Tesco claims to be at its most competitive in years as it sees continued sales decline and 'loss of 1m customers a week'
Tesco has claimed its enhanced rewards through its recently launched Clubcard Fuel Save scheme and a cheaper online grocery service is increasing its competitiveness, despite a group sales decline of 0.9 per cent for the last quarter.
The supermarket is aiming to improve customer loyalty through the launch of schemes such as the Fuel Save scheme, which began in March, but has witnessed group sales growth including petrol fall by 3.3 per cent during its first quarter in comparison with the first quarter of last year.
The UK sales growth, including petrol, has declined 3.8 per cent on the same period the previous year also.
Despite this, Philip Clarke, CEO of Tesco, claimed that the supermarket was more competitive that it had been for many years, having cut prices on important products, home delivery changes and made its Click and Collect service free to use.
"As expected, the acceleration of our plans is impacting our near-term sales performance.," he continued. "The first quarter has also seen a continuation of the challenging consumer trends in the UK, reflecting still subdued levels of spending in addition to the more structural changes taking place across the retail industry. We are determined to lead in this period of change, building long-term customer loyalty and positioning the business to win in the multichannel era."
He claimed that the store refresh programme would impact on 650 neighbourhoods, including over 100 Extra stores.
"We further strengthened our market-leading multichannel offer at the end of April with lower delivery and service charges for grocery home shopping. These included the introduction of free Click & Collect, £1 one-hour delivery slots and a lower priced, no-risk guarantee Delivery Saver subscription scheme. Since the launch of these initiatives we have fulfilled over 100,000 daily orders on four occasions; a milestone we had previously not reached, even during the Christmas period," said Clarke.
Like for like sales growth for the supermarket, excluding petrol, was down by 3.7 per cent, for 2014/2015 figures.
Meanwhile, according to data from Kantar Worldpanel, Tesco is losing around 1 million customers each week as they look to rivals such as Aldi and Lidl instead.
New data from Kantar Worldpanel released to The Telegraph, showed that in the quarter ending 25 May, the supermarket chain's sales fell by 3.1 per cent on last year.