Store: Tesco Sleaford Superstore
Store manager: Steven Ross
Opened: 1994
Size: 21,530 sq ft
Market share: 35.3%
Population: 37,254
Grocery spend: £993,090
Spend by household: £61
Competitors: 9
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.5 miles, Asda 11.4 miles, Co-op 0.5 miles, Iceland 0.3 miles, Lidl 0.2 miles, M&S 11.5 miles, Morrisons 11.5 miles, Sainsbury’s 0.2 miles, Tesco 10.1 miles, Waitrose 17.5 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.
What’s your career path with Tesco been like? I’ve worked for the company for 24 years. I started off in London, where I worked under all formats. I then moved out to Peterborough and worked at the Holbeach store for about three years before moving to Sleaford, where I’ve been for four years. Coming here is probably the best move I’ve ever made in Tesco, because it’s just such a lovely area, the customers and the staff are fantastic.
What is it about the local community that makes this store special? The local community is about 10,000 people living in the area. Normally you live in Sleaford if you shop in Sleaford, this is not a destination store. We see our local shoppers every day, and while it’s a decent-sized superstore, it feels more of a local community store.
What else do you think is behind the huge market share the branch holds? We’ve always had a good market share in the town – being located in the high street also helps – but I think our market share has increased since Covid because when it hit we genuinely did our best to look after our colleagues and our customers. They showed their appreciation by shopping with us more.
How is summer trading now compared with last year? Prices have gone up so people are perhaps buying less, but everything is more expensive so trading is roughly the same.
What school summer holiday displays do you have on right now? We’ve got ‘back to school’ already on and it’s 25% off this week, which is fantastic for people buying their uniforms in advance. We’ve got loads of summer toys available, and we’ve got a couple of very big displays with barbecue and gardening stuff.
What feedback are you hearing on the new Free Kids Meal campaign? We don’t have an in-store café at Sleaford, but I am going with my kids today to our other local Tesco as I think the offer is the right thing to do.
How else is your branch helping people facing rising living costs? We support our local food bank, so we have a permanent food bank fixture at the back of checkouts in our store. It gets filled every single day for the local food bank to collect weekly. Every evening we also donate food that would have otherwise gone to waste. We recently did a cycle ride to support Ukraine in which we raised about £1,500, and we are currently collecting food and other parcels such as school clothes and toys for some Ukrainian families in the area.
How are the coming HFSS legislations affecting your store layout? Your mystery shopper would have seen the grocery changes already, and they were incredibly minimal in our store. We’ve moved just a few products around. We’ve got some fresh moves coming up in a few weeks’ time and that’ll be more noticeable. The main change will be our meal deal fixture, which will be relocated.
Why was your meat and cheese section shut down last Saturday? It wasn’t to do with supply – it was due to the extreme weather we had earlier in the week. Some of our fridges went down – we had a great maintenance plan and we kept pretty much all our fridges on, but unfortunately a couple of them did go down. We lost a bit of stock, which unfortunately we had to waste in order to keep our customers safe.
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