Yeah.. Waitrose is better for coffee. They give you a free one and a paper too if you spend over £10 so that’s a winner to begin with.

Waitrose don’t sell shoelaces ffs. What kind of crap supermarket doesn’t sell shoelaces ? My local ethically owned convenience store sells shoelaces, as well as most other stuff, and it’s only got a few square feet of floor space. I would be mortified if Tesco didn’t sell shoelaces.

And Waitrose croissants are shite btw. At least they were about 8 years ago on the one and only occasion I bought some.

Blimey if that is putting the shareholders first, they must be REALLY bad at customer service

Share price -24% over past year and well over £4 5 years ago versus today’s £2.23. Divi close to 5% and a kitchen sink Dave – might be worth a little “nibble” in the value section!

Indeed. I think it was more big egos and shit forecasting that got them into this position.

That’s not even getting into the details such operating without a CFO in place for most of last year.

Maybe it’s just my highly trained eyes but

molgrips – Member

the two big ones
St Mellons
you come in in the middle

Given the fact that customers provide the working finance for supermarkets and that it is a volume business, you have to be truly incompetent not to prioritise your customers.

*WHSmith – how the hell are they still in business?

Cost control

They have basically said “selling magazines, books and stationary is screwed in the long term, therefore how can we milk as much cash out of it as possible in the short term”.

So they stopped investing in their stores (or anything really); started hawking massive bars of chocolate at the tills; focused on high margin travel locations such as airports, service stations etc where customers have no choice but to buy their overpriced convenience crap; stopped selling low margin items such as CDs and DVDs and did everything they could to make money without spending any. It was very successful for their chief exec who oversaw all of this, Kate Swan left in 2013 with a cool £13m! (and walked straihgt into another job).

They don’t do the same with less money, they do less with less money. You may be happy with less, but that’s a consumer choice.

Many people think that Aldi provide better quality produce for a given price.

I know the fake offers thing is annoying, but this:

An example, share bags of Cadbury giant buttons, in the last 6 months they have been £1 for a 165g bag, £1.50 for a 165g bag, £2 for a 165g bag but buy 2 for £3, £2 for a 109g bag, £1.50 for a 109g bag and £1 for a 109g bag, all with various yellow offer signs at random points. Frankly, it’s dirty and misleading.

appears to demonstrate a not entirely healthy obsession with the price of Cadbury buttons to a level I’d not really thought possible!

Cost control

And basically a hatred of their customers.

I’d rather a business carefully managed its costs AND gave a great service to its customers. See Amazon….

I don’t think Tesco have ever really competed on price even though they’ve often pretended to be, they’ve always been a mid ground supermarket price wise. This is no bad thing though, I think there is a market for a “nicer than Aldi, cheaper than Waitrose” kind of place.

Their challenge is partly a general cynicism to them from the public based on some fairly questionable pricing tactics combined with horrible stores to shop in. The former is easy to fix, stop questionable “offers”, set a price that is less than Waitrose, done. The latter is also easy in principle but much harder in practise when you have spent a decade building huge stores.

Edit, and amedias, guilty as charged. I no longer go into supermarkets at lunch as that is what happens, I simply can’t be trusted, if the buttons were too much I’d just by some other crap instead.

I’d rather a business carefully managed its costs AND gave a great service to its customers. See Amazon….

Generating a profit is easier when you avoid tax.

They don’t do the same with less money, they do less with less money. You may be happy with less, but that’s a consumer choice.

Not property wise, Aldi run a very tight ship compared to the big boys. Their properties are better designed and better maintained, if smaller in scale.

I’d rather a business carefully managed its costs AND gave a great service to its customers. See Amazon….

Something always has to give. In Amazon’s case it’s how it treats it’s staff.

…and it’s tax arrangements.

Generating a profit is easier when you avoid tax.

Not really, tax comes after profit not the other way round, with Amazon they aren’t very good at generating profits (as opposed to cashflow) hence they pay very little tax.

Almost no one would be prepared to argue Amazon dont actively avoid tax and that is why they pay very little. Its not “cashflow” its design
The EU are currently investigating them on this iirc.

Amazon’s most recent charge brings to just over £10m its contribution to the public purse through corporation tax in a decade. Over the last four years, Amazon has generated £23bn in British sales.

No one really believes they are not making profit on this. I am sure they are sufficiently lawyered up to argue it but we all knwo what is really going on even if we cannot prove it

Last year they generated $90 billion of sales globally, they made zero profits. They did pay a bit of tax though.

Oh and online and click and collect is both necessary to retain customers and stop Occado nicking all the most profitable ones but also completly at odds with Tesco’s requirement to get more people into their stores to buy all of the randon shit they fill their stores with.

Nobody at the moment can compete with Ocado for the online service anyway (apart from Morrisons obviously)

Store picking groceries for home delivery is a crap method and will never provide the same quality of products, with minimal substitutions as a properly organised central warehouse system.

Amazon is a massive beneficiary of a very sweet tax deal with Luxembourg (Junker’s handywork I imagine), ditto Apple, Starbucks, eBay etc. The UK is massively profitable for Amazon, Apple, Starbucks and eBay, its just very little if any profit is booked in the UK.

We can prove what they are doing, it’s just that its allowed under tax laws in the UK and under the EU tax treaties

By creating a £6bn loss Tescos probably won’t pay any corporation tax either for a very long time

Its very ugly politically but that’s why there is 5.5%-8% on food in most of the rest of the EU. The companies cannot dodge VAT and neither can we as consumers. I would have a 10% online sales tax with offsets if you have a physical presence in the UK and you pay UK corporation tax (that might not be legal under EU tax lawy unfortunately)

Amazon doesn’t need a fancy tax structure, it doesn’t make significant profits*, never has because it continually reinvests in building market share. It is a way of achieving zero profit growth in value, one of the happy consequences of which is that there is nothing to tax. They are in Luxembourg because the VAT rate is lower so they can offer lower prices compared to people in higher VAT juridictions, but VAT is a tax on the consumer not the corporate.

Apple, Starbucks Ebay are different because they actually make profits. There is no such thing as an EU tax treaty, but the Luxembourg structure in these cases is a US avoidance structure designed to avoid supbpart F income recognition.

Tesco loss is predominately on unrealised property write downs so there will be no loss for tax purposes.

*Look at their 10-K filings.

I thought Starbucks started paying corporation tax? Or are we so used to typing the name..?

No I still love Tesco. But Aldi is cheaper. Their cat food is silly cheap. I don’t know how they do it. And the cats love the taste of it.

That pile of horsemeat had to be bought by someone.

I also think you have to be really careful in Aldi – lots of items are in smaller packs and less weight. Then you need two for our large family – leaving some to freeze or faff with. It ended up barely saving anything to eat good meat & veg, but everything else we were not keen on. ;0

Anyway, having shopped in a village Co-Op for 6 years, everything seems cheap

My local Aldi store simply ignored their licence when it suited them :

Aldi in Selsdon breached licence by opening until 10pm

Selsdon councillor Sara Bashford says the licensing breach shows the German chain “doesn’t really care about the community”.

She told the Advertiser: “When Aldi came to Selsdon in 2006 they held a meeting and told us they would be a part of the community; they acted like they were going to be our best friends.

“I still don’t have any objections to having an Aldi here but they have done a lot of little things like this that show they don’t really care about our community.
Sounds to me they’re being part of the community by giving the local community what it wants; later opening hours.

I thought Starbucks started paying corporation tax?

They started making a profit, how did that happen ? I thought that despite Starbucks Corp making profits throughout the world for some inexplicable reason they never made any profit in the UK.

Well it just goes to show, despite making losses every year for the first 16 years of operations in the UK Starbucks never gave up, eventually their faith in the British market paid off and they made a profit.

I think we should all be grateful to Starbucks for subsidising their UK operations for 16 years just so we could enjoy their delicious coffee. It’s a classic example of capitalism which puts people before profit.

B AND Q, are another strange retailer,they dont have a b and q website, but use diy.com for some reason, they own screwfix, but also have b and q trade in a lot of stores for the trade, same prices and codes as for screwfix and same prices, but most stuff off the shop floor is not at trade prices , and if the trade bit has run out of stock youll get charged the store price if you run and get some off the shop floor, and not all stores have a trade dept , also timber isnt discounted , but pensioners on a wednesday get 10%off all products, more than us trades get.

but use diy.com for some reason

Fairly obvious reason, no?

http://www.bampersandq.com

http://www.bandq.com

http://www.diy.com

Yeah.. Waitrose is better for coffee. They give you a free one and a paper too if you spend over £10 so that’s a winner to begin with.

Genuinely surprised at this – not the waitrose offer but that people actually stop for coffee. Clothes shopping with the mrs wandering for hours around town, yes coffee break guaranteed, need to rest my weary legs and chill for a while. But doing your food big shop, why? For starters all your chilled/frozen food is getting warm while you sit sipping your skinny-moccachino-latte. Dunno, I guess I see food shopping as a chore so get it over and done with asap, so I’m surprised a coffee shop is a profitable addition to a supermarket (or is everyone else in the UK addicted to coffee and literally can’t go 5 mins without one?)

So is the tesco thing a tax dodge or the new ceo setting himself up for a big win?
and are amazon really tax dodgers extraordinaire or continually re-investing entrepreneurs?
Coz on posts so far it still seems to be 50/50

The voice of reason…

I want to see squirrelking’s

very efficient snaking motion

I won’t be able to go into a supermarket now without wondering if I’m unconsciously doing that, or trying to identify other shoppers who are. 😀

Lidl needs to get back the paprika crisps. Those ones that are like kid-on Pringles are alright, but not as good as the crisps.

Genuinely surprised at this – not the waitrose offer but that people actually stop for coffee.

My Waitrose is near a train station, so a lot of people pick one up and pop a lid on it, and drink it on the train. I do see a lot of people pick them on their way out after shopping, tho. So assume they drink it on the way home?

and are amazon really tax dodgers extraordinaire or continually re-investing entrepreneurs?

Look at the numbers, Amazon has retained earnings, all profits made globally in its history (less dividends paid) of $2 billion. It has never paid a dividend so that equals total profits worldwide in its 20 year history. It does not make a significant profit.

However the stock market values it at $180 billion because investors believe it will in the future make profits. So it has created value without making profits.

Genuinely surprised at this – not the waitrose offer but that people actually stop for coffee

Need milk on a Saturday morning? Wander through the woods, stop off at the park, kids can play, get to Waitrose and the kids enjoy a snack, we do a crossword with the coffee, then get milk and go home. Rather pleasant 🙂 there are no other coffee shops within walking distance of ours anyway.

I don’t do it when doing a big shop of course.