A collection of news about the Nation’s favourite store :

BBC NEWS | Business | Tesco sees profit rise to £2.8bn

Tesco has reported an 11.8% rise in underlying annual profits for 2007 to £2.846bn, meeting analysts’ forecasts.

Group sales at the UK’s largest retailer rose to £51.8bn, up 11%

Tesco shares rose 7.29%, or 28.50 pence, to 419.50p at close of trade.

Nothing wrong with a little profit is there ?

BBC NEWS | England | Merseyside | Gran in Tesco boss planning war

A grandmother from Merseyside has applied for planning permission to demolish the home of Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy.

Dot Reid is retaliating against plans to bulldoze her home and 71 others in Kirkby, to make way for Everton’s new stadium and a Tesco supermarket.

But we all need progress and we can’t build this Tesco without the space. Someone has to move it’s people houses or another profit developing shop friendly local grocer.

Tesco stocks up on inside knowledge of shoppers’ lives | Business | The Guardian

Tesco is quietly building a profile of you, along with every individual in the country - a map of personality, travel habits, shopping preferences and even how charitable and eco-friendly you are. A subsidiary of the supermarket chain has set up a database, called Crucible, that is collating detailed information on every household in the UK, whether they choose to shop at the retailer or not.

The company refuses to reveal the information it holds, yet Tesco is selling access to this database to other big consumer groups, such as Sky, Orange and Gillette. “It contains details of every consumer in the UK at their home address across a range of demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle characteristics,” says the marketing blurb of dunnhumby, the Tesco subsidiary in question. It has “added intelligent profiling and targeting” to its data through a software system called Zodiac. This profiling can rank your enthusiasm for promotions, your brand loyalty, whether you are a “creature of habit” and when you prefer to shop. As the blurb puts it: “The list is endless if you know what you are looking for.”

But as far as Crucible is concerned, the company admits it has “put great effort into designing our services” so information is classed in a way that circumvents disclosure provisions in the Data Protection Act. Clues about the content of dunnhumby’s database have appeared in the company’s marketing literature. Crucible, it says, is a “massive pool” of consumer data. “In the perfect world, we would know everything we need to know about consumers. We would have a complete picture: attitudes, behaviour, lifestyle. In reality, we never know as much as we would like.” But Crucible, it suggests, has got much further than rival systems by pooling data from several sources and then using the vast Clubcard data pool to profile customers.

Together, Crucible and Zodiac can generate a map of how an individual thinks, works and, more importantly, shops. The map classifies consumers across 10 categories: wealth, promotions, travel, charities, green, time poor, credit, living style, creature of habit and adventurous.

Surely that’s not bad? Doesn’t that mean that we all get the best product at the best price? But how can food be any “cheaper” when it’s produced mainly in the Third World by farmers already on the breadline?