Easter Trading & Passing 150 Ecobricks

I hope you have all had a good Easter break. I enjoyed reading Rebekah Brain’s blog entry last week and I want to thank Rebekah for taking up the opportunity to be the first guest blogger. It was great to hear about Rebekah’s role within the Society, her career and how she is working on a number of diverse engagement projects, such as the most recent training on mental health awareness that has been well received by the Leadership Team and the Managers at the Managers Conference. Please be sure to read about what you can do to help drive conversations around this important subject, especially during Mental Health Awareness Week, which runs from Monday 13^th to Sunday 19^th May.

This week I want to take a look back on our Easter trading. I was away in the lead up to it but I hear that Britain was basking in wall-to-wall sunshine, with temperatures surpassing that of Madrid! With the unseasonably warm weather over the Easter weekend, it provided an unexpected opportunity for everyone to indulge in some warm weather and BBQ food products. Over the Easter weekend, we saw our stores sell 10,000 bags of ice, 33,000 packs of hot cross buns, 46,000 quarter pounder burgers and 15,000 packs of bread rolls! However, the warmer temperatures did mean that customers were choosing ice creams over Easter Eggs in some cases.

I was interested to see from Energy UK’s latest monthly figures, that over 600,000 customers switched their electricity supplier in March 2019, an increase of 30% when compared to March last year. This brings the total number of switches to nearly 1.5 million so far this year. We hope that our new community Power product and the launch of our new Fair Price Tracker, will help to keep as many customers as possible.

I am also pleased to report that the interest in our One Change and Ecobricks initiative has been really well received by our members and colleagues. As a Society, we ran a series of Ecobrick tutorials that took place across a number of stores. Chipping Norton has now passed the 150^th Ecobrick bottle mark since its launch; a very impressive figure and one that shows that people are willing to help make a difference if you give them an opportunity to do so. You can find out more detail here if you would like to get involved.