Tesco Metro rolls out Astound look

Tesco is to roll out a revamped Metro store format to key city-centre locations, following a successful trial of an Astound-designed pilot at its Canary Wharf store, Design Week can exclusively reveal.

The refresh is part of the supermarket chain’s move to increase turnover and product range at its city centre Metro stores, according to Tesco head of design Jeremy Lindley.

‘Some of the busiest stores were becoming unshopable. Queues for the checkouts were taking up aisle space and putting customers off,’ explains Lindley.

The challenge was designing a format that delivered ‘more value’ in a fixed area of space, he adds.

Astound partner Mark Dickins says the solution was to create a format tailored to location.

‘The Canary Wharf store is flexible to meet the demands of both the transient business community and local residents. It uses changeable time-of-day merchandising to alter the store range to match the way different customers want to shop, and streamlines the shopping experience for the snacking customer,’ Dickins adds.

Lindley says reworking the layout of checkouts to create banks of tills with ‘post office style queues’ has also had an impact.

‘We’ve managed to increase the range of products we stock and install 40 per cent more check-outs,’ he says.

The new formats will be applied to key urban locations including London’s Oxford Street and roll out to a total of ten to 15 stores.