Herb Sorensen, Ph.D.

Tesco to Shutter 12 Fresh & Easy Stores

January 11, 2012

FROM RETAILWIRE:
From the Tesco perspective, the press coverage generated by the announcement that it has decided to close 12 Fresh & Easy stores may seem a bit overblown considering the chain is looking to open 25 new units by the end of March. What do you read into the latest store closing and opening announcements from Fresh & Easy?      [more...]

I'm disappointed, and have been from the beginning. Pre-opening, I thought they were going to be a super-C-store. The reality was that they were a shrunken supermarket. I thought that Walmart's response, the Marketside, was a better shrunken supermarket. What I was looking for in both cases was something more like an expanded Sheetz, not a shrunken Safeway.

What happened, at least with Fresh & Easy, is they started aiming for the type of Big Head store (what shoppers mostly want to buy,) maybe an upscale Lidl or Aldi, and immediately began growing a Long Tail (the broader selection that ATTRACTS shoppers -- even though they don't buy it).

This is so characteristic of the merchant warehousemen who populate, especially the upper ranks, of self-service retailing today. Before and right after roll-out you saw lots of management commentary by Tesco on what the Fresh & Easy EXPERIENCE would be for the shopper. (And of course all the social do-gooder stuff, too.) That all disappeared like a fart in the wind, hanging onto forced self-checkout as a vestigial idea. (They do an excellent job of ASSISTING you with your self-checkout -- especially since the low traffic usually means there are semi-superfluous staff.) I don't recall seeing their permanent demo station ever being in action when I visited a store over the years -- admittedly at perhaps odd hours).

I don't know where I would begin with advising/suggesting improvements, apart from maybe a brain transplant. But then, maybe that's what this little dissertation was. ;-)