Appearance matters

In this article about the Do’s of running a convenience store I am looking at employee appearance.

Personal cleanliness must be a given as your team will be dealing with food every day. So clean hands & nails, clean, controlled hair and clean cloths is the basic standard.

Employees: Uniforms

We choose to wear uniforms in our shop for a number of reasons including:

* It enables the customer to identify shop staff

* It gives the customer a consistent visitor experience

* It ensures all employees are dressed appropriately for work

Uniforms in the form of summer polo shirts and winter fleeces are provided to the staff free of charge. It is their responsibility to keep them clean and maintained.

Employees: Name Badges

We don’t use badges in Lamb’s Larder because almost all of our customers know us by first name and we have very few ‘strangers’ use the store.

*Badges should be professionally produced

*Reflect the brand of the store

*Employee names use should be consistent across all employees and should reflect the fact that you are running a community based store.

Employees are your key retail ambassadors they always need to look the part.

This post is an extract from the e-book ‘So, you want to run a convenience store?’ by Peter Lamb. It is available for free download here.