Top of the shops
The overall winner of this year’s C-Store Awards was Scally’s Centra in Tullamore. Fionnuala Carolan travelled to Offaly to meet the man behind Ireland's top c-store.
Print18 January 2011
For the past three years Scally’s has featured in the top ten of the Centra Store of the Year Awards and it’s easy to see why. From the ease of parking outside to the warm welcome once you enter, it’s clear that there is something different about this store.
Owned by Ben Scally and managed by Fiona Leavy, Centra Tullamore also won the Gold Award in its size category of 2,000 to 4,000 square feet and the award for the Best Frozen Foods Department in the ShelfLife C-Store Awards. Both owner and manager say they are still on a high since their win and have since enjoyed a very good Christmas trading period. Like other small community stores, they found that the harsh weather actually buoyed up sales as locals tried to avoid unnessesary journeys during the bad weather.
A retail lifer
Ben Scally has worked in retail all his life. He spent many years working for H Williams and Quinnsworth throughout the country. When he moved home to take over this store 23 years ago he was well used to the hard graft that a life in retail brings and thought little of travelling to Dublin at 3am three times a week to get fresh fruit and veg from the markets. Luckily now Musgrave look after that side of things but you can be sure he would still do it without a second thought if it was required. In fact there isn’t much Ben Scally wouldn’t do to keep his customers happy and you can see that his customers hold him in very high regard as they greet him enthusiastically while he negotiates his way around the store.
“I took over this shop in 1998. A cousin of mine, Eugene Scally, owned it and he was moving to Clonakility and asked me if I wanted to take it over. I didn’t have to think twice about it,” says Scally.
One stop shop
The store is 4,000 sq ft and employs 50 staff with opening hours from 7am until 10 at night. There is fresh food available all day long and the kitchens only close when the store does. It is a one-stop shop for fresh food, grocery and non-grocery products and there is a very competitive pricing policy with lots of special offers available. The highest standard of food hygiene is evident throughout the store.
Usually a store will open when a new community is established but this store broke the mould by opening up in a quiet, rural location and a community was built up around it. “When I bought this shop there were only a handful of houses around it and now we have four estates and I’d say probably 800 houses. That all began as we completed our revamp 10 years ago,” he explains.”
Modesty is one of Scally’s most likable features. Far from gloating about his success he steers all the compliments towards his staff and customers.
“We have fantastic customers who are very loyal. They have built me. It was great for me coming back home to work in Tullamore because you are getting to know people again that you used to know. I have a wonderful staff here and we were lucky because business has been very good. I suppose we have always tried to put back into the business all the time and grow the brand.”
Revamp
This store has never become stale as Scally engages in some sort of a revamp every year in order to keep improving the store. The last major revamp was carried out 10 years ago. “We totally gutted the place but managed to keep trading throughout so it was quite a challenge. We created a lot more space for the kitchen which has helped us grow the fresh food business.”
The fresh food in store is a great credit to Scally and his team of four chefs. The queue for the deli, serving hot and cold meals, snakes around the shop for most of the day. The meat counter is very enticing but Scally, being the perfectionist that he is, feels like it could be bigger. If he could he would make the whole store bigger but unfortunately there is little space to expand on the site. There is space for approximately 30 cars outside but again he would love to have more room to extend this. “You can never have enough car parking. I’d love to have double the parking.”
When the new M6 road opened last year it spelled disaster for the store as they were situated along the main Dublin/Galway road and the bypass was going to take away thousands of potential customers a day. “It’s taken a lot of traffic away from this route. This was the main route going from Galway/Dublin. But we’re a destination shop for a lot of local people so we were actually not as badly affected as we could have been.”
Year ahead
Rather than dreading the year ahead and worrying about the economics of the country, Scally is actually very optimistic about the future.
“I think there’s going to be a bit of inflation and a little bit of growth aswell. All in all it’s going to be a positive year.” Over the past two years Scally has not let any staff go. “We’ve remained very solid throughout the last few year. We’re a good team,” he says.
Getting named as store of the year has had an impact on more than just the proprietor. Store manager Fiona Leavy says that winning the award was “a dream come true”. The rest of the staff were also delighted. “It’s still sinking in” says Scally. “We’re gone to many events over the years but you never expect to get the number one award. It was absolutely great. We would have hoped that we would have been up in the top few percent because we work hard at what we do but it’s the biggest and best award we’ve ever had in our lives and we’re absolutely thrilled,” says Scally.
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