Like most supermarkets, it all started from a market stall in London Town. Tesco started in , when Jack Cohen started selling surplus groceries from a market stall in Hackney. Jack's market stall grew, and by , the first Tesco store opened in Burnt Oak, Edgware. The store focused on dry goods, including the Tesco branded tea!
During the next 10 years, the business continued to grow, with Jack opening stores in expanding London Suburbs. In , Tesco purchased a plot of land in Edmonton to allow him to build state of the art headquarters and warehousing. It was one of the first modern warehouses built for food, and introduced breakthrough ideas for stock control. The Tesco stock was offered for sale at 25p per share.
This flotation jump-started Tesco's journey into self-service stores, with its first supermarket arriving a few years later. In , the first big step was taken, which began the transformation into the retailer we know today. Tesco opened its first self-service store. Jack had travelled to America to research self-service stores. Tesco was changing the way it served its customer. In traditional stores, customers would form a line at a counter and a store assistant would gather the shopping from the back of the store.
Self-service allowed customers to walk round the store, picking their own shopping from the shelves. The first Tesco self-service store opened in St Albans in , with initial mixed feedback from customers. The change was as polarising as self-service checkouts are today. They were right to do so — Tesco shares soared in price and the business became a darling of the City and a regular in the FTSE Cohen first took a trip to sunny America in to investigate the trend for self-service supermarkets.
He left unimpressed and believed British shoppers would feel the same. But after the war, encouraged by his son-in-law Hyman Kreitman, who had joined the business and would later take the reins at Tesco when Cohen retired, he decided to trial the concept at a store in St Albans. However, he reopened the store a year later and this time his customers were ready. Kickstarting a succession of acquisitions that would become a familiar pattern and route to growth, Tesco snapped up 19 Burnards stores, a self-service rival.
Cohen had always stuck to groceries, but at the turn of the swinging sixties he introduced clothing for men, women and children, and household goods and electronics like TVs, record players and radios. At the same time Cohen branched out into the north of England, buying branches of Irwin stores. Resale Price Maintenance prevented large retailers from using their buying power to undercut the prices of smaller shops.
Jack Cohen lobbied parliament to have RPM scrapped. Tesco kept some stores as Victor Value to offer a bargain-based arm to the operation. The plan was simple: introduce the same sharp prices on petrol as Tesco did with everything else.
We were really disruptive in the fuel market, opening new petrol stations and undercutting the local competition, and that meant a real reason for customers to come to our stores. Cohen was succeeded as chairman by son-in-law Hyman Kreitman in , and another son-in-law, Sir Leslie Porter, succeeded him in In good times and bad, the company that works hard, that insists on offering value for money, and is not afraid to experiment and make changes will always prosper.
Cohen was knighted in and retired from Tesco in Food sales had slumped across a country struggling with high unemployment. Jane Snowball, 72, ordered a grocery shop from Tesco using a piece of tech called Teletext. In a forerunner of online shopping, she used her TV remote to choose from 1, products from the Ceefax-style display and her order was sent through her phone line to Tesco, who picked, packed and delivered it.
But it also targeted smaller sites to drive growth and catch up with rivals, and Tesco opened its first Metro convenience store in Covent Garden, London. Five years later it had 40 Metro stores. The first Tesco Metro opened in Covent Garden. The new smaller format brought value into the heart of towns and cities. Our Extras brought new homeware and electrical goods to customers.
We became the first UK retailer to offer customers a service commitment at the checkouts through the 'One in Front' initiative. Expansion into Central Europe with stores opening in Hungary. The Tesco Clubcard was launched and attracted nearly 5 million customers in the first year. With the introduction of Clubcard, Tesco overtook Sainsbury's in market share.
We developed and launched our Finest range, which was aimed at filling the gap in the market for our more affluent customers. The website has grown to serve over 20,, customers visiting the site every month. Tesco opened the world's first zero-carbon supermarket in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire.
A new Clubcard app was launched in the UK, which gave customers a new way to swipe their cards in store. We opened our first zero-carbon store in Asia, in Bang Phra, Thailand as part of our commitment to become a zero-carbon business by See more Companies in this Industry: Food Retail. Tesco Plc is engaged in the business of offering food, non-food and other retailing services. It operates various store formats that offer products, such as fresh produce, wines and spirits, in-store bakery, ready-meals and sandwiches.
The company, through its subsidiary, Tesco Bank, provides retail banking and insurance services, credit cards, MasterCard and Visa credit card transactions in the United Kingdom. The Telecoms business, primarily operated by Tesco Mobile network, offers mobile handsets, including the latest smart phones.
The first self-service store opened in St Albans in which remained operational until before relocating to a larger premises on the same street, with a period as a Tesco Metro , and the first supermarket in Maldon in During the s and the s Tesco grew organically, and also through acquisitions, until it owned more than stores. Originally specialising in food and drink, it has diversified into areas such as clothing, electronics, financial services, telecoms, retailing and renting DVDs, CDs, music downloads, Internet services and software.
This paved the way for Tesco to expand its presence in Scotland, which was weaker than in England. As of November , Tesco was the only food retailer to make online shopping profitable.
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