and we have partners who work with local charities, schools and things like that to make sure we support them as best we can. Our customers have a real passion for quality – for example our food counters trade very well in Sidmouth. And because our team knows the customers really well, they know what to offer them.

How do you balance catering to your retiree customer base with appealing to other shoppers? One key thing is to be consistent and obviously our assortments and products are managed centrally, so we just try to make sure that when every customer comes in, whether they’re a regular or whether they’re somebody new to the area,they receive a consistent experience. So we’re really trying to focus on putting the customer first every time - as you would have seen from the service scores that your mystery shopper highlighted, We just do everything we can to make sure the customer experience is a really good one – and what we’re finding is that it makes people come back to us.

How have your older shoppers taken to the revamped Waitrose loyalty programme? We try to make the offers personalised and tailor the offer to better suit customers. We have dedicated partners in branch who are very knowledgeable about the MyWaitrose offers and have worked really hard, over recent weeks in particular, to support our customers with the slight adjustment. But we’re continuing to look to hone and to modify the offer to make it fit for customers.

What was the team’s reaction to the return of the John Lewis Partnership staff bonus? It’s always a good time of year when the business has been successful. I think partners are really clear on when we will receive a bonus and what conditions mean that we might not, so there’s real transparency. But yes, they were delighted with the bonus this year and it’s a testament to everybody’s hard work, particularly over the last year as we’ve had such turbulent trading conditions. .