Booths at Hale Barns is right in-between Altrincham town centre and Manchester Airport, it is one of two Booths stores within Greater Manchester. This location is obviously much larger than the Media City UK store, which doesn't stock as many products.
The look and feel of the store is good, it feels different from your regular supermarket and it matches the high-end nature of the brand and area.
Getting in and out of the store can be tricky via the car park, it is basically off the main road, next to Costa Coffee and in a small complex with a few other stores. The traffic lights to get onto the main road take several minutes, it's ridiculous making getting in and out of the store difficult.
The staff here all seemed super friendly and eager to help, even though I did visit later on in the day. The store closes at 10 pm during the week but in the final few hours they do wind down a bit, I personally think this should be made clearer on their website for example
- The cafe closes at 7 pm - this is reasonable as you can still sit in a cafe with a drink from the machine and they do state this on the website
However, after around 8 pm they close down the counters with fresh cheese, fish, meat which are some of my favourite parts about Booths - I was especially gutted as my favourite crumbly Lancashire cheese was on offer at 30% off, which already is pretty cheap. The only way I could get my cheese is if I chose one which was already pre-cut, which was an ultra-small or large piece. I had to spend £5.70 just to get enough cheese which was around 1/3 more than I planned to spend coming into the store (that's before considering it was on offer too!)
They also shut off the freshly squeezed orange machine, again they left two small bottles available to buy. I don't like how they didn't label this, however, they did turn the machine off but it wasn't obvious so I did try to get the juice out for a minute only to get a member of staff who in turn asked a supervisor to see it had been switched off.
They did have some great products especially for gluten-free foods, gluten-free ranges included their sausages, pigs-in-blankets, fresh bread rolls and bread and the MakTok Chilli Paste, as seen on Dragon's Den where the amazing Will went on to get a well-deserved investment with Sara Davies.
A high-end store so it is pretty expensive in general, I ended up paying £6 for two packs of sausages, close to £4 for fresh gluten-free bread (still expensive even by gluten-free standards), but on the other hand most of the cheeses were good value and the fresh butchers sausage were much cheaper than the pre-packaged ones, they also had good multi-buy offers on the essentials and more common/budget items including chocolate.
A really good store, the overall design and feel of the place is cool and it is probably the best store in the area to get gluten-free products, perhaps on par with Marks and Spencer's larger locations but I really do feel the store's unwinding from 3 hours before closing which even all staff aren't aware of (certainly isn't stated on its' website) is a big down-fall. I can't help but consider the amount of food waste too as many times due to expire including the orange juices (I don't know how long they were there for) were still full price even during this phase.
4* read more
