Winner: Sainsbury’s Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire
Store manager: Jason Merrett
Opened: 1994
Size: 44,000 sq ft
Market share: 18.7%
Nearest rivals: Waitrose - 0.2 miles; Tesco - 2.1 miles; Morrisons - 5.1 miles
Store data source: Analysis by CACI. Call the market planning group on 020 7602 6000

Congratulations! How long have you been store manager? I’ve been at this store almost a year to the day. I’ve been a store manager for 20 years and with the company for 26 years.

What recent changes have you made to your store? I’ve really tried to get the team to focus on the customer. We launched a Tell Sainsbury’s campaign and we’ve used that information to improve the store: it’s about the range we offer. We over-index on what we call ‘confident cooks’ and therefore we have expanded our range to stock more exotic items such as globe courgettes and black garlic.

The store offers several other concessions - Starbucks, Explore Learning Maths & English tuition, Timpson, a dry cleaners and a pharmacy. Has it been a successful way to drive footfall? It helps as it gives customers a one-stop shop. The pharmacy has particularly helped to get people into the store and the Starbucks is very popular with parents. We tend to get a spike in trade around the time kids are dropped off at, and picked up from, school.

The store received a perfect score for shop floor service. How have you managed to bring this about? We’ve got an internal measure to promote customer service called Making Customers Matter, which helps us keep customers in mind.

With a Waitrose very close by and a Tesco superstore a few miles away, how do you fight the competition? We have a lot of competition and so we’ve tried to look at our range and provide a wider premium range - Waitrose customers tend to demand more premium products. We like to think we can now compete with their range and also attract customers through our points of difference that the Waitrose store doesn’t have, such as clothing.

Are you doing anything special for Wimbledon? We’ve got several promotions on strawberries and Pimm’s and we’re hoping for a Murray win!

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