Tesco's have lost the plot.
I have three branches near me - a Tesco "Extra", a normal Tesco and a Tesco "Express". Time and again the two larger stores are out of basic stuff - tea, coffee, rice, tinned foods, various frozen foods. Space given to what they do stock is sometimes pitiful and it is obvious that their priorities are wrong. You can rarely make two trips and be sure of the same list of basic goods all being available. They boast of carrying 40,000 lines. Well that may be so, but it's of little use if 20,000 of them are out of stock. Over the past couple of years the normal size branch that I use has given over about 30% of its space to clothes, TVs, toys and gardening equipment. They simply don't have the room and their Tesco Extra store (which is three times the size and has the space for such goods) is less than three miles away. The result is that the store is always short on various items. The outcome for me (and no doubt thousands of others) is that whereas I used to do almost all my shopping in Tesco I now shop around and only go to Tescos occasionally.
Bryan Roberts, retail analyst at Kantar Retail told the BBC: "Philip Clarke inherited a troubled business that had not seen enough investment in the UK and also featured misguided overseas expansion. The remark about overseas expansion is certainly true. But I would suggest that the UK investment has been sufficient but just wrongly used. Tescos are essentially grocers and people do not choose them to buy clothes or a new TV. Those high value goods are not the sort of thing people pop into their trolleys whilst getting the weekly shop.
Of the new man, it is said "Dave Lewis brings a wealth of international consumer experience and expertise in change management, business strategy, brand management and customer development." Tesco does not need all those skills. What they need are a few experienced stock controllers who understand why people go to their stores and make sure they have the goods they want all the time.