‘Sainsbury’s in Camden Road is second rate at best’

• TWO miles away from Camden Town, in 1869, John James Sainsbury opened a shop in Drury Lane. Today, this large FTSE100 company has some 1,400 shops, perhaps 180,000 employ­ees and owns brands such as Argos and Habitat.

Chief executive Simon Roberts sits in his office in Sainsbury’s head­quarters in Holborn, also about two miles away, and he could walk to the Sainsbury’s supermarket at 17 Camden Road, Camden Town – or he could take the 46 bus!

The sadness is that Sainsbury’s supermarket in Camden Town, in the building designed by Nicholas Grimshaw and opened in November 1988, is a shadow of its former self.

“Retail is detail” was the slogan of one of the last of the Sainsbury family to run the business but that’s a slogan that is not under­stood, it seems, by those running the company or by store managers today.

The external fabric of the building is not well maintained and the state of shelves and checkouts inside the supermarket is second rate at best.

Inside the store the patience of customers is tested daily. Very recently, local manage­ment undertook an almost complete reorganisation such that, were customers’ time of no consequence, one might no longer feel the need to visit Hampton Court Maze, for the “find that product” game is now here on your doorstep.

Local people can waste tens of minutes trying to find products that were once long found in one place but, now, who knows where the store manager has hidden the product.

To be fair, when I asked one of the staff where a product was now hidden, she enjoyed the question and was indeed able to point me to the product’s new home.

There are frequent queues at the checkouts and when one suggests that another till might be opened, one often learns that no more staff are available.

Simon Roberts should take that 46 bus and look at Waitrose in King’s Cross and Marks & Spencer in Camden High Street. Sure, both supermarkets may leave customers with a little larger bill, but Sainsbury’s chief executive would get a good idea of how properly to run a supermarket.

He should then go to Sainsbury’s, Camden Town, taking with him an assistant with a large notebook and a couple of pens.

I’ll help him, if he likes, pointing out hundreds of things that should be improved, hundreds of things that mean the customer experience is not what it should be, hundreds of things that are likely to send customers elsewhere.

LESTER MAY
Camden Town, NW1