Store manager: Ian Thorpe
Store: Waitrose, East Sheen
Opened: 1973
Size: 14,064 sq ft
Market share: 3.8%
Population: 159,546
Grocery spend: £16,016,816
Spend by household: £235.12
Competitors: 42
Nearest rivals: Aldi 4 miles, Asda 2 miles, Co-op 1.2 miles, Iceland 2.6 miles, Lidl 1.9 miles, M&S 1.1 miles, Morrisons 2.1 miles, Sainsbury’s 0.7 miles, Tesco 0.1 miles, Waitrose 1.4 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
Did you always want to work in retail? I’ve been in shops my whole life, it’s what I’m passionate about and couldn’t see myself doing a desk job. I started at Sainsbury’s and came across to Waitrose 20 years ago. This is my second spell in East Sheen – I used to be deputy manager 12 years ago and returned as branch manager in 2022. It felt like coming home.
This seems to be the typical Waitrose area… It is an affluent area, no two ways about it. There’s a very village feel here, it’s one of the closest places you can get to London without feeling like you’re in London. Our customer base is predominantly families and older people. It is mixed, but we have an older demographic than perhaps other stores in the area. Our average spend is also typically higher. Last week the sun was out and people here went heavy on hot weather items.
The weather was mixed this bank holiday, did strong early sales hold? Sunday and Monday were actually quite cold here, so we didn’t have the ‘bumper’ bank holiday barbecue weather. But that being said, it was still strong. We are a very busy, densely traded shop and we beat budget last week.
Our shopper noted that they found partners hard to find on the shop floor. Why could that be? It is fair to say we are operating things slightly differently now, in terms of being data-led in what should be done and when. Sunday is our busiest trading day of the week, so we don’t want too much activity in terms of stock filling. Obviously, it’s about striking the right balance and if the checkouts were particularly busy, we would always try and support that area.
That being said, everyone the shopper interacted with was excellent, and checkouts went smoothly…
I’m really pleased. We have 130 partners, including one who’s been here 52 years! We’ve got probably one of the more established partner teams in the country. Our self-checkouts were a pain point and last year we had some major investment to reconfigure them. There are more terminals now and it’s so much easier for customers to get served. Ultimately, I’m fairly simple-minded in that I just want the shop to be full and give great service. Getting customers through the till quickly is what shoppers want, it’s what I want, and that has really helped us. We want everybody to get the Waitrose experience, which is probably one of the biggest challenges we’ve got. The job has changed and is much more complex now. Five years ago we weren’t doing on-demand orders.
How have you had to adapt since the rollout of on-demand? Has it put pressure on teams? It’s changed the landscape, definitely. It’s great that we can reach more customers, but it does add more complexity to the operation. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Some orders feel almost like a full shop, but equally on a Saturday night it can be a pack of cigarettes and that’s it. We’ve recently opened up Sunday afternoons and evening order slots. It feels like the Sunday trading six-hour window is no more – we open on-demand at 7am and it’s busy until 10pm, whereas the physical shop is only open six hours. We are having to adapt quickly to ensure we have the right stock on shelves and the right people to be able to capitalise on that.
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