Sainsbury's Reopens After £3.5m Refurbishment

Store manager promises better product availability and improved customer service

Sainsbury’s reopened their doors at 9.00am this morning (Wednesday 4th December) after a £3.5 million refurbishment.

Over 400 hundred members of staff have been decked out in new uniforms fitting for their much improved surroundings.

Wider aisles and a brighter, airier feel to the store are the most apparent changes, along with a new meat counter, fish counter and delicatessen.

“We’ve made a massive improvement in our fresh food offering which is what customers asked for,” says Store Manager Tom Routledge.

Tom, who has 32 years of supermarket experience, has been at the Chiswick store for the past three months heading up the new senior management team. “We’ve listened to our customers’ grievances and done our best to address these. But we’ve also made a large investment in the staff areas of the stores which were dire; we’ve given them a place that they can be proud to work in, trained them in the art of customer service and shown that we care about them too.”

This was clearly working this morning with smiles all round from staff and customers alike.

25 additional staff have been employed for the online shopping service opening up 750 delivery slots locally, the basket only tills have been replaced with more self service tills for those with only a few items (and I didn’t hear ‘please replace the item in the bagging area once in the hour I was there this morning!), the customer service counter has been enlarged and, Tom promises, much improved and the back door exit has been reopened with greater security measures in place and

The store also boasts a new-look pharmacy which will allow customers to pick up prescriptions between 8am and 9pm Monday to Friday and between 11am and 5pm on Sundays and a new private consultancy room in which Tom hopes to be able to offer services such as blood pressure checks in the future.

Any comments about the new store both positive and negative are welcomed. Please email manager.chiswick@sainsburys.co.uk

December 3, 2008