5 new focus areas for My Local stores

Within the first few weeks of taking over, Mike Greene plans to make a raft of changes to the 140 My Local shops.

1. Within the first few weeks, a children's sweets range will be introduced on the end of aisles. "Morrisons ended up with cookie cutter stores. They had stores with schools within 200 yards and not a kids' sweet in sight," said Greene.

   

2. Halal meat will also appear in many My Local outlets. “We’ve got about 40 stores that are in very Muslim areas,” he said.

   

3. Local produce will play a huge role. Near the My Local Ilkley store there’s an award-winning butchers called Lishman’s where everyone buys their sausages, which Greene said they would be immediately approaching.

   "We'll let them know we can double their sales just by letting us stock their products," he said. "We’re looking for local heroes. It’s very easy for us to do third-party distribution – especially through Nisa.

   “I think M Local started off with the intention to do quite a lot of regional products and then very quickly, because they didn’t get the scale they wanted, they reduced it down to the simplest possible way of doing it. There was a lack of understanding of convenience.”

4. 

5. An improved food to go offer will be made available. The price of standard coffee will be brought down to £1 across all stores, but a Starbucks or Costa Coffee machine will be added alongside it  to give a balance of value and premium.

   Slush Puppie machines and Dunkin Donuts or Krispy Kreme concessions will also make more of food to go. "There’s a current deal which is a sausage sandwich and coffee for £2, which is really popular with early morning trade, so we don’t want to lose it, we just want to build on it with premium," said Greene. 

   Prices will be pitched just at or below the Co-op. Greene said: "Morrisons was unnecessarily cheap, partly because a lot of their product was priced at source so they didn’t have a choice and partly because of supermarket paranoia of what if the press say we’re ripping off our convenience customers. So, for us, it will go up a few percentage points."

   

6. Morrisons' M Local had no PayPoint in any stores. That will change under Mike Greene's leadership. "I know there’s an issue with the margins, but you’d sell your grandmother for the footfall it brings. We’ll put that into every store," he said. 

   

My Local Begins: follow the whole story