Tesco, I hate you — and you need to know why

For the vociferous band of Tesco-haters, waiting for the supermarket giant to slip up on one of its own homogenised banana skins has been a long and frustrating business. OK, you can clutch on to the failure of Tesco to achieve the 4 per cent year-on-year increase in sales during the Christmas period which analysts had predicted (it only managed 3.1 per cent). You can point out that its shares have plunged by 20 per cent since December — but which retailer’s shares haven’t? You can crow that a remarkable number of its executives over the past year have been scattering to jobs in rival businesses (one of them, dammit, to Sainsbury).

But it is all pretty desperate stuff. Tesco still takes £1 in every £8 spent in shops by British consumers. Moreover, in ten years it has successfully built up a network of 1,376 stores outside the UK, which last year generated £564 million worth of profit.