Alex
Video transcript
My name's Alex Irving. I joined Waitrose in October 2010 and I am a Team Manager. I joined Waitrose as an external applicant. I came from McDonalds where I was an Assistant Manager for six and half years and I felt the skills I had from McDonalds transferred really well to Waitrose.
I applied to join a Waitrose convenience store because it was the location I wanted in London, the job I wanted and the pay I wanted as well. I applied online, it was really easy and it's exactly the job I was looking for.
What Waitrose means to me is the highest quality, great customer service, a really good customer experience. For me personally it means fairness, feeling really valued at work and just generally enjoying my job every day. For someone considering a career in a convenience store I'd say that it's going to be hard work, but it's also going to be really enjoyable. We're a smaller team, so it feels like a family. I'm constantly doing different things, so one minute I could be involved with an important store decision and the next minute I could be working on the shop floor and helping the Partners out; I've got my fingers in all the pies so to speak.
My people management at Waitrose really got tested earlier this year when I opened a new store for the first time, because not only was I quite new, there was 50 new Partners as well. So quite often I was dealing with situations where I wasn't 100% sure what to be done either, so in that situation I find it really useful keeping calm, keeping a level head and making common sense decisions.
The convenience format's really new to Waitrose so we get a lot of visitors in the store; we have the Managing Director pop in from time to time. The location of my store being central London means that I get the odd celebrity or two, it's obviously very entertaining. But we do get a lot of visitors which is really good because it shows that we're all working together and that the people at head office aren't just at head office.
