Tesco vs. Wal-Mart

[randy_byers]

According to Slate, Tesco is invading California and thereby the US. The article claims that Wal-Mart has encountered some difficulties in its own attempts to conquer California, discovering that more affluent areas don't care so much about dirt cheap prices.

"Great Britain's last effort to conquer the colonies with muskets and cannon ended in failure. This time, the Redcoats are arriving armed with merlot and cucumbers, which may prove to be superior weapons."

Go, Tesco!

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting. I've long been astonished by the way that the very poshest US grocery stores would be run of the mill in UK grocery terms. Tesco, whose founder, Jack Cohen, invented the slogan "pile them high, sell them cheap", is below mid-market in the UK but described as having a 'generally pretty upscale image' in the article. Not so; there's a very clear pecking order of UK supermarkets, with Waitrose (and the northern chain Booths) at the top, Sainsburys and Tesco in the middle, Asda & Kwik-Save at the bottom and let's not talk about Aldi & Lidl (who are sort of like a downmarket version of Trader Joe's).

Anyway, Tesco do two sorts of smallish shops here. Tesco Express are basically reinvented petrol station forecourts; it is precisely the 7-11 market, and a sudden realisation that there is no reason why convenience stores have to sell junk. (Weirdly, in Walthamstow we have a fabulous Turkish grocery store that works in the identical market niche and set up before Tesco came along. But I digress). They benefit from being local, but also from the UK's retail laws that basically mean that large stores can only open for six hours on Sunday but small stores can get away with opening all hours. The other small stores are Tesco Metro; they have small city centre locations, sell no bulk products, and are predominantly catering for workers picking up food for lunch, their evening meal, and office events.

But the thing I really don't understand is why there isn't a Waitrose equivalent in the US. I think it's because a lot of people with high disposable incomes just eat out all the time and don't cook much. Hence the stores that survive here with incredibly high margins on perfectly presented food don't have a niche. But I don't know.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I confess that I don't know enough about grocery stores either here or in the UK to make an informed reply to this. I don't do the grocery shopping in our household and rarely go to grocery stores on my own. I've never even been in a Trader Joe's. My parents and sister have talked about a couple of new chains of health food stores that they consider relatively expensive (compared to Costco, where they normally shop), but I don't know if that translates to upscale. I really have no idea where upscale shopping is done around here. Larry's Market? And I've never made it into a Waitrose either, and now you've made me curious. When's the next Plokta.con?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I obviously didn't get to enough grocery stores in the UK, because it was not at all clear to me that run-of-the-mill, e.g. Tesco and Sainsbury's in East Ham and Leeds and Cambridge and Manchester, in the UK equates to top-out-of-sight for the US. Certainly I never saw anything that impressed me more than the Whole Foods we had in Costa Mesa which had, among other things, a vast selection of import cheeses, a very decent olive bar, and a reliable selection of organic and USDA prime meats, as well as a broad selection of organic fruits and vegetables, plus craft beers, plus craft-brew sodas, in-store bakery and deli and all the yam chips anyone could possibly want. I've never been inside a Waitrose, so I don't have a reference point -- what specifically makes them exceptionally good?

My experience in the US is that the best grocery stores are either smaller, regional/local chains (Randy mentions Larry's Market, though there's also Whole Foods, and the unappealingly named Thriftway, Pasadena's Jurgensen's of yore) or members of larger chains that happen to be in affluent neighborhoods. For instance, for some reason our Fred Meyer in Redmond is quite a bit nicer than the one in Belleview's Overlake district.

Our local Safeway (apparently no relation to the UK chain of the same name) just remodeled in anticipation of the Whole Foods that's coming to the neighborhood, and their selection of goods went quite a bit up scale from where they had been. For instance now they carry a rather marvelous UK product that I discovered at Safeway and fell madly in love with: Gourmet Garden fresh herbs in tubes. These are brilliant. Having things like dill and ginger and basil in squeezable form to just add to soups on a whim is very shiny indeed. It is ironic (and perhaps aids your point) that my tube of squeezable dill comes to me by way of Britain, though.

They (Safeway) also started carrying what is now my favorite form of pre-peeled whole garlic cloves: rather than sell the garlic loose in tubs or jars, which are subject to molding in the fridge, the cloves are packed in groups of four or so in individually sealed packets in a resealable bag, which keeps the unused garlic fresh until I use it instead of my throwing away half. (And yes, I could avoid the problem if I would just peel my own garlic, but I use a lot more of it and a lot more happily if I don't have to.)

So, anyway, what I tend to think of as a sign of a posh American grocery store include a broad/ecclectic selection of bulk foods, wide selection of organic meat and veg and dairy, broad and deep deli selection including olives and cheeses and deli meats and so on, and a decent selection of good beers and wines. What, over and above that, does Waitrose do?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I believe Whole Foods is one of the chains my parents and sister were talking about. They like the goods on offer (my dad has to eat whole grain stuff now because of hypoglycemia), but consider it expensive.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, Whole Foods and for that matter Larry's *are* expensive, at least compared to Fred Meyer or QFC. That's what makes Trader Joe's so very remarkable -- not only are their products reliably very good/tasty instances of their kind of thing, but the prices are quite consistently lower than comparable items at Fred Meyer, even though the food is tastier.

[dalmeny]

the best grocery stores are either smaller, regional/local chains

In central Texas the best places were Whole Foods and Central Market. Central Market stores were an upmarket rebranding of selected supermarkets run by the Texan chain HEB. They had a big array of fresh foods, a good selection of freshly-made heat-and-eat, and also imported items catering to ex-pat crowds (e.g. Cadbury and McVities). More expensive than the standards HEBs certainly.

And also a suprisingly extensive wine range, including bottles from really quite small places here in South Australia.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

So many things come to mind here.

My personal feeling is that generally UK supermarkets are better than their US equivalent.

I like Whole Foods but found it pretty expensive and no good for day to day stuff. Where Waitrose really wins is high quality food, good range of specialist stuff and also day-to-day stuff available. All in a nice environment and well presented.

Tesco have been moving up the food chain over the years and I ought to cheer lead a little for them coming from Cheshunt in Hertfordshire which just happens to be their home. But, all in all, they are just another super market chain.

I find the US chains to be generally poor in comparison to the main UK ones - there are some local exceptions but the big stores are not good.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Sorry Dave, you're not really giving me the kind of detail that makes it explanatory. Yes, Whole Foods isn't good for oh, I dunno, aspirin and bog roll (though I'm sure they have them), but Larry's is, and does the high quality food as well, ditto Top Foods, and, as I understand it, Thriftway. I'm willing to believe Waitrose is something yet again, but Tesco's and Sainsbury's did not impress me as being overall better than, QFC or Fred Meyer, for instance. I'm beginning to wonder if it's just a matter of what products one looks for.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I suspect the difference is the variety of happy soothing aisle-cruising music.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Waitrose generally don't do music. :)

But they have a hell of a selection of organic and specialist chocolate and an amazing drinks section, especially if you want those weird liqueurs that you need for odd cocktails.

The foie gras selection is pretty extensive too.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, at a first order Waitrose is good for bog roll, asprin, Kellogg's Corn Flakes and other conventional branded produce.

However, the key thing is it's a pretty ubiqutous chain - you don't have to particularly go out of your way to find one, whereas, in the Bay Area at least, I had to drive miles to find a supermarket that wasn't an Albertsons or Safeway.

Larry's Market seems to be quite good - but my experience is that that is still the exception in most of the US, rather than the rule.

I'm surprised at your comment about Tesco and Sainsbury as I would consistently rate them above any US supermarket I find. For example, pretty much any Tesco or Sainsbury I go into will have a wide range of specialist foods, olive oils, imported products where as I've found in the US I often have to go out of my way for them.

I'm prepared to believe this is a regional thing and that Seattle is way above average in this regard, but my own experience is the average is higher in the UK.

Unless you want to shop in Asda, which is pretty much on par with a Safeway.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Safeway's disappeared now, with its stores divided between Tesco and the Northern-based chain Morrison. The former appears to have grabbed the better sites.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Tesco is just as greedy, just as expansionist as Wal-Mart (which owns Asda in the UK). This is not Good vs Evil, but rather one of those late 1960s Japanese monster movies, where two creatures battle and leave devastation in their wake.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Excellent! We must destroy our economy before the Chinese take over.

I actually hadn't heard of Asda before reading this article, and wondered about the rhetoric of the statement that Tesco had "crushed" Asda with 30% of the market compared to 19% (IIRC). 19% still seems pretty good, especially for a foreign-owned company. Wonder how Sainsbury's compares.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Asda is a contraction of Associated Dairies, and was originally a company set up by British agricultural interests to cut out the middle man and ensure they got a decent return on their milk, etc. Now Wal-Mart owns it.