Sprouts Farmers Market 2014 Annual Report Download - page 9

The below diagram shows a sample layout of our stores:
•Culture of Service. We are committed to providing and believe we have best-in-class customer
service, which builds trust with our customers and differentiates the Sprouts shopping experience
from that of many of our competitors. We design our stores to maximize customers’ interactions
with our team members. For example, in addition to an open floor plan and low displays, we do
not have aisle numbers or self-service checkout lines in our stores, which promotes interaction
between customers and team members. We believe this interaction provides an opportunity to
educate customers and provides a valued, differentiated customer service model, which
enhances customer loyalty and increases visits and purchases over time.
Customer service is critical to our culture and we place great importance on training our team
members on customer service and product knowledge to ensure there is friendly, knowledgeable
staff in every department. Our team members are trained and empowered to proactively engage
with customers throughout the entire store. This includes investing time with them on the benefits
of different vitamins, sharing ways to prepare a meal or cutting a piece of produce or opening a
package to offer customers product tastings throughout the store. We consider customer
education and service to be particularly important as many conventional supermarket customers
that have not shopped our stores believe that eating healthy is expensive and difficult. At Sprouts,
we believe in “Healthy Living for Less” and strive to provide more consumers with the opportunity
to offer their families great tasting, healthy, natural and organic products for less.
Our stores are typically staffed with 80 to 90 full and part-time team members including a store
manager, an assistant store manager, eight department managers, five assistant department
managers, store office staff and other team members.
•Recruiting, Training, Development and Promotion. We strive to create a strong and unified
company culture and develop team members throughout the entire organization. We have
regional department level merchandisers and trainers who are focused on training team members
within departments and also assist with store and local merchandising strategies and execution.
For new stores, we typically have team members on site approximately three to four weeks before
opening to optimize initial and long-term store performance and customer service. We also have
approximately 100 people in the field as regional support teams in human resources, operations
and compliance. These teams focus on hiring, retention, training, food safety, security, financial
management and other operational best practices. We regularly perform audits of our stores to
assess customer service, inventory quality and control, merchandising and other factors. We
believe our team members contribute to our consistently high service standards and that this
helps us successfully open new stores.
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