Tesco Bourne Centre, Salisbury: Grocer 33 store of the week

Tell us about your career at Tesco: I started when I was 16, and now I’m 36. I started as a Christmas temp – it was supposed to be a part-time role, but I never left. I’ve been a store manager for seven years, and in this shop for the last two.

This is a large store… It is. We’re on the very outskirts of Salisbury – you can see the cathedral from the shop. We have 511 colleagues, across all operations, which includes a substantial online delivery operation across 19 vans. The range is very good – we pretty much sell everything Tesco has to offer. It’s a bit of a hub for the community – we do various work with local community groups, be that the food bank or local pantry. 

You must get a lot of seasonal tourists, how do you cater for them? We’re not technically classed as a seasonal shop, but we definitely see a change in our customer base come holiday time, mainly to visit the cathedral. As store manager I have the ability to order stock and make sure we’ve got that seasonality covered. Cathedral visitors can be quite upmarket, so I tend to lean into some of the opportunities for our Finest range. There’s also a 10-mile hike people can do around the town, so we’ll try and cater for that too.

What’s your point of difference to nearby competition? Waitrose is probably our biggest competitor in town. We’re in a prime location, and we have a petrol filing station. The shop had a mini refit recently, so when you come in the shop it’s clean, tidy, light and spacious. As a store we still operate a scratch bakery and a lot of our competitors don’t do that. The other area in-store is wines and spirits – we have some presenters to make sure the section is looking immaculate at all times. We absolutely win that market in town.

When was your last refit? It was in November 2022. The focus was to bring fresh food to the front of the shop. We know a high priority for our customers is the quality of fresh food, dairy, meat and poultry, so it was just to bring that to life, and make fresh the first thing they see when they enter the shop.  We also revamped the fixtures, fittings and customer signage. Previously there wasn’t enough directional signage and we wanted to fix that.

How do you collect customer feedback in-store? I have two main ways. The first is a bit ad hoc when I’m on the shop floor most weekends. The second is not necessarily corporate policy, but we will invite some of our loyal customers in to have a coffee with me, and we will just talk about what we do well and what we could improve in shop. I always try and do them every period, say every four to five weeks, so it gives me time to organise. The business used to do something similar, but I’ve just run with it.  

What’s been the impact of the changes to Clubcard Prices branding in-store? We were disappointed as a business to lose that case, and there is work ongoing in the background to understand how big the workload is. It’s not just the labels and PoS packages – some shops will have external and internal signage. Each store is specific on what it will look like, but we know there’s a timescale and we know there’s a plan. It’s now down to each store to implement the changes.