Customers wandering around their local Tesco superstore may have difficulty working out how the nation’s biggest grocer came to be in such a mess, the accounting scandal aside. The stores seem busy enough, the tills active, the car parks full.
Halfway figures from the UK and Irish stores make it clear. Operating margins at these plunged to below 0.8 per cent in the half-year to August 31, from 2.5 per cent last time. This is astonishingly low. Tesco used to shoot for above 5 per cent, admittedly in a different world. The core of the group is barely profitable, then.
As it is, profits from that business fell from £543 million to £166 million. Tesco is having to invest in cutting prices — retailers formally