Waitrose Industrial placement is a program that belongs to John Lewis Partnership and it aims at helping continuing students in developing their careers and talents through professional training. An individual seeking placement with the service has an option of working in the sales department, retail/merchandising, purchasing and supply, and logistics and operation. The company has close to three-hundred branches countrywide and a student is likely to be posted in any of these branches. Anyone seeking placement is expected to possess a number of qualities, one being taking an initiative where the intern has to ensure the boss works without many difficulties and produce the desire results. The intern has to anticipate what the senior manager in the department wants and aspire to deliver the best result before he or she is asked to do so. The second quality pertains to hard work implying the intern has to give the best to the organization. In many cases, the organization is likely to forget the intern once the agreed term is over, but a hardworking individual is rare to forget. Under the placement service, a student should develop a special quality where he or she under promises and strives to over deliver. This would definitely guarantee success, but it does not come easy because an individual has to develop an additional quality in the form of humility. Pride leads to devastation whereas humbleness results in honour.
An intern is always under the process of learning and it is advisable that listening is employed as a major quality. An individual who speaks a lot does not command respect from colleagues because too much talking is associated with underperformance. Therefore, placement at Waitrose Industrial has to be guided by special listening skills to improve communication between interns and the management. Interns seeking placement with Waitrose Industrial have to treat each person equally, irrespective of whether it is the client, fellow employee, or other partners. They should never treat people based on their social statuses, race, or ethnicity because this will definitely have a negative impact on the organization. Feeling inferior is one of the problems that many interns face. It is something that interferes with personal identity. Based on this, the intern has to be confident that the job will be done effectively and in an appropriate way.
The UK grocery market has been stable for the past twenty years, but instability was reported recently because of the emerging price wars and falling of the prices of food commodities. The value of important products, such as milk and bread, are now 4% less as compared to the previous years. The market leader, Sainsbury, has been overtaken by Tesco because of stiff competition that calls on supermarket chains to devise specific strategies to cope with pressure. The new entrants in the industry are offering huge discounts that attract customers, but the market leaders are unable to follow suit because of the nature of their operations. The German grocer, Aldi and Lidl, is offering stiff competition to industry players because of the way it handles customers. Waitrose shares in the market are also in the increase, as it recently reported a growth of 5.6% whereas the shares of Aldi dropped to 25.5% from 29.1% in October 2014. The trend is expected to continue because of new laws governing distribution and marketing of products in Europe.