Santok Singh likes to instil a simple philosophy within his team. Provide “clean, clear stores that are easy to shop” and customers will come. That was evident when The Grocer visited his Marlborough Way store in Tamworth, which took the crown in this week’s Grocer 33 mystery shop.
It came during a challenging time for Singh who was covering for the regional manager, giving him the distraction of overseeing 26 stores within the region. But his 182-strong team more than stepped up to the mark, delivering a spotless store and an enjoyable shopping trip.
Singh talked to The Grocer about what drives that culture, how Morrisons has significantly cut waste from its Market Street counters and why he thinks its new Unbeatable Prices price match will be a “game-changer”.
Is this your first Grocer 33 win? Yes and it’s absolutely made my week. It’s funny, I was actually reading the magazine last week and was wondering ‘when will it be time for my store’, so I can’t believe it’s actually happened. I’ve been with Morrisons for 23 years, two of them here which is my tenth store.
What makes this win even more amazing for me as a manager is that it came during a week when I was covering for the regional manager, looking after 26 stores. I wasn’t really involved in the day to day running here, so this win is all credit to the team. As a manager you set the culture, but you have to trust and empower them to do their jobs. They will tell you what good looks like.
Describe the store in one word. Why? Community. The majority of our customers are regulars, coming at least twice a week. They know my name, they even know what car I drive. Every Saturday we have around seven or eight couples who come in early, it’s like their day out and they tell me all about what they’ve done in the week. We also work closely with the local council, as well as volunteer groups. We host the local little picking group on a Sunday every month. We provide the refreshments, they clear our carpark. They like it, we like it and the customer notices a clean, clear store.
What’s your biggest point of difference compared to the competition? We’re just outside of the centre of Tamworth, which is a lovely town. It’s a big store, doing around 25,000 transactions every week, which gives us one of the biggest market shares in Tamworth, at around 24%. We’ve managed to grow that by around 2% over the past year.
How have you managed to grow your market share? When it comes to my teams, our roles are simple. We need to provide a clean, clear and easy shop store for the customer. Everyone needs to see the store from the customer lens. I’m very process driven, so is my team. If we don’t have availability, what’s the point, our customers will just shop elsewhere.
It’s also about listening to our customers. For example, I’m very passionate about our Market Street here. Last year we trialled a new bake off model for our instore bakeries, where we cooked Frozen baguettes rather than scratch baking. Customers didn’t like it at all. We fed that back to HQ and brought back instore bakers. We reacted quickly, and we won back their trust.
On Market Street, Morrisons claims to have made significant improvement in reducing waste, how? We’ve reduced waste massively over the last year in two ways. One is that we now have a digital production plan that calculates what has been selling well, and how many we should make of each item every day. Previously it was done by pen and paper. The other is that we’ve streamlined the range of products available. I treat my Market Street like a tap. If the weather is hot we will turn the tap on to make more fresh products. If it’s cold, we can increase the production on other lines like pies. That’s in our hands now.
Morrisons has also switched from a night to daytime replenishment model, what’s the benefit of that? Put simply, we now have more colleagues on the shop floor when we need them for customers. Previously we’d have the shop ready to go by seven, and the night team would go home. Now we start at about 4am and work until 10am, or later. Our afternoon availability has also improved because we are restocking throughout the day.
Unbeatable Prices launched this week. Do you think it will resonate more with customers than the previous Aldi/Lidl price match? It’s going be a game-changer. We previously matched 200 lines to Aldi and Lidl, now we match 500 across all of the big supermarkets. We need to do everything we can to stop customers leaving here for other shops. Customers will go to where they can get the best value, with Unbeatable Prices we’re giving them confidence. If we can combine that here with maintaining our great service and standards, I think we can disrupt the market.
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