A department store with a giant Waitrose food hall on the ground floor, or a major supermarket with a host of eateries, and two floors of John Lewis lines. However you want to characterise it, Waitrose's flagship at Canary Wharf is something special, and six years since opening retains a vivacious edge that keeps its rightful place in the Partnership.

Waitrose's new Market Town store format, as the name suggests, is all about offering a range focused on local and fresh produce in convenient, small town-centre sites. In June the multiple opened its third Market Town store, in a former Budgens in Buckingham. For manager Darren Kimber, although he has plenty of retail experience, this was his first store opening.

Running a flagship London store might be the pinnacle of your career, but as Sam Pelling admits, the challenges of an affluent customer base require a keen focus as well as an engaging manner. Luckily she has both in bucketfuls, which helped to ease her arrival at the Cromwell Road store in Kensington three months ago.

Small regional teams working with suppliers to help them get local produce on to shelves, offering a fair price and no pressure to serve hundreds of stores? Doesn't sound very Tesco does it? However, the mega-mult has had six regional buyers in place for a over a year doing just that, according to Midlands incumbent Simon Dryell.

Whitby is a picturesque and historic fishing port on the north Yorkshire coast, and it has proud inhabitants, who value their large town-centre Co-op highly, almost to the point of defensiveness.

Sarah Jackson may be young for a branch manager, at 29, but she has solid retail experience under her belt. This pedigree, plus her ambition, means she is as confident about her prospects within the Waitrose Partnership as she is content to be serving the needs of her store in Ely, Cambridgeshire - at least for the time being.

Gavin Strachan began working at the Co-op in St Leonards On Sea, just outside Hastings, in 1976. This has meant that last year's merger of the Co-op and the northern United Co-operatives is nothing new for him - but is just another stage in the process of this unique retail group's development.

Mike Estlea has followed an interesting road to his current role managing a successful Bud­gens in the Berkshire commuter town of Newbury. And that road has moved beyond just owning and managing a store to a more fundamental role in the local community.

Bustling, fun and full of theatre. Those are terms you might apply to the cheeky, gaudy and quintessentially British seaside resort of Blackpool. However, you might also apply them to the distinctly classier interior of Booths' second 'Artisan' store in Lytham St. Annes, six miles down the Lancashire coast.

Far from turning its local high street into a ghost town, Ed Barton gives his Waitrose in London's fashionable Marylebone High Street credit for helping turn the area into a mecca for foodies.

Highly competitive and driven, it's not hard to see why Roger Daltrey-lookalike Paul Barwick has managed to lead the UK's biggest retailer's Sandhurst store in affluent Berkshire to the top of Tesco's sales rankings recently. It may be a flagship store with 94,000 sq ft of every conceivable food and non-food range, but to keep it around the top spot week-in week-out since he took over a year ago takes some doing. With an M&S next door, the figures are even more impressive.

Meeting store manager Linda Alexander at her substantial Sainsbury's store on the outskirts of the attractive market town of Bury St Edmonds in Suffolk, the first thing you notice (apart from her broad smile) is her evident passion for the job. The friendly Scot may be all smiles, but she has a serious commitment to getting things right. Her strong work ethic, driven by a love for all things grocery, was demonstrated from the word go as a Sainsbury's trainee after graduating from Strathclyde University in the mid 1980s.

Sawbridgeworth is a pretty town in rural Hertfordshire. It has almost been a victim of its own desirability, as small retailers have been replaced by service sector businesses like architects, as rates rise. However, the Budgens store run by Paul and Michelle Gravelle is going strong, although it has to be said it is 'the only supermarket in the village.'

Mention Worthing to anyone who doesn't already know this south coast town and they'll immediately think of a faded but genteel seaside resort.