"Queen of the Christmas aisle" Sheila celebrates 50 years of service
Colleagues at our Castlepoint store in Bournemouth affectionately call Sheila Day "the Queen of the Christmas aisle" for the way she always pulls out all the stops to put smiles on customers' faces at this time of the year.
Sheila's just celebrated 50 years with Asda, after starting working at the store as a Saturday job when she was 15.
Sheila said: "I like working at Christmas time. It's very, very busy and the customers are all very chatty on the Christmas aisle, always asking questions about things. It's a lovely place to work."
Sheila, who's the longest serving colleague at the store, started work in 1973 when the supermarket was a Woolco. Asda took it over in 1990.
She said: "When I left school at 16 I went full time and I've been in retail ever since. I've had various jobs – I've been on the toy department and I was in the office for a little while but mainly I've been on ambient. The time has flown by mind.
"I love meeting people and making friends with the colleagues and customers. I'm on first name terms with a lot of the customers here and they've become friends too.
"We are such a family store here. When I first started I actually worked with people's grandparents. We have colleagues here whose mothers and grandmothers have worked here over the years and now they work here.
"I've seen a lot of changes over the years but the biggest has been with technology. When I first started we had pricing guns and everything had a price on it. You had to manually input everything through the tills. The ordering system was so different too. We had to order stock over the phones and reps would come in and queue up to be seen. And now it's all electronic, but you've got to adapt, don't you?'
Sheila is married to Stephen, who she met when he worked as a security colleague at Woolco in 1981.
Katy Lavis, our store's customer trading manager , who nominated Sheila for an Asda service superstar award, said: "There is nothing Sheila won't do for our customers and colleagues at Castlepoint – she's the Queen of Aisle 26 and does the most amazing job.
"Celebrating 50 years of service – wow, now that's commitment. Thank you Sheila for all your passion, hard work and fun personality. We cherish having you at this store."
And operations manager Margareta Egeljic-Walton said: "She is very hardworking, fast and knows what she is doing. She's never off sick or late for work. She's a colleague you can rely on in every sense of the word.
"She's friendly and always glad to help anybody and everybody; customers and colleagues. She's very well known here. She always works on our seasonal aisles every Christmas and Easter."