Morrisons Norwich store manager Chloe Summons

Chloe Summons was talking to Stephen Jones

What’s it like to be a retailer in Norwich? Norwich is a lovely and extremely diverse city. I joined here a year ago and, compared to other stores I’ve managed, it’s really fast-paced, there’s always hustle and bustle with people needing to buy things. We’re busy all year round and our online operation is massive and growing.

Carrow Road stadium is practically in your car park. How do you manage that challenge? It can get very crowded very quickly with thousands of people coming in to use the café or pick up a drink, sweets or a pie on game days, so it’s all hands to the pump. There’s nine managers and 215 colleagues here, and many have been doing match days since the store opened 26 years ago. They know how best to serve the football fans. Success on football days comes down to planning. We’ll prep certain areas of the store earlier, so when they come in we can be on hand. Our approach is to man-mark certain areas we know will need extra bodies, like the café or in the pie shop or oven fresh for people who want hot meals for the match. Everyone gets involved, including myself.

 

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You’re one of three stores to have a new Holland & Barrett concession installed this week. How has that been received? It looks fantastic – it’s only been open one day, but I think it will draw more customers in. The Holland & Barrett team manages the running of the store entirely separately and have their own deliveries once a week. However, it’s really important to me they feel treated the same as any of our colleagues in the store.

Has there been any other recent investment? We relaunched fresh foods at the same time. It’s been massive for us – the range has been modernised and completely changed, with 400 new products added. We have a big vegetarian and vegan population, so we’ve increased our range in those categories too.

How are you promoting the new ranges in store? We run tastings across Market Street. But the best way to promote products on shelf is really focusing on availability. It’s especially important for the specialist sections like vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free. The product range is smaller, but people come in specifically for those ranges and it’s disappointing if they can’t get them.

That’s clearly working, as standards were high – is that something you’ve worked on? In the year I’ve been here the store has had its challenges, but we’ve really faced into them as a team and done a great job to bring it back to the basics of cleanliness, availability and time to queue. Sometimes in retail we have a tendency to try and fix something, but fix it how we think it should be done, rather than listening to what our customers are telling us. But we’ve really slowed down and we’re working harder now to listen to customers.

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