How long have you been at Tesco? I’ve been with Tesco 24 years. I started in checkouts and then became a dotcom driver. I just worked my way through different roles in Tesco. I’ve worked in six stores in total and four of them as store manager, which I started five years ago.
Fraserburgh is towards the very tip of Scotland. How important is the store to the local community? The community is huge for us here, as I’m sure it is in everybody’s hometown. Doric – the Scots dialect – is quite a big part of Fraserburgh. The town for us is known as Broch. So we’re Broch and proud – this is our motto. It’s a close-knit, hard-working town. It’s got lots of heritage in the fishing industry.
How remote is it there? Do you feel isolated? It’s funny because I did read it was an extremities special in the Grocer 33. When you’re living here, you don’t feel like you’re isolated. But we are the largest supermarket in the surrounding area. So people travel into Fraserburgh to get their shopping. It’s a bit of a one-stop shop. We are 39,000 sq ft with a lot of concessions: the café, the Tesco Mobile. So people come for a bit of everything.
The store is having a major refit. What does that entail? When I started working here the store was only one year old. It’s 25 years old in April – we just had the birthday bash this weekend. It’s quite exciting because we have started our refit this week. Our fridges and freezers are going to get replaced, we’ll give our customers some nice new cabinets. We’re also looking at some signage and the ranging across grocery and non-food, and tweaking the layout.
What does the store do to help the local community? Being the biggest retailer in the area means people reach out to us all the time. We do the Tesco Stronger Starts campaign, which helps a lot of local organisations. If you take this weekend as an example, we raised some money for Mikeysline, which is a suicide prevention charity. We raised £1,300. On Monday, I was at South Park Primary School.
Are you involved in the Free Fruit & Veg for Schools programme? Yes, we’ve got an ambition to make sure that pupils are never hungry at school. In fact, at the school I was at on Monday, the kids were having breakfast during the business meeting and the teachers were saying that since they’ve introduced fruit into their breakfast, concentration levels are better and the dips at the morning breaks are a lot less for the pupils.
Tesco has expanded its Aldi Price Match to convenience stores. How important has it been for you? Very. In Fraserburgh our affluence is really mixed: it’s almost 50-50. So we do well in everything between the Tesco Finest, right down to Aldi Price Match or the new everyday low price launch. It’s all really, really important to our customers.
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