Store manager: Darren Fraser
Store: Tesco Kingsway, Dundee
Opened: 2003
Size: 64,320 sq ft
Market share: 8.4%
Population: 228,089
Grocery spend: £55,900,403
Spend by household: £525.62
Competitors: 49
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.9 miles, Asda 0.4 miles, Co-op 0.7 miles, Iceland 1.6 miles, Lidl 0.8 miles, M&S 1.7 miles, Morrisons 1.6 miles, Sainsbury’s 2 miles, Tesco 0.8 miles, Waitrose 37.4 miles
Source: CACI. For more info visit www.caci.co.uk/contact. Notes: Shopper profiling is measured using Grocery Acorn shopper segmentation. Store catchment data (market share, population, expenditure, spend by household, competition) is within a five-mile radius. For CACI’s shopper segmentation of the other stores we visited this week see the online report at www.thegrocer.co.uk/stores/the-grocer-33
There are three Tesco Extra stores in Dundee. How are you different? We’re all quite similar, we just have different customer metrics. Riverside, which also won in October, is more of a student store. Whereas we are on a retail park and get a lot of passing trade. Our position on the Kingsway, the main route into town, is ideal. We are busy through the week, but certainly Saturday and Sunday we benefit from trade at the retail park.
Do you cannibalise each other? Not really. We sell lots of local produce, but our non-food offer is what makes us different. We are the destination shop for non-food. Our clothing mart is 9,000 sq ft, which is one of the largest in the country. Then when it comes to GM, home and cook, we’ve got the biggest range in Dundee.
How closely do you work with the other stores to collaborate on preventing crime? We’ve got Express stores and the three Extras, and we all know each other pretty well. If something happens or there’s a shoplifting gang, we will use our internal chat to pass information around. Organised crime is the biggest threat. We’ve introduced bodycams here and it’s made a real difference – colleagues feel much safer and it can also de-escalate situations.
It’s been a sunny couple of weeks. Have shoppers in Dundee been splashing out? Yeah, you see it on fresh foods – particularly meat and poultry, where we’ve been refilling a lot more throughout the day. We’re also dealing with different types of requests, about whether we have paddling pools or garden furniture. People buy different things with summer coming up, there’s an atmosphere in the shop as people get excited for their holidays – it’s almost like Christmas. The theatre really comes to life.
It sounds like you were prepared for the rush this week…We buy well in advance on non-food. But the biggest thing for me is keeping an eye on the weather forecast, and making sure if it’s sunny we’re on top of our schedules and rotas. We ‘man mark’ certain areas that are important to customers. If you’ve not got the right people on the big areas like booze, crisps, meat and poultry or basic produce like lettuce, you’re going to be toiling a bit.
We’ve worked quite hard on making sure we’ve got enough colleagues in on Fridays and Saturdays when we know it’s going to be busy. That sounds like a dead easy thing to say, but its something we’ve had to work hard on and it’s great that the results came through on Friday.
We are well into the Easter run-up. How is prep going? We’re starting to see all the pre-Easter stock sell, which gives a good buzz. From my experience, Easter is not nearly as busy up here as it is in England. We don’t close on Easter Sunday, so we can spread trade out over the seven days rather than squeezing. We’re not subject to HFSS laws either, so it’s not something we have to worry about. We’ve got lots of Easter eggs and lots of great deals.
What did you make of Tesco’s results last week? What’s been Ken Murphy’s message to stores? Great results. There’s been lots of hard work over the past three years and it’s great to see market share and profits increase. The big message was just ‘thank you’ – it’s a combination of everybody’s hard work.
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