The flames of inflation look, finally, to be cooling. While politicians play tug of war over who can take the credit, shops’ tills should reap the benefits. Tesco’s chief executive, Ken Murphy, was already hailing “encouraging early signs” of easing inflation back in June; results in October then showed an almost 9 per cent increase in sales and a 14 per cent rise in profits for the first half of the year as Britain’s biggest supermarket upgraded its profit forecast.
That half-year sales increase was almost entirely due to inflation, but Tesco’s discipline in keeping costs constrained — while also cutting its prices on essentials such as milk and bread to compete with Aldi and Lidl — has put it in a retail sweet
