The Tesco story
Jong Won Lee, Homeplus.com Seoul, South Korea
- This is the story of an international business…
- and how we strive every day to do the best we can for our customers…
- thanks to the staff we’re so proud of…
- working hard to make things better…
- offering an unbeatable range of products…
- helping you make the right choices for you and your family…
- while building strength in non-food…
- through stores designed and operated for customers…
- and tailored to the communities which they serve…
- so you can shop from wherever you like…
- making things simple…
- while contributing to our local communities…
- with suppliers who understand their markets…
- and leading the way on the environment…
- and benefiting all of our stakeholders.
To make sure that our customers get the same great choice as they have come to expect when doing their own shopping, tesco.com operates by asking customers to send their orders in on-line and then by picking their orders from our existing stores.
Today the tesco.com model operates in the UK, the Republic of Ireland and South Korea. On-line grocery sales have exceeded £1 billion for the first time in the UK alone. We have an active customer base of 850,000 and more than 250,000 orders are now being completed each week.
In the UK, nearly 1,860 vans operate out of 294 stores. In our Newcastle store our service is so popular that there are now 18 vans delivering to local customers.
Drivers deliver between 9am and 11pm, and our staff start picking our customers’ orders from 6am. A record-breaking 1.3 million shoppers chose tesco.com to deliver their presents and groceries over Christmas, and to make sure that these were all picked successfully, our staff started picking even earlier, at 4am.
To help us continue to deliver this success, we have now opened our first tesco.com only store. Some people might call it a warehouse, but we have been very careful to make the distinction. By laying the products out in the same way as in a standard store and by filling up the shelves in the same way, we have been able to ensure that the pickers choose customers’ shopping with the same care and attention that they would do if they were picking from their local superstore.
Situated in Croydon, South London, the tesco.com only store helps us to meet the demand for our home shopping service that the local stores were not able to meet. Although these kind of stores don’t replace our normal tesco.com model, there may be a few more locations around the country where they could help us offer our service to more customers.
Green van men take to the streets
Many people know the huge difference that we can make by delivering customers’ shopping to their doors. Perhaps they don’t have a car, are recovering from an operation and can’t leave the house or perhaps they have a young family and are short on time.
Tesco.com has made a big commitment to reduce CO2 emissions throughout the business. Because our dotcom vans visit several different households before returning to store, each van saves thousands of car journeys per year, thereby reducing pollution and congestion on our roads.
We are, however, conscious that there is more we can do, so in May 2007 we introduced our first fleet of fully electric, zero-emission home delivery vans which are both quiet and pollution free.
Each of the zero-emission vans, which are based at the newly-opened environment store in Shrewsbury and throughout London, will save 21 tonnes of CO2 per year – the equivalent of driving 51,000 miles in a car.
Many people associate our on-line service exclusively with grocery products. However, we are also a wine merchant, with a range of over 900 wines, including 150 that are only available on our on-line service. We also offer customers a beautiful range of courier-delivered bouquets, and indoor and outdoor plants through our on-line flower shop.
tesco.com
We have over 9,000 staff picking our customers’ on-line orders in our UK stores.