It’s a long way from South Queensferry to Los Angeles and there’s not a lot in common if truth be told, apart from a suspension bridge.
But they do nicely illustrate the different sides of the overstretched Tesco empire.
This week, the store in South Queensferry, a pretty (but cold) estuary town just outside Edinburgh, was celebrating its biggest ever week in Click and Collect with almost three times as many orders as normal and a massive 68% boom in frozen food sales.
Stores like it across the UK are at last beginning to see the results of CEO Philip Clarke’s £1bn turnaround plans, which despite an overall like-for-like fall in sales in the UK, have helped outperform the market with a 1.2% growth in food sales for the third quarter.
These may not be the sort of figures Tesco was used to when it was an all-conquering global force but if the trend carries on they will be the start of the fightback.
Meanwhile on the US front, Clarke himself was today busy fire fighting a very different story and one which doubtless will dominate the news headlines - his decision, it looks almost certain anyway, to pull the plug on Tesco’s floundering Fresh & Easy business.
For a long time now, the embattled CEO has expressed his intention to concentrate his efforts on Tesco’s UK heartland, while keeping up a none too convincing desire to make Fresh & Easy work and keep up the extent of Tesco’s global presence.
Withdrawing from the US is, as one commentator notes, hardly Tesco’s finest hour but it will enable him and his remaining board members, now minus one Tim Mason, to look at what they are doing right in South Queensferry and other places and make sure they get the same results across the UK
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