Jack’s of all trades was not Tesco’s finest retail ploy

theguardian.com:

“We have learned a huge amount from Jack’s,” said Jason Tarry, chief executive of Tesco UK and Ireland, as he pulled the plug on the group’s experiment in running an Aldi copycat format. One lesson is probably an old one: pure discounting is best left to specialists.

Trying to run a limited-range discount chain is hard when your core business is, and always will be, mainstream grocery retailing. Sainsbury’s had a go a few years back in partnership with Danish group Netto and also got nowhere. In Tesco’s case, only 13 Jack’s outlets appeared, so no more than the 10-15 billed as “an initial phase” by former chief executive Dave Lewis back in 2018. It suggests the case for expanding Jack’s never got close to borderline.

One can see why boards of big supermarket chains are sometimes overcome by the urge to try to play Aldi and Lidl at their own game. The rise of the discounters is the most significant development in UK grocery retailing over the past 25 years. What the big players tend to overlook, though, is that it took Aldi and Lidl more than a decade to become a serious fighting force.

The former launched here in 1990, and the latter in 1994, but it was only after the turn of the century that the privately owned German duo became more than an irritant to the major chains. Their biggest growth came after the helpful plunge in commercial property prices that followed the financial crash of 2008. Such investment horizons tend to be far too long for quoted companies.

The smarter tactic is the one that Tesco and Sainsbury’s have increasingly adopted – just try to match Aldi’s prices on basic goods, especially fresh food, and champion the fact. It is jarring to see Tesco, the UK’s biggest beast, admit, in effect, that a smaller