CAN RYDE SURVIVE `EXTRA` ONSLAUGHT?

By Richard Wright - Friday, January 25, 2008

New Tesco Extra store manager Dan Jones, outside the development. Picture by Laura Holme.

WIGHT LIVING
THE LATEST chapter of a long-running story involving old money and new money is about to unfold in Ryde.
Tesco is set to throw open the doors of its new Extra store on March 3, less than nine months after contractors first “broke ground” on the site that used to be a go-kart track and before that, part of Ryde Airport.
Tesco is new money, in retail terms relatively nouveau, and certainly very rich indeed.
The new store, two thirds bigger than the old one, is to be managed by Dan Jones.
He is a Tesco high-flier, proof that the mega-group policy of career advancement really works.
He became manager of his first Extra store in 2001. Since then there have been five more, including Ryde, a town where he and his young family will set up home.
He comes to the Island from Reading Extra and at the age of just 33, he is still one of the youngest Tesco managers in the country.
He was six when Tesco opened its old store, then regarded as being of monstrous size, on the Ryde site. I flew over it in a Tesco ‘copter on opening day and it was big, back then.
It was managed by a young chap called David Potts, who went on to marry a local publican’s daughter, Debbie Hall.
He’s now on the Tesco main board and they have a home at Seaview Heights. Just shows what can be achieved in the Tesco “family”.
Paul Wyatt, the long-serving chairman of Ryde Business Association and member of the town’s management committee, represents old money.
The family Jack’s hairdressing and beauty business was established in the town as long ago as 1933, moving from the High Street to Union Street after the war.
It was only recently, perhaps in a concession to perceived trendy modernity, that the Wyatts dropped their C to become Jak’s.
Post the shockwave of Tesco’s first coming, Paul has been, firstly, part of the town’s dive in fortunes and then its subsequent lift and seismic shift in the way it does its business.
Gone are the housewives and old ladies who darted from top to bottom seeking savings in myriad small shops. Indeed, gone are most of the shops they visited.
All but one of the greengrocers, all the wet fish shops and a host of other businesses have gone, washed away by the supermarket tide.
Somerfield coming to the centre, with its free car park, was like a rock to which satellite retailers clung and today there are many niche businesses and a proliferation of restaurants and cafes.
Paul believes the council wasted an opportunity in securing only £190,000 for community initiatives in Ryde from the store giant as one of the planning conditions. He hopes it is wisely spent.
“Tesco worldwide probably takes a couple of seconds to make that amount of profit,” he observed.
“There are businesses in Ryde that will find it very hard to survive in competition but in Ryde we are helped by the traffic that stymies people getting into Newport. The loyalty of our customers will help us to continue in business,” he hopes.
Up the road, Dan believes there is room for his store — with its 72,000 sq ft of sales area, open all hours, employing 550 people and stocking everything from a washing machine to a pack of pins — and the High Street, too.
He wants Tesco to be part of, and not aloof from, the community.
Dan presides over an enterprise that will employ 150 more people in addition to the current workforce that includes a night worker, a baker, a manager and a checkout lady who first clocked in with Tesco when the old 40,000 sq ft store first opened.
Work will start on demolishing that and building a new petrol station there soon after the new Extra opens.
Dan, with an honours degree in business studies, comes from, and inhabits, a very different retail world from Paul Wyatt.
Dan’s is a world of “power-aisles” — those that attract the biggest footfall of customers — of the logistics of running a hugely complex enterprise, with a team below and accountability above.
In summer, each square foot of the existing store generates more money than any other Tesco in the land. Probably more cash than the whole of the High Street.
On Friday, Dan had just returned from sampling Minghella’s sorbet in Wootton and he says there are big plans to extend the range of local produce because there will be space for it where in the present “over-trading” store, there is not.
Gone are the bad old days when a tomato produced in the Arreton Valley would speed its way to Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, to be shipped back down here.
Direct delivery, cutting food miles, is the order of the day and Dan says he welcomes Island producers who have something to sell ringing him up and telling him about it. He already has a couple of dozen local businesses he’s investigating and has signed up a good few to add to the local producers that already rely on the Tesco dollar.
Use of carrier bags is to be further discouraged and there will be full availability for the first time of Tesco Direct, where goods can be ordered from its catalogue and delivered or collected from store.
In fact, the Ryde store was something of a flat-pack itself, designed on a tried and tested Extra model.
Tesco’s communications manager for the site, Ivor Jackson, says it was built with a quarter the carbon footprint of a traditional build.
Super energy efficient, it harvests natural heat and light, the so-called ‘solar gain’ without dazzling the checkout gals and boys who can toast their toes on the underfloor heating.
Everything shuts down when it’s not being used and the only fly in the Green ointment so far has been the scrapping of juice-generating wind turbines.
It was found the site at the top of the town had the wrong type of wind. Too much, in fact, for the type of generator that was planned.
Tesco and the small businesses of Ryde have all shared the gales just lately. And the rain, too.
But they are by no means equal under the sun and only time will tell whether small businesses survive the latest retail squall.

CAN RYDE SURVIVE `EXTRA` ONSLAUGHT?

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