I’ve been reading Andrew Simms’ Tescopoly, subtitled “how one shop came out on top and why it matters”. As you might expect from the man associated with the coining of the term “clone high street”, he’s not complimentary. It proved timely since I arrived this afternoon in Poole (Dorset) to find in the local newsagent a petition against a planned Tesco “Metro” on the high street.

The book itself has lots of good data and anecdotes, while being in structure rather loose and unfocused – he keeps getting distracted by broad issues such as food miles and digressing at great length off into those.

Still, some great snippets

* The board game Monopoly was invented by a Quaker called Elizabeth Magie-Phillips in 1903 “to teach the evils of land speculation and the tendency of badly regulated markets to create monopolies”. (p. 1)

* From 1980 to 2000 the overall number of retail outlets fell from 273,000 businesses to 201,000. Specialist shops such as butchers, bakers and fishmongers shut at a rate of about 50 a week between 1997 and 2002. In the two years up to 2003 wholesalers closed at the rate of about six a week. (p.79)

* The number of apple orchards in the UK reportedly halved between 1990 and 2002. In 1930 there were 97,866 hectares of traditional orchards in England. By 2004 there were 16,767 hectares. (p. 81)

* Tesco for the year ending Feb 2006 had over £39bn of revenue, and profit of over £2.2bn. This would put it 55th in the World Bank’s 2005 ranking of nations, above Bangladesh. (p90)

* The Financial Times calculated that by enforcing long payment terms, Tesco was effectively getting a free £2.2bn loan from its suppliers. (p. 129) According to Accountancy Age, Tesco paid only 67% of its invoices below the value of £5,000 on time –even on its own favourable terms. (p. 140)

* In 2004, calculations showed that in the convenience store sector, which employs half a million people, it took turnover of £42,000 to create a job. For superstores the figure is £95,000. That year Tesco, with a turnover of £29bn, employed 250,000 people, while small grocery stores, with a turnover of £21bn, employed double that figure. (p. 162)

A plan for a huge new coal mine in Australia is likely to be stopped in its tracks by an acute water shortage very possibly related to global warming.