Abdul Noor brings a rare perspective as a store manager who has worked for all of the big four retailers during his 20-year career. He’s biased of course, but he says his current employer Morrisons is the best because of the opportunities it’s given him.
Opportunities don’t come much bigger than Morrisons’ Canning Town store, the winner of our east London mystery shop. It’s got a diverse commuter trade and the busiest on-demand channel in the company, taking £75,000 a week on average. Add competition from a Lidl store that opened on its doorstep last year and it can get “crazy”, Noor says. He sat down with The Grocer to tell us more about it.
Have you won the Grocer 33 before? How has your team reacted? No, this is my first in my eight years with Morrisons and 20 years in retail overall. I’ve only been here six months, but I wasn’t surprised when I heard we won because of what my team are doing day in, day out for our customers. All 170 of them have everything to be proud of. To win it is the icing on the cake.
Your location suggests you have a varied trade. Tell us more about your shoppers and what they’re buying. Our shoppers are commuters. We have Canning Town bus station and train station opposite, with lots of people travelling into Canary Wharf and the City. The store opened in 2019 as part of a development of flats, and even now there are more flats being built so we’re getting busier all the time. We have schools and hotels around us, too, so we get lots of tourists in, which is helped by the London cable cars nearby, too.
It means we have mostly basket shoppers, buying maybe five to 10 items on average. Trade really picks up from 3pm every day when people come home from work. Food to go and our salad bar are the most popular items. There’s a gym next door to us, which is another key trade driver, and we stock an extended range of protein and health products to cater for gym goers. We share our underground car park with the residents; you’d expect it to get really congested, but it doesn’t.
How has Morrisons Now landed? How much of your sales does it contribute? We are the biggest store in the company for immediacy, taking £75,000 a week on average across Morrisons Now, Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo, as well as Amazon. Sometimes we’ll 40-50 orders drop at any one time so need to have a big team dedicated to that, and we recruited more than 15 roles when it launched.Has it been a challenge keeping up with the growth?It can get crazy, especially when the football was on and we were open two hours later than usual.
But we’re proactive, and we also make sure to celebrate success because rewarding your team can go a long way.My ambition is for us to be a showcase store for the rest of the business, as the biggest operator, but with a minimum rate of rejections. Our current rejection target is 3%, but we’re aiming for below 1%. Any rejection has to be approved by the duty manager. Sometimes it’s the case that an item isn’t on the shop floor or it’s been missed during the shop when it’s very busy.
How do you stop on-demand detracting from the experience of shoppers in store? It’s true, some customers often don’t want to disturb a store colleague who is busy picking orders. But since I’ve come into the store I’ve made sure that all of our colleagues are trained on how to greet customers as soon as they’re through the door. I spend a lot of time on the shop floor meeting customers. Store managers have to role model – if managers are doing it, colleagues will follow.
Lidl opened next door, how have you responded? It opened a year ago. At the time head office agreed we could price match them locally on key lines like bananas and onions. We check the price every week and will drop our prices if they have. At the end of the day our main point of difference is Market Street, combined with our customer service. We have to make sure our counters are always fresh and appealing. My job as store manager is to ensure my team feels empowered to hold those standards 24/7, even when I’m not instore.
Your Market Kitchen, café and florist closed last year, what have you replaced them with? The space is currently still mostly empty, but a new company is going to take over the space from November. We were also one of the launch stores for a new Asian Corner concession, which opened about three months ago. It sells fresh sushi and bubble tea and has brought a lot of extra trade.
It’s run by an external company but customers don’t see it that way. They’re involved in our daily huddles, and we keep them up to date on what’s going on across the store so that everyone has the same vision.
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