Tesco has come out all guns blazing as it sets to fight back against rival companies claims, that it dominated the grocery market . Talking Tesco is a new website produced in an effort to limit the fallout from the Competition Commission’s probe into the sector.
Sainsbury’s, Asda, Wm Morrison and Marks &Spencer all demanded changes to the planning regulations governing new stores and extensions in an attempt to check Tesco’s retail power . The companies submitted complaints to the watchdog inquiry, but Tesco have hit back with their latest website, Talking Tesco, in an attempt to quash claims that its high share of local markets is bad for shoppers .
According to Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s large supermarkets hold a monopoly or duopoly in 40 per cent of their local markets, and it was Sainsbury’s that reported to the watchdog inquiry asking them to introduce new planning laws in a bid to stop Tesco’s complete takeover of the market sector.
Tesco’s company secretary and corporate affairs director, Lucy Neville Rolf, said Talking Tesco would tell its customers its side of the story . Without rubbishing its rivals’ claims, Tesco paints a different picture of the UK’s supermarket landscape.
Despite Sainsbury’s claims about Tesco’s dominance in the market, Talking Tesco says “customers choose where they shop” . It produced research which showed that 94 per cent of British consumers have a choice of three or more different grocery chains within a 15-minute drive of their homes .
The website includes a shopping list of ways in that customers have benefited from the hold that supermarkets have on the country .
Talking Tesco is the latest plan in the company’s public relations strategy that has already seen the group launch a community plan, which is aimed to improve its strained relationship with some towns anxious to avoid becoming ‘Tesco towns such’, such as Inverness and Bicester.
The commission is expected to publish its results in December at the earliest.
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