Store: Waitrose Walton-le-Dale
Store manager: Frank Young
Opened: 2012
Size: 30,000 sq ft
Market share: 4.45%
Population: 269,953
Grocery spend: £6,683,819.91
Spend by household: £58.70
Competitors: 54
Nearest rivals: Aldi 0.9 miles, Asda 2.9 miles, Co-op 1.4 miles, Iceland 0.9 miles, Lidl 0.9 miles, M&S 1.1 miles, Morrisons 1.6 miles, Sainsbury’s 1.1 miles, Tesco 1.0 miles, Waitrose 8.1 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.
This is your second Grocer 33 win in just over a year. What’s changed since then? There’s been a huge amount of change. Partners were able to benefit this year from their first bonus for a few years, so that’s really lifted their spirits. Then we came into the new year and a lot of unexpected activity happened, so it’s just been a very agile year and we’re adjusting to changing trading patterns.
What have been your priorities while navigating all those changes? From a store point of view, we’ve focused on shop floor, customer service and just getting the best availability we can for those customers. And alongside that, making sure the Partners are okay – over the last 12 months they’ve had a lot of disruption themselves, so you find yourself as a listening tool for them too.
What’s so special about your front-of-store efforts? We use the front of store to try and capture the customer’s imagination straight away, and within that we really push our Essentials range at the moment. However, we’ve just changed it now for the Jubilee, so if you walk into the store today you’ll see a fantastic range of the exclusive Waitrose Jubilee products.
What are your Jubilee bestsellers so far? The one we’re really hoping for and that people are talking about, especially the Partners, is the Buckingham Palace gin. We’ve taken the botanicals from Buckingham Palace and made a bottle of gin exclusive to Waitrose.
What are the plans for the store post-Jubilee? We’re looking forward to celebrating with our fantastic summer range. There is a lot of point of sale already coming into the branch. There will also be a lot of new counter lines coming in, and that’s an area of the store where we can really aim to be different from competitors as not many still have counters in operation.
Are shoppers taking advantage of the new MyWaitrose counter discounts? Yes, that’s been a real push for us. Going from benefiting from the discounts solely on a Friday to every day has really made a difference to those areas and generated a lot more footfall.
You’re located in a retail park. How have you benefited from post-Covid trends? It can be a bit of a catch-22. As much as we’re seeing new footfall coming through, we’re conscious we are a destination shop that customers decide to drive to and because of that, we’ve got to make sure those customers have a great experience. It’s less basket shopping and much more trolley shopping. But also, we have one of the largest geographic areas in terms of home deliveries – we will very soon open up postcodes as far north as Carnforth and we also go across to Manchester. We did see a slight downturn because of inflation, but the fact we’re expanding shows our intent to go further with online.
Your market share has dipped slightly (0.4%) in the past year. Was it due to value perception? We push the Essentials range hugely and it’s one of the greatest value ranges out there in the market. We’ve also supported that with the MyWaitrose relaunch, which aims to make the items customers buy even more affordable. The value perception potentially attached to Waitrose is starting to break down, and we’re starting to see more customers doing more shopping with us.
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