Tesco is to take an even bigger share of the UK's fast-growing local store market by buying family-owned convenience store chain Adminstore. The £53.7 million deal puts Tesco in a stronger position in the sector that is dominated by the Co-operative Society.
Adminstore's chain of shops is in the sought after high streets of London, mainly under the Europa, Cullens and Harts brands. Tesco will rebrand all three to become the supermarket's own Tesco Express outlets.
The Transport and General Workers' Union is raising the issue of the takeover with the Office of Fair Trading. "We are concerned that following the Morrison takeover of Safeway, the big four supermarkets will effectively control seventy five per cent of the food supply," said Brian Revell, the T&G's national organiser for food and agriculture. "We do not want Tesco to get any bigger as customers must have a choice. If Tesco is allowed to buy up its competitors, then the customer is deprived of that choice."
The largest US organic and natural food retailer Whole Foods Market (WFM) has entered the European market with the acquisition of British group Fresh & Wild for $38 million.
While WFM has said that the British acquisition was simply the first step in a wider European rollout, Bryan Roberts, analyst at M+M Planet Retail, stressed that making the UK business work in the short term would not necessarily be an easy task.
Union members are picketing some 200 or so Migros supermarkets across Switzerland today to protest against poor working conditions. Not surprisingly, the co-operative retailer has refuted the claims.
According to the unions, Migros offers its employees some of the lowest salaries and poorest working conditions in the Swiss retail sector. It is also said to be anti-union.
But the co-op was vehement in its denials of these accusations. "In the last four years alone, Migros has raised salaries by 10 per cent, a total increase in salary payments of SF400 million," the company said in a statement.
The Supermarket Code of Practice, designed to regulate the way in which British retailers do business, has been criticised once again by a number of consumer and producer organisations for failing to do enough to curb the power of the supermarket groups.
An alliance of organisations as diverse as Friends of the Earth, the National Federation of Women's Institutes, the Soil Association and the Small and Family Farms Alliance, has today called on the UK government to take a tougher stance against the retailers when it completes its review of the Code later this year.
