Time to boycott Tesco?
1. Tesco is the world's fourth largest retailer.
In 2006, Inverness, in the UK, was branded as "Tescotown", because well over 50p in every £1 spent on food is believed to be spent in its three Tesco stores.
2. Jack Cohen founded Tesco in 1909 when he began to sell surplus groceries from a stall in the East End of London. (Tesco - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Shirley, Lady Porter DBE is the daughter and heir of Jack Cohen.
In a review of the biography of Mrs Porter by Andrew Hosken, Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian described her as "...the most corrupt British political figure in living memory, with the possible exception of Robert Maxwell". She retired to Israel in 1993.
3. How fresh is Tesco food?
Audrey Brown, of BBC News, (BBC NEWS Business Out-of-date food in UK supermarkets) reported:
"I saw food past its sell-by date on the fresh food counters... and it was regularly being sold.
"At Tesco, it was re-packaged and re-labelled with a new date and reduced in price, sometimes days after it should have been sold or removed from the shelves.
"A lot of the time, the counter staff treated the meat and fish we were selling with indifference and, worryingly, there were times at Tesco when they had no idea what the real sell-by date was as they had altered it so many times.
"Sometimes it was not until the food smelled bad that it was eventually thrown away."
In a programme for BBC1's Whistleblower, "counter staff at... Tesco falsify food temperature records and flout basic rules of food hygiene such as using different knives for fish, raw meat and cooked meat to prevent cross-contamination of bacteria.
"Undercover footage shows the factory floor of a major supplier of ready meals to Tesco cross-contaminated with urine and faecal matter from employees' boots, and a farm which supplies chickens to Sainsbury's where a bin of dead birds crawling with hundreds of maggots is alongside the area for live birds being reared for sale." - TV film claims Tesco and Sainsbury's stores flout hygiene rules ...
3. According to The Guardian, 31 May 2008:
The magazine Private Eye (May 2008) "identified what it said was a Tesco tax avoidance operation involving a complex web of offshore operations centred on the Swiss canton of Zug.
"These arrangements involved an English limited liability partnership (LLP) called Cheshunt Overseas.
"Cheshunt is the name of the Hertfordshire town where Tesco has its headquarters.
"The Cheshunt Overseas accounts provide grounds for believing that the structure may so far have assisted the international retailer in sheltering more than £66m in profit from UK tax."
4. According to Wikipedia (Tesco - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia):
In May 2007 it was revealed that Tesco had moved the head office of its online operations to the tax haven of Switzerland.
In February 2008 a six month investigation by The Guardian revealed that Tesco has developed a complex taxation structure involving offshore bank accounts in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.
Tesco is in the process of selling its UK stores, worth an estimated £6 billion, to Cayman Island based companies set up by Tesco. These companies then lease the stores back to Tesco.
This arrangement enables Tesco to avoid an estimated £1 billion tax on profits from the property sales, and also to avoid paying any tax on continuing operation of the stores, as the rate of corporation tax in the Cayman Islands is zero.
5. In Thailand, Tesco has been criticised for aggressively pursuing critics of the company. Writer and former MP Jit Siratranont is facing up to two years in jail and a £16.4m libel damages claim for saying that Tesco was expanding aggressively at the expense of small local retailers.
Tesco served him with writs for criminal defamation and civil libel.
6. Criticism of Tesco includes allegations of stifling competition due to its undeveloped "land bank", pugilistically aggressive new store development without real consideration of the wishes, needs and consequences to local communities, using cheap and/or child labour, opposition to its move into the convenience sector and breaching planning laws.
7. It's time to close down the big supermarkets because they do more harm than good.
Walmart and Tesco are examples of big supermarkets.
"Wal-Mart may drive prices down, but it drags the quality of life for millions of people down with it.
"With hundreds of employees dependent on public assistance to meet their basic needs, American taxpayers subsidize Wal-Mart's low prices at the rate of roughly $420,750 a year for every 200-employee store by paying for low-income services...
"Wal-Mart hurts U.S. communities by undercutting local merchants and increasing urban sprawl, and its suppliers have been cited for labor and human rights violations." - Responsible Shopper Profile: Wal-Mart:
8. "I've had a big notice in my shop window for a few weeks "the shop that Tesco cannot close" along with photos of the 50 empty shops in our town.
"There's a huge Tesco here, and the town centre is in a bad way.
"I think that small scale retail is just about dead ..." -clearwood.co.uk
Tesco is to open a third store in the town of Dumfries.
"Tesco would take about 60% of all money being spent in the town." Traders fear third Tesco's impact
9. In 2006, Felicity Lawrence wrote in the Guardian
"The trouble with weeds is that left unchecked they become invasive and strangle everything else. Tesco has spread uncontrolled with frightening speed. In some parts of the country it has 45% of the grocery market...
"Tesco... subverts the democratic process as it forces through planning permissions against community wishes; it added 2m sq ft of sales space last year alone...
"It suffocates independent shops and markets; it uses its power to squeeze its suppliers...
"The supermarket sector, with its just-in-time ordering that requires casual labour to be turned on and off like a tap, and its new packhouse industries, has been one of the most prolific creators of demand for trafficked labour."
10. "In Bangladesh young women are working for as little as 5p an hour to make clothes for Asda and Tesco while working up to 14 hours a day for weeks on end... Tesco reported annual profits of more than £2.5bn last week" - 6p a T-shirt. 30p an hour for shelling cashews.
