Tesco has made their biggest inroad into their fight with cut-price food chains Aldi and Lidl by launching their own chain, Jack’s.
The first store was unveiled last week in Chatteris (Cambridgeshire) and is named after Tesco founder Jack Cohen almost 100 years ago.
In the coming months, Tesco is expected to launch 60 Jack’s stores all over the UK after Aldi and Lidl have nearly doubled their market share to 13.1% in the last five years and their growth is significantly outpacing traditional supermarkets. Many of the stores will be former metro stores converted into Jack’s.
Over the past few years, the big four (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons) have all been forced to cut poor performing stores and significantly reduce the price of their essentials.
Furthermore, Tesco has also launched an array of cut-price goods under in-house brands such as Creamfields, Butcher’s Choice and The Growers Harvest, all of which are expected to be stocked in Jack’s alongside specialist products under the new chain’s name.
This is not the first time one of the big 4 has tried to launch a chain of cut-price retail stores with Sainsbury’s having opened a string of Netto stores in 2014, only to close them all just two years later. Asda also tried an essentials chain in 2006 as an experiment but scrapped the idea. Such is the fear of the rise from Lidl and Aldi, the UK’s second- and third-largest supermarket chains Sainsbury’s and Asda, merged in an effort to cut costs.
