Tesco plc Annual Report and Financial Statements 2012

UK: Refreshing our stores
for customers and staff
The way stores look and feel is an important
part of the shopping trip. Customers wanted
a warmer, friendlier look and feel, so we
have accelerated our Refresh programme to
improve the environment in all our stores.
Investing over £200 million of additional
capital, we will refresh 430 stores in the
coming year, representing about 25% of our
UK space. Bringing in a warmer, friendlier look
and feel will go hand in hand with our work on
quality and range, so that we offer customers
great products displayed in an attractive,
inviting store environment.
Listening to our staff
Most of our changes are visible to customers
but we are making some equally important
changes behind the scenes. We ran a
programme this year for staff to email or
text in comments about what they felt
needed to be fixed in their stores. With
40,000 comments received, we’ve responded
by rolling out new and better equipment,
like checkout chairs and handheld printers.
This has helped deliver the best staff
Viewpoint feedback survey results for
five years.
The Extra format
Customers are noticing the changes we are
making in stores across all of our formats –
Extra, Superstores, Metro and Express
Fixtures and fittings,
lighting and space
We are refreshing our stores, inside and out,
to make them more inviting. Wooden cladding
and brighter signage welcome customers into
the store. Inside, different areas are being given
a more distinctive look and feel, such as wooden
fixtures in Bakery, or sleek shelving and lighting
in Health & Beauty. Our produce aisles are
more spacious, and our counters have less
functional, more engaging signage, flat
glass fronts and better lighting, to show
off our meat, fish, cheese and
deli products at their best.
12 Tesco PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2012
– but we’re also making some changes that
particularly affect our larger stores. We’re
drawing on the great success of our new
Extra format in Europe to make sure that our
UK Extras continue to meet our customers’
changing needs, as they increasingly combine
shopping in store and online.
Future investment
In the last few years, both convenience
and online shopping have been growing
rapidly. While our existing large stores in
the UK perform very well, recognising the
current economic climate and the growing
importance of online shopping, we are not
planning to open many more of the very
biggest. Instead, more of our investment is
going into refreshing our existing stores.
New investment will be channelled into
Express stores and our online offer.
Scan here to see some of the
improvements we’re making
in store, or visit www.tescoplc.
com/ar2012/ukvideo
Bakery
Customers love being able to choose from
freshly baked breads and cakes and see
our bakers at work in the background.
Displaying the goods in baskets, not on
standard shelves, also helps to make our
bakeries much more appealing.