Tag: Tesco

Fuel prices power community of interest

Price information on a petrol pump dashboard

People living in small towns and villages don’t need telling that life is harder without a car. Disconnected, underfunded and unreliable, public transport doesn’t serve rural areas well in my experience.

My home county of Pembrokeshire typifies this picture, although there are efforts to address this. Welsh researchers found this year that some areas don’t even get one bus an hour! Bus stops (reduced by 3%), routes (15% less) and opportunities catch a bus (down 22%) all contracted during the pandemic across Wales.

And thanks to global events putting a rocket under fuel prices, life is harder for drivers too. As ever, these changes hit deprived communities and people who can’t work from home hardest.

It’s a grim picture. It may explain why talk about ‘connecting places’ often hits a wall of scepticism.

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Why we’re deserting supermarkets – and saving money

Fruit and veg

Tesco over-egging its profits by £250m (yes, that’s a quarter of a billion quid) rightly led to statements of shock across the media this week.

Twice the price; 5kg of spuds for £3.50
Tesco price: 5kg of spuds for £3.50

Explanations for its ‘fall from grace’ are varied. They range from being caught in a sector-wide pincer movement between Aldi and Lidl and Waitrose, to a rise in internet shopping. This feeds sense that shoppers have simply fallen out of love with Britain’s biggest retailer.

It’s still making hundreds of millions in profit each year. But the CEO Dave Lewis probably can’t afford too many hits like this, even though his response to the outbreak of the crisis was swift and impressive.

I’ve worked as a comms person for Tesco, supporting local consultations designed to inform its planning applications for new stores.

I was struck by the dedication and drive of those connected with the business; everyone bought into the vision. We’ve shopped there for years and been devotees of its Clubcard loyalty scheme, which we’ve used to ‘reward’ ourselves with meals at Pizza Express and trips to Longleat.

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