Co-operative Group, the egalitarian retailer, has unveiled a format in London that will set the pattern for the future. John Ryan visits.

“Let’s all go down The Strand.” And for those doing so, there is rather more than bananas on offer these days thanks to the new-look Co-op shop that’s at the western end of the thoroughfare that connects what is effectively the West End with the City’s eastern fringes.

Store facts

Store Co-operative Group, The Strand

Opened February 24

Design In-house

Graphics Futurama and Novagraph

Shopfitting Johnson Group

The store in question has been open since February 24 and represents the best of the best as far as Co-op and convenience retailing are concerned. First things first, however. The Strand has a number of fairly high-profile locations along its length, ranging from the headquarters of property company Land Securities to The Savoy and taking in stamp collecting Mecca Stanley Gibbons along the way. As such, it is home to a broad swathe of affluent types, domestic and international, who will, from time to time be in need of lunch, a snack or something for the evening.

And as they emerge from Coutts, the high net worth individuals’ bank, and head off for the evening, the pressing matter of a bottle of Dom Perignon (just shy of £100) or Krug (£115) must mean that a visit to the Co-op becomes a necessity. Yes, the Co-op, the natural home of champagne and, of course, the divi - the long-serving loyalty scheme that used to carry with it highly prejudicial overtones of Coronation Street, whippets and suchlike.

Now, however, there is a new brand of city centre Co-op convenience store and there is a real sense of democracy about this one, even if it does cater for the well-heeled as well as down-to-earth Londoners.

Co-op commercial director Sean Toal puts the case clearly: “When we did the research about the location, we found that the customer base is very transient and very mixed.” The transient nature is not entirely a surprise. The store is more or less bang opposite Charing Cross station and when you glance around, everybody in this part of London is in even more of a hurry than usual.

From the outside, the store has a fairly long, low frontage and there is little sense that in its previous life it used to be three separate units, with different floor levels and non-standard internal geographies, according to Raphael Rashid, operations manager for the Southeast.

Freshening up

The store also looks pretty much like a modern Co-op of the kind that you might see almost anywhere and which the retailer has been making its standard for a few years now. Step inside though and things change and the first impression is fresh. This is a convenience store, so you’d expect the fresh nature of the offer to be put at a premium and this is indeed what greets the visitor.

There are chiller units everywhere and clear signage over each of them, although it does not always bear a relationship to the stock. There is, for instance, a long, high chiller cabinet set against the right hand perimeter wall with the legend ‘Food to go’ above it. This is curious as beneath this, the cabinet turns out to be filled with soft drinks.

Rashid says that this needs to be changed and that the reason the signage does not mirror the product is because there has been a recent move to bring the ‘Food to go’ to the front of the shop - where it is located on the first unit that the visitor encounters.

While the signage may be a little out of time, what it does show is that like most new shops, fine-tuning is required if it is to trade at its best and Co-op is busy honing its act. And in spite of the ‘Food to go’ sign, there is a requirement for product signage in this store because owing to its diverse former tenants the store is a distinctly non-standard shape with dog-legs and return areas seemingly at every turn.

That said, the ambient goods area at the back of the shop, towards the left-hand side, has product areas such as another chiller cabinet filled with bottled waters, above which there is a sign stating ‘Water’. There is an argument that the stock does the talking in instances of this kind and that the units are sufficiently high to enable shoppers to see through the space and work out what’s going on. This is carping, however, as there is little that is wrong about this store and touches such as the bakery area with its black-fronted shelves with plain wood trays and wicker basket trays have genuine appeal.

Numbers up

The numbers are impressive as well. Toal says that a shopfit, where the bulk of the design was carried out by the in-house team, that cost about £1m is producing sales averaging £75,000 a week for Co-op - a respectable figure for any convenience store.

And 61% of these sales are coming from fresh food, he says, validating the decision to bring fresh to the front. Toal also mentions that more than 60% of sales in this branch come from own-label merchandise - something which “we hadn’t anticipated”, as he puts it.

Surprisingly it has also proved to be cheaper to put together than a comparable store. Toal says this is because of the modular nature of the shopfit, which has bought the cost of store equipment production down sharply. This in turn means that as well as the newly opened Tottenham Court Road branch, which follows the same blueprint, there will be others like it in the near future. Toal says that 70 stores have been earmarked to get The Strand treatment - across a range of city centre locations.

Just as significantly he says: “There are elements of what we have done that we’d like to take to some of our other stores and we’re looking at how we can do this at the moment.” The Co-op on The Strand therefore is not only a good-looking store, but it also provides a genuine vision of the future for this retailer in a way that is so infrequently the case.

And when all else fails and it just has to be champagne, the wine cooler unit behind the long row of checkouts is filled with branded fizz that will have many reaching for their wallets as they head in to town or back to the burbs.

The champagne offer, incidentally, follows the pattern of encouraging shoppers to trade up by offering two very premium labels and then a range of mid-priced bottles, that should see customers eschewing the budget lines.

It’s about psychology - and on that account Co-op has clearly thought things through carefully.