Tesco Makes Further £100m Price Cut

Popular money saving offers on everyday products including 3 for £10 on packs of meat will continue into the New Year and new offers such as 3 for £3 on Hovis bread will be introduced.

07/01/08 Tesco has announced that it will be investing a further £100m this month in a combination of permanent price cuts and promotions on over 3,000 products, taking the total of its investment in price in the last fortnight to a massive £200m.

Popular money saving offers on everyday products including 3 for £10 on packs of meat will continue into the New Year and new offers such as 3 for £3 on Hovis bread will be introduced.

And, on top of this, from Wednesday, Britain’s favourite supermarket will be launching a brand new advertising campaign to highlight to hard pressed consumers which supermarket is the cheapest.

Real customer’s baskets of shopping, bought by hundreds of thousands of shoppers every day, will be compared against the cost of the same baskets if bought at competitors including Asda, Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s and the results will be published for all to see.

Results from Friday 2nd January showed 1.1 million baskets were cheaper at Tesco than they would have been at Asda. And on average over the last year 1.5 million more baskets per day were also cheaper at Tesco than at Sainsbury’s and 1.2 million per day cheaper than Morrison’s.

And with Clubcard - which returned almost half a billion pounds to customers last year - the number of baskets cheaper at Tesco than at Asda increases to around 1.5 million. Customers can also currently receive double Clubcard points on all fuel purchases at Tesco.

The campaign will be launched in a national advertising drive starting this week and will feature on-line and in Tesco stores giving customers honest information to help their money go further.

Tesco claimed that its new approach is in stark contrast to other high profile price comparison campaigns which are more selective about which products they compare and can therefore be misleading. For example, shoppers may be surprised that Asda’s price claims do not include any own brand products, even though these make up over half of an average grocery shop, Tesco claimed. This means that essentials such as own brand milk, fruit, vegetables and meat which most customers buy every time they shop are excluded. Despite this, they do include 162 hair colourants and 64 dog treats.

Tesco Commercial and Marketing Director, Richard Brasher said: “This year the cost of shopping will be more important to customers than it has ever been and I believe they deserve to know the truth about who offers them the best value for their hard-earned cash.

“For years retailers have made claims and counter claims about who is the cheapest. But until now nobody has looked at what shoppers actually put in their shopping baskets to provide a true picture of what customers are really spending.

“Our new real baskets look at the actual products people buy every day including popular own brand items and essentials such as own brand milk, meat, fruit and vegetables so customers can be confident that our price claims reflect real shopping.”