McColl’s reported operating profit up 14.6% to £10m in the six months to May 25. Retail Week speaks to the retailer’s chief executive James Lancaster.

Lancaster has dropped the chairman role after pressure from the City

You’ve posted a strong set of half-year results with both sales and EBITDA up. What’s driving the growth?

We’ve seen growth from customers changing their shopping habits. Gone are the days where customers spend £200 on two trolleys’ worth of goods. Now people shop little and often.

How are you competing against grocers such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s who are opening more convenience stores?

We differ from them because we operate stores locally where people live. For example, 11% of our stores are on the high street and the rest are typically on housing estates. Our biggest competitors are actually independents and the Co-op, but we compete by being very convenient. We offer a range of services such as Post Offices within stores, Collect+, PayPoint and the Lottery.

You’ve stepped down from being chairman, passing that role to deputy chair John Coleman. Was that down to pressure from the City?

When you float and you’re chairman and chief executive, it’s not regarded by the City as best practice. Through meeting more investors, I’ve discovered that they couldn’t invest because it’s not code compliant. I thought, why am I putting myself at a disadvantage? The simplest answer was to be code compliant.

What other internal changes have there been?

Our chief operating officer Martyn Aguss has resigned. It was completely his own decision - I’m not aware if he has a job to go to. I’m long enough in the tooth to know that over time people come and go. It’s a seamless transition with operations director Dave Thomas now taking up that role. We won’t be recuiting an operations director. I don’t think we need to as a plc with a board our size - we have three executive directors and three non-executive directors.

Last week you launched a customer loyalty scheme for the first time. Why are loyalty cards important to the business?

We have five million customers coming into the stores every week and we wanted to know more about them so we could target them more. We also wanted to reward them for shopping with us. We’re new to this game but it’s going well – people are signing up.