Tesco world domination!

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flanajb

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Just noticed an ad on the right hand side "Tesco Kitchens". I think it is time people started boycotting these large corporations. Our local Tescos has just opened a dry cleaners and a cobblers in store without any thought to the independent dry cleaners and cobbler in the town.

I am all in favour of a free market, but not when it comes to the likes of these companies, who's sole aim is to maximise share holder value regardless of the local businesses they destroy in the process.
 
Like you I detest Tesco for several reasons, not least the activities of the original owner. I never user them. Nevertheless you have a couple of contradictions in your post. If you have a free market then you cannot pick and choose who opens what where. There is nothing in free market economics which requires them to give any consideration the communities which they routinely destroy.

They and others also promote the price above all philosophy which ignores value and also causes much destruction.

Your only power is boycott.
 
Modernist":te1fhfrq said:
Like you I detest Tesco for several reasons, not least the activities of the original owner. I never user them. Nevertheless you have a couple of contradictions in your post. If you have a free market then you cannot pick and choose who opens what where. There is nothing in free market economics which requires them to give any consideration the communities which they routinely destroy.

They and others also promote the price above all philosophy which ignores value and also causes much destruction.

Your only power is boycott.
I appreciate your point regarding the contradictions. Maybe what I should I have said is "I am all in favour of a free market, so long as the free market in question happens to be local businesses in competition with one another"
 
Until 18 month ago a local shopping precinct had consisted of Tescos, a Chemists, a DIY store, Newsagent/tobacconist with a PO and a sports shop. Tesco apparently gradually bought up all the land and the freeholds. They cleared out all the tenants, demolished the shops, and now there is just one vast 24hr Tesco.

I've not used Tesco or any large supermarket for many years.
 
I hate porridge, I don't like the texture or the taste the only way of removing this evil breakfast sludge is to boycott it.
From now on I'm eating shreddies.
 
doctor Bob":35rs4vt9 said:
I hate porridge, I don't like the texture or the taste the only way of removing this evil breakfast sludge is to boycott it.
From now on I'm eating shreddies.

Will you be buying your Nestle Shreddies from Tesco Bob?
 
The problem is that without the likes of Tesco and the factory food that is the modern diet a proportion of the country could not afford food at all. The price would go through the roof, because we cannot and have not been able to feed ourselves for some considerable time. The abandond High Streets are a price that Goverment is willing to pay to prevent food riots in this country.
 
My older brother works in sainsbrin In There bakery in the first week he had to destroy over £5000 in wasted bread and baked goods he came home and didn't talk for a few hours he still has a tally going its just wrong rather than just buying loads in and it going to waste, if a small bakery just made what was needed ( no pun intended) would save a lot of money...
 
Hardwood66":3mkbpqde said:
My older brother works in sainsbrin In There bakery in the first week he had to destroy over £5000 in wasted bread and baked goods

It's an accepted "truth" in the supermarket industry that the bakery is there as a loss leader. All of the supermarkets lose money on their bakery department, but they all follow the common wisdom that customers want to visit a supermarket that has an on-site bakery and that nice freshly-cooked-loaf smell, and a significant number of customers will choose their supermarket based on how nice the bread they buy is, and they have to have the best, most appealing bakery that sells the freshest, softest loaves, or everyone would drive twice as far to shop at the next large supermarket down the road which does.

This is also apparently why they slice all their whole loaves at 7 or 8PM every day - it's not actually because they have an irrational hatred for customers with office jobs who can't easily get to the supermarket before then during the week, but it's so they can easily tell later which loaves have been out for too long and "need" to be binned to maintain that lingering freshly-baked smell and ensure that nobody goes home with a slightly-unsatisfying loaf which might make them shop at a different supermarket next week.

So since they lose money on all this, you'd think that they'd just cook less bread, right? So that people can still come in and buy fresh loaves without having to throw away as many loaves as they sell every day? Well, no. Apparently customer surveys and other research has suggested that customers like to see a large bakery with lots of shelves which are all full of bread, and if they don't have lots of shelves or if some of them are only half-full, it's disappointing. So they cook all that bread and throw it away purely to give customers a vague contented feeling while they happen to be in that corner of the supermarket in the hope that it makes a significant enough number of them prefer this particular supermarket to offset the huge waste of time and money.

All this at the same time as giving you extra customer-reward points for using your own carrier bags in the name of environmental benefit. If there's a more blatant example of how capitalism is utterly two-faced and ridiculous, I've yet to find it.

(And yeah - if you have a local bakery, give them your money. They need it and they almost certainly make far better bread.)
 
Thing about supermarkets is that people use them either for convenience or because they are cheaper. Local greengrocers, butchers and bakers are far far cheaper and leagues ahead in quality. Also by the time you squeeze past the old ladies in mobility scooters and queue up for an age while they slowly scan all your items you could have gone to town and bought everything separately and saved time and money and gone home with great quality food.

If you bit the bullet and did all your shopping from local independent shops for a month I bet you wouldn't stop.

I buy 90% of my food locally and get a small Tescos delivery for the bits I can't get elsewhere and they have messed it up and then held onto my money for week half a dozen time in the last 4 months.
 
Elapid":36vg6t0x said:
Thing about supermarkets is that people use them either for convenience or because they are cheaper. Local greengrocers, butchers and bakers are far far cheaper and leagues ahead in quality. Also by the time you squeeze past the old ladies in mobility scooters and queue up for an age while they slowly scan all your items you could have gone to town and bought everything separately and saved time and money and gone home with great quality food.

If you bit the bullet and did all your shopping from local independent shops for a month I bet you wouldn't stop.

I buy 90% of my food locally and get a small Tescos delivery for the bits I can't get elsewhere and they have messed it up and then held onto my money for week half a dozen time in the last 4 months.

Not sure your being serious.....
1/ no queues at my Tesco's, 30 checkouts plus self scan.
2/ £1.20 to park in town and then at least 1 mile walk between shops
3/ Butchers, bakers and greengrocer are way more expensive, plus don't stock the range of Tesco's
4/ Can't taste any difference if you buy the decent stuff and not budget.
 
My wife travels the 18 miles to shop at Tesco because she likes it though she does use Asda sometimes. She works full time and really doesn't have time to spend trawling the shops for groceries.
Our village has one very small shop selling sandwiches, newspapers and a few tins etc. Our nearest shopping facility is 6 miles away, a reasonable town but with few decent shops, certainly the butchers and greengrocers have no better quality produce than Tesco. The town planners won't allow any large supermarkets so we have a Safeway and a Lidl, both poor. Shops are still closing - except charity shops - despite the planners decisions as customers either travel or have deliveries.

Supermarkets are here to stay and serve customers well as long as they double check the prices, compare the pack sizes and don't get taken in by some of the "offers" :wink:

Walmart btw might be bad but allowed me the opportunity to buy 3 pairs of Wrangler jeans for the princely sum of £13.50 ($20) each. :lol: Levis were the same price and I noticed in San Francisco the cheapest were 2 pairs for £64. ($99). Perhaps the fact that San Fran doesn't have a Walmart has something to do with that :-k

Bob
 
We haven't shopped at Tescos willingly* since they built an unnecessary supermarket on Golden Hill. They then defied the undertakings they'd given regarding opening hours (to protect local smaller businesses).

We won't shop at Tescos, but it doesn't stop the leeching effect supermarkets have on local traders. It's not just retail though. In almost every industry, large companies have unfair advantages over smaller traders, and generally the more industries are regulated, the more that's true.

I'd like to see a 'community charge' levied on big corporates, on a sliding scale basis. It would be calculated on two factors:

1. how big they are in turnover, and
2. how much they import into the UK.

So big companies wanting to import finished goods would be taxed higher than manufacturers in the UK itself.

"You want to sell here (and thus export the profits)? You pay a fair rate for the privilege."

The revenue would be ring-fenced into a fund offering cheap loans and services to smaller enterprises. I still believe in capitalism, but not in corporate greed, and the two don't necessarily have to go together. It's depressing they so often do.

E.

*once or twice on holiday when there's literally been no alternative.
 
So big companies wanting to import finished goods would be taxed higher than manufacturers in the UK itself. "You want to sell here (and thus export the profits)? You pay a fair rate for the privilege."

I don't necessarily agree though I see where you're coming from Eric, but it wouldn't work in a free market and EU law probably wouldn't allow anyway.

Can of worms really because a similar argument can be used for many companies maybe not retailers in the same sense as Tesco etc but still ripping us off and then sending the profits to their shareholders abroad.

The utility companies for instance. I can choose whether or not to shop at Tesco. I don't have a choice where I buy my water or how much I have to pay but the surplus millions certainly don't stay here!

Bob
 
Tax and duty have two purposes: raising revenue and modifying behaviour. If you can find a tax that does both simultaneously, that's probably a good thing for policy, but long-term it may be bad for revenue. The UK is unusual in that it doesn't tax the offshoring of profits very much, in comparison with other European countries. They don't do it directly, but they do have a much higher overall cost of doing business, for example in very restrictive employment law or other, more direct costs, in local community taxes or energy tax, etc.

This doesn't inhibit large companies much in the way they operate. You *do* see an effect in manufacturing, where absorption costing makes it very obvious wherever businesses operate in high-cost locations, but generally, other types of business set up wherever they can turn a profit. Overall, in other EU countries the higher tax regimes don't stop multinats from selling there. And if you want manufacturing, you can do what Ireland has done and relieve the taxes for preferred activities.

In any retail-focused activity, the objective *always* with multinationals is to achieve monopoly market share (around 40%), at which point they can dictate terms, to both customers and competitors and the free market rules break down. This is what supermarkets aim to do - if you're the biggest shop in a small town, you can charge what you like as your customers have nowhere else to go. Supermarkets, coffee shop chains, fast food chains, telecoms, bus companies, and so on are all highly competitive until they win, at which point they're protectionist and greedy. They don't compete on a level playing field with the smaller fry, as they have more corporate resources and economies of scale.

You mention EU rules, and I think you're right: One effect of the EU is to make life easy for multinats, who "lobby" legislators to get what they want. They have the resources to do this, and they thrive in a highly-bureaucratized environment because bureaucracy tends to result in fixed costs (overheads). Big companies can easily comply whereas the cost for smaller competitors is usually disproportionately high. Driving down variable costs usually doesn't help much.

Apparently pike (esox lucius) can grow to an as-yet unknown large size. The largest yet caught was around six feet long and around 80lb, but scientists think the only limiting factor is the size of the lake and the food supply. In Loch Lomond, for example, there are persistent rumours of something around eight feet long that takes large wildfowl (pike are known to drown ducks). Pike are cannibalistic, and can drive other fish species into local extinction, as they are very efficient predators. Some pike lakes have ended up full of fish, though mainly pike!

I firmly believe in a diverse economy, with businesses of a range of size, and business activity. Not having that makes an economy (and a nation) vulnerable, as we've recently found with our "service" economy - the buzz phrase of only a decade ago.

I think the same growth rules controlling the size of pike can be applied to large corporations too. For the health of the other 'fish' and the environment as a whole there needs to be fish management!

E.
 
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