Waitrose has installed concierge desks in eight stores to welcome customers and offer services. John Ryan visits the Horley branch.

Front of house is one of those terms used by retailers when they mean the part of a store in which shoppers shop.

It is also used in opposition to ‘back of house’ that tends to mean everything that the customer doesn’t see, from IT systems to stock reserves.

Both terms are not entirely helpful and all it really goes to show is how imprecise the definitions are. Indeed, for anybody unfamiliar with the jargon, front of house might actually mean that which is encountered on entering a premises, whether it is a shop, a hotel or maybe a restaurant.

On this reckoning, front of house will colour the judgement of pretty much everything that is likely to follow and it is vital a good impression is made if a sale is to be closed.

With this in mind, Waitrose has just unveiled a front of house ‘concierge desk’ in Horley, the small Surrey town just south of the North Downs and just north of Gatwick airport.

It is a generally affluent neck of the woods, hence perhaps the fact that Waitrose has had a “mark three” store here since 1999 and the shop ticks over nicely almost from the moment the doors open in the morning. A ‘mark three’ store features huge amounts of space between the fixtures and astonishingly wide aisles. For those arriving in the Horley car park, however, the view has been slightly different since last week.

Waitrose in bloom

Stand in front of the store and, apart from the long frontage, the element that is likely to hit the shopper between the eyes is the Waitrose Flower Garden.

It is one of 40 that have been rolled out across the estate in recent months and has proved a success almost since the off, according to Anthony Wysome, head of store development.

Designed by consultancy Edge, Waitrose Flower Garden’s appearance is akin to a mini-garden centre in a dark wood box. This means plants, a few gardening tools and some compost piled up in front, allowing those with a hankering to become an urban gardener to satisfy their craving while doing a food shop.

It’s a gentle introduction to the store, even before entry is made to the interior, and beyond it there is a lobby that Wysome says was a gents’ toilet until a few days prior to the visit.

Now it is a floral space in which shoppers can pick up blooms. It continues the horticultural theme of the exterior and softens the entrance to the shop.

Move through the lobby-cum-antechamber and into the store proper and, as well as the bank of handheld scanners that Waitrose seems to have had for an age, the initial vista is occupied almost entirely by the concierge desk.

This is a very well-finished wooden affair and there is a simplicity and warmth about it that seems immediately at ease with the rest of this store. The concierge desk, again the handiwork of Edge, fits well within the environment.

“We wanted a desk at the front of the shop that wouldn’t be about selling cigarettes and magazines and which would act as a hub for the services that we offer and which will be able to help with those that may yet be to come,” says Wysome. “This is about service and being able to help out partners with the service that we are known for.

“All retailers at the moment are taking bets on which services you can put in a store to make it more useful when you are shopping.”

For the moment, this means that if you are a Waitrose card holder, and around 50% of those entering this store are likely to be so, you can head for the concierge desk to claim your free cup of coffee and a copy of either the Daily Mail or The Daily Telegraph. The latter service is dependent on the shopper spending a set sum in the store and having a particular political world-view perhaps, but it does nonetheless equate to a welcome.

There are other services available at the concierge desk. Dry cleaning and picking up click-and-collect purchases from John Lewis are among them. On the laundry front, for those needing freshly pressed shirts, for instance, the dry cleaning service is provided through a tie-up with Johnsons The Cleaners and it’s a simple matter of putting your soiled shirts in the car when you head for the store and handing them over prior to beginning the shopping.

Prices are competitive and given that increased frequency of shopping is a trend that retail pundits everywhere seem to be noting, it seems a small step for shoppers to get used to the idea of taking their dry-cleaning in when they go food shopping.

The greeting from those behind the concierge desk is friendly and un-pushy, as you’d expect from Waitrose, and goes some way towards avoiding the potential “collateral damage”, as Wysome phrases it, that can take place when things are moved in a supermarket. “Shoppers hate it when you move things around,” he notes.

Easy options

In total, this is a simple initiative, but one that marks Waitrose out as continuing to strive to improve what is already a good, service-led, food retailing proposition. And, as this is about making shopping easier, Wysome points out that next to the concierge desk there is a Food To Go perimeter chiller unit, for shoppers on a grab-and-go mission - it has been moved forward to its present position from deeper in the store.

There are now eight Waitrose stores with concierge desks. As a way of giving real meaning to the front of house term this looks effective. Rather more to the point, this is about investing in a future that is still evolving and, as the John Lewis Partnership is generally recognised as being in the vanguard of ecommerce, the concierge desk is an in-store expression of this, in part at least.

In the case of Horley, it also takes a ‘mark three’ store, of which there are apparently a handful, and gives an additional reason for loyal shoppers to visit. This is a relatively small change to the store’s interior, but change in existing supermarkets has to be undertaken gradually and tends to be incremental.

And when you’re done with the concierge service and the food shopping is complete, it would be a good move to visit the in-store cafe, which really does have something of a look and feel of a 1950s diner, as Wysome observes.

Waitrose Horley

Ambience Spacious

New features Exterior garden shop and interior concierge desk