Winning The Grocer 33 store of the week is no fluke. It requires spotless standards and flawless retail basics from a well drilled, passionate team, topped off almost always by near faultless availability.
That’s not easy in the best of times, but for Alastair Havers and his 250-strong team at Sainsbury’s London Road in Southend, they’ve delivered the winning combination during what has been one of the store’s most challenging periods to date: a complete top-to-bottom refit.
Havers sat down with The Grocer to tell us more about the chaos of serving customers while your store resembles a “ building site”, how the cost of living crisis is impacting Halloween spend and why his Southend store is like a “mini-London” on the Essex coast.
What’s it like running a seaside store in autumn? Are your trade peaks different? You get a bit of seasonality in Southend because lots of people come on holiday, but in reality this is a shop that’s right in the middle of the town. I describe it almost like a mini-London. There’s lots of houses around us, and you have to go through a few sets of traffic lights to get here. We’re also on the pedestrianised high street. So we get a complete mix of different trade, from people driving for their big shop, or just popping in for their meal deals. Saturdays are heaving, and our Fridays are also quite busy.
This win comes during quite a difficult period for the store. We’re four weeks into a seven-week refit. It’s a full refit right across the store. The aim is to create more space for food, and we’ve got 1,500 new lines coming in, as well as new kit and PoS. We’ve more chilled and frozen coming in and have reduced our GM department to create the space and moved the health & beauty department to the front of the shop to free up space. Some days there will be entire aisles that are empty of anything. We’ve put up signs and have greeters on hand to help customers with what is going on.
What’s been the most challenging aspect to manage? How have you coped? Definitely the night shift. The team are trying to deliver the shop for the next day, but at the same time they’ve got to manage six or seven contractors working across the store. It’s like a building site. Communication has to be there. Every day we have a huddle with all our colleagues. They all know what aisles have changed and what’s coming up the next day. We’ve got little sheets we hand out to them, so they know exactly where everything is.
The team seem to have coped well. What’s been your message as a store manager? It’s that the company have trusted us with all of this money that they’re investing into the store. It’s our job to take that on board and make sure that the customers know those plans. We want them to understand why we are doing it and that ultimately that this is all for their benefit.
It’s Halloween this weekend. Are shoppers cutting back amid the cost of living crisis? We’re selling as much confectionery as we were last year. Our Halloween aisle is selling through nicely. We’re putting Christmas on this weekend, knowing that shoppers are looking to trade up.
What other trends are you noticing driving shopper behaviour? We had the bad weather last week, so our on-demand sales went up. There’s lots of talk about the cost of living crisis, but it shows that people are still happy to pay extra for on demand deliveries or to trade up. They might not be able to afford to go out for a meal, but they want to treat themselves through our Taste The Difference or Discovery ranges.
What’s your next big target? What do you need to do to ensure you have a great Christmas? It will be about attracting as many new customers as possible. As I’ve already said, we know that customers trade up Christmas, and we’ll aim to keep them when they do. We know the basic lines they’re coming in for and will do lots of work to show them off in displays around the store.
As much as I talk about shoppers trading up, let’s not forget there’s also going to be a core wanting our Aldi Price Match lines, or who are coming in for our Nectar value. So, we need to make sure we’re shouting about them. Then the big one is recruitment, which we’ve already started.
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