Sharon’s C-Store Diary: Sun and Salads

June 9, 2009

Sharon Kane, award-winning c-store manager at Spar Cullybackey, part of the Henderson Retail group in Northern Ireland, on serving convenient summer food.

At last the sun is shining and sales are on the up too – it’s amazing how the weather can affect our business. I hope it lasts.

The only challenge is that the poor girls in the prep room are rushed off their feet. When the sun comes out everyone wants to eat salads but they can’t be bothered to make them for themselves. As a result, the girls’ arms are aching from mixing buckets of coleslaw and their fingers are sore from peeling 200 boiled eggs every day.

You would be amazed at the amount of lettuce we sell too, simply because customers can’t be bothered to wash the leaves.

I guess that when the weather is good people want to make the most of it and don’t want to waste time cooking. And, if you can pay for something already done you may as well, rather than wasting time doing it yourself.

The sun loungers and deck chairs are now flying out of the door. It’s amazing that people will spend the money on these items even though they may only get a few days use out of them. But I’m not complaining: every sale counts.

We are busy trying to organise our next fund raising event in aid of the NSPCC. Last year we held a car boot sale in our car park and we raised over £300 by charging an entry fee for the cars and selling cakes, which our staff had baked.

Unfortunately the event was far more popular than we anticipated and, due to the number of people and cars it attracted, we practically brought the whole village to a standstill. At least it was for a good cause.

I attended another awards ceremony this week, this time as a guest. Two of my colleagues who manage stores in the north west were nominated for awards at the Coleraine Business Awards: Eurospar Hillcrest was a finalist in the Retailer of the Year category and Spar Castlerock Road won Training Store of the Year. Needless to say we celebrated their success that night.

Everyone is now busy preparing their entry forms for the next series of awards and hopefully the company will produce finalists this year too. There’s nothing like being nominated for an award and, even if you don’t come away with first place, you still feel like a winner.