This is the first time you’ve won the online Grocer 33. So tell us about the store and how dotcom plays into things…
Darren Print: We’re a pretty normal-sized Extra, we have clothing, non-food, health & beauty. We also have a dotcom pod on site, where customers can do Click & Collect and pick up their groceries from the car park. Online, we’re a 19-van operation, and they go out three times a day. We also have three click & collect vans, about 100 drivers in total and around 100 personal shoppers, as well as eight managers for online. So I’ve got a similar sized team for dotcom alone as you might have in total for a smaller Extra.
Successful online operations obviously require excellent teamwork. How have you tried to engender that?
Sam Shaw: In a dotcom operation this big, it’s all about overcommunicating. You have to share every single bit of information with every member of your team. Every day we have a meeting with every member of my team that’s in, we have a ‘huddle’ every morning for all our pickers, and we do the same for our drivers, so everybody within dotcom knows exactly what’s going on. If you’re overcommunicating you can’t go wrong.
What’s your clientele like?
DP: Toton, south of Nottingham, is very affluent, but 40% of my trade is online, where we serve Nottingham and Derbyshire. So, once that’s taken into account, we have big variations of low, mid and high affluence and have to accommodate multiple demographics with the lines we stock.
Forty per cent is pretty high…
DP: It is. It’s very high. We more than doubled our online business through Covid, and we’ve managed to keep the majority of that trade. At the same time, our in-store sales have gone back to their original levels, so things are going well.
As such a huge dotcom operation, how do you strike the balance between online and in-store when it comes to minimising disruption?
SS: We start picking at 6am. Our night team are generally finished by then. We’re also fortunate that we’re not a very busy morning store. Other than a little bit on the school run, we generally start getting busy from about 11am, so we have a lot of pickers in from six o’clock to get the pick done and finished quick enough that we’re not impacting lunchtime and afternoon shoppers.
How do you manage substitutions? Any funny stories?
DP: Ha, yeah, there are lots of examples from years ago. But as Tesco has grown in dotcom everything’s a lot slicker, we have guides now to help people with what a good substitution would look like. So we don’t get as many silly substitutions as we used to – they’re pretty spot on nowadays.
Finally tell us about you…
SS: I’ve done 20 years. I started out part-time on bakery. I’ve managed pretty much every department – fresh, grocery, non-food, and now dotcom.
DP: I’ve done 28 years. I’ve been a Tesco store manager for 15-16 years. This is my third Grocer 33 win – and when you win the FA Cup three times you get to keep the cup, so I’m wondering if the same applies?!
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