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Edited on Fri May-23-08 02:47 PM by Kutjara
They're a leading quality food retailer, at or near the top of the market (arguably, only Waitrose have a stronger brand image). If anything, the ASDA supermarket chain is "the Wal-Mart of Britain," for the simple reason that it's owned by Wal-Mart. The "George" clothing line you find in Wal-Marts all over the US is, in fact, an ASDA brand.
Fresh & Easy, on the other hand, brings none of Tesco's strengths to the US. Out of curiosity, I visited the two branches closest to me (La Habra and Orange, CA). The stores are fairly dispiriting places, with a pretty limited range of fresh food. Most of the floorspace was devoted to cheap-looking rack shelving over stacked cases of canned and packaged goods, giving the place a 99 cent store feel. More worrying, a significant proportion of the "fresh" products were past their sell-by dates.
F&E appear to want to reduce their headcount to a bare minimum. The eight checkouts in the Orange store, for example, are all automated "scan it yourself" setups, manned by a single employee on a master terminal. His job appeared to involve little more than "approving" credit card purchases over some preset limit. My $75 total was referred to him for "clearance," so the limit is set fairly low (I guess F&E don't expect their customers to buy very much). In total, I would guess no more than ten people were on duty during my visits (three on the shop floor, one at the registers, and I'm guessing maybe five or six in the back). Nobody was policing the parking area, because shopping carts had completely overflowed the "cart return" area and were half-blocking one of the parking lanes.
One of the nice things about shopping at Tesco in the UK is the wide range of high-quality "ready meals" they carry. Quite sophisticated dishes, made with excellent ingredients, can be selected pre-prepared from the chiller cabinet, and then simply warmed in the oven or microwaved at home. For busy people, they're a godsend. I thought of them as "TV dinners done right." One of the reasons I visited F&E was because I thought they might bring the ready-meal concept to the US (where I'm still amazed to find none of the major food retailers offer anything similar). The good news is they have. The bad news is they're crap. Flavorless, lackluster attempts at "Mexican," "Indian" and "Thai" cuisine (I use the quotes to avoid insulting real Mexican, Indian, or Thai food) that, if you close your eyes, are hard to tell apart.
The other "fresh" offer at F&E is, of course, produce. What first struck me was that every vegetable and piece of fruit was wrapped in cellophane. The amount of unnecessary excess packaging was appalling. I couldn't understand why F&E did this until a realization hit me: this wasn't a grocery store, it was a vending machine. All the products are prepared and packaged somewhere else, and then simply shipped to the store and placed on the shelves by utterly interchangeable semi-skilled employees. There is no produce manager, ensuring only the best products adorn his/her shelves. There's no butcher, ready to make cuts to order. There's no fishmonger, happy to recommend the catch of the day. Instead, there are low-paid teenagers, trained in nothing but how to take a product out of a box and put it on a shelf.
It's unsurprising that F&E have taken such an anti-union stance. Skilled, competent employees are the last thing they want. Organized, skilled, competent employees are the stuff of nightmares for F&E's C-suite executives.
I really fail to understand what Tesco hopes to achieve with F&E. They've left everything that makes Tesco great in the UK and concocted a format that's little more than a large food vending machine (with less charm), staffed by uninterested, poorly trained, poorly paid drones. I can't honestly see F&E making it.
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