“Tesco, the U.K.’s largest grocer, has opened its first store-within-a-store dedicated to selling Apple Computer products. The display area in a cavernous store in Milton Keynes, north of London, features iMacs, PowerBooks, iPods, and accessories,” Saheli Datta reports for Business 2.0. “For Apple, this is the latest expansion of its retail presence overseas, and for Tesco, it’s part of a continuing push to expand its sales into nonfood items.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: For more background information about Apple’s growing relationship with Tesco, which operates over 2,000 stores worldwide, please see our related articles below.
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Related articles:
Tesco’s Apple iPod UK sales trial goes ‘very well,’ chain considers larger rollout including Macs – January 25, 2006
Tesco to start selling Apple iPods across the UK – May 20, 2005
Good for Apple – ‘Every little helps!’
This is HUGE for the UK people TESCO is very powerful over here. This sends a HUGE message to the masses.
thinking different
a carrot, tin of beans and an imac please, can i use my nectar card? lol
I’ll take a pound of roast beef, a dozen jumbo eggs, a gallon of milk, a 5user license of ilife ’06, and a macbook pro please!
…at the GROCERY store?
OK…
No you can’t use your nectar card as that’s Sainsbury’s!
I wonder if they’ll let you take these through the self-checking aisle.
“Oh, did I forget to scan that?”
because they can.
And I wonder whether they’ll let Richard Madeley near them
I like to see Apple branching out with the store-in-store concept, but a grocery store just seems odd. Sears, JC Penney, sure. Wal*Mart I’d not like, but it’d make sense on some level. But a grocery store is like placing iPod vending machines at gas stations…
i think this is a very big deal. you can mock the idea of apple having a presence in a grocery store but tesco is far more than that nowadays, selling electrical goods, games, toys, clothes etc. this is a very very big chance for apple to get its products in front of the kind of joe public who would never consider going through the hallowed portals of any of apple’s usual retail outlets – totally excellent news! let’s just hope they have staff who know about the product.
hey guys! there’s this thing called the internet where you can find out stuff… look at this: http://www.tesco.com/
Buying “Apples” at grocery stores? Makes sense to me! When will Tom Thumb get on that bandwagon down here in Texas?
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>> iPod vending machines at gas stations…
Why the hell didn’t I think of that??
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MDN word ‘those’
Gotta love those little iPods
For our US friends – Tescos is not just a ‘grocery store’.
You can literally buy almost anything from Tescos these days in the UK.
The Apple ‘stores’ within Tescos are ONLY in the ‘Tesco Extra stores’ which are massive in size (bit like Walmart).
My nearest one is the size of a football pitch – so these are not the ‘local’ small stores by any means.
This is fantastic, oh and Tesco are opening some grocery stores later this year in California backed by an initial investment of £450 Million ($782M) in the US market. The aim, if successful, is to go head on with 7 Eleven.
That amount of investment is peanuts for a business like Tesco, so I expect you guys there in the USA to begin having a grocery store war, good for consumers as that keeps prices down, bad for smaller grocers as they are put out of business.
Tesco in the UK are so huge that for £1.00 in every £3.00 is spent in any one branch of Tesco on a national scale.
American owned grocers are also represented here in that Wal Mart own the chain of Asda stores here and this store is in 3rd place behind Sainsbury with Tesco being number 1.
In the recent past two British owned grocery stores have failed in the USA those being Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer.
Personally I have three Tesco stores nearby, two by car another smaller Express store in walking distance of where I am now. The largest is called Tesco Extra and boy does it have extra, soon some Macs too!!!
My only concern is for the smaller independent Apple reseller as these are suffering already from poor support from Apple in that they tend to get new models last and are looked over by Apple users new and current looking for the latest Mac kit.
I wonder how many Clubcard points a Quad would garner?
Random Coolzip said: “but a grocery store just seems odd.”
Traditional “grocery stores” have diversified tremendously in many places I have visited recently. I’ve seen banks, dry cleaners, florists, cell phone retailers, you name it, in “grocery stores”.
Makes sense for the shoppers and the store.
Rock on Steve!
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This is quite probably the biggest marketing move ever made by Apple, this is going to gain them enormous market awareness in the UK. Tesco is just about one of the biggest and probably most well recognised store in all of the UK.
Get some free iTunes songs if you buy Tide today or by fulfilling your perscription at the Tesco pharmacy.
This has to coming. It’s too good of a promotional concept. Maybe your Tesco card could be connected with your iTunes account and you get instant credit for promotional purchases.
Anybody who produces consumer goods, pharmas, etc…are all looking for ways to connect with people’s lifestyles.
They run a computers for schools promo and last year one of the ads featured an eMac: “An apple. For the teacher. Can help you buy… an Apple. For the whole class.”
This is quite an old story. Everybody else was talking about it on Jan 25th.
Tesco selling Macs isn’t new either. They did so many years ago with the CRT iMacs, but it wasn’t much of a success and they didn’t do it for very long. My understanding is that the Apple department in Tesco will be staffed by specialist, Apple-trained salespeople. Hopefully that should increase the chances of it working out well this time.
Tesco are a massive retailer in the UK. They have innovated many new aspects of retailing and have managed to combine selling everyday essentials at very low prices with selling premium and luxury goods. You can buy low-price baked beans or expensive household goods like a large Sony LCD HD TV.
Apple should fit well within their flagship stores and the arrangement ought to work well for Apple, Tesco and their customers.
We still don’t have any TV on our iTunes
Macjammer, sorry to have a go but i just like things to be right. Asda went passed Sainsburys around 2003 when it took 17% compared to Sainsburys 16.2%. Asda now has 16.6 to Sainsburys 16.3, both losing out to Tesco even more.
Oh, you’re right about the £1 in every £3 thing but thats just grocery sales, tesco account for £1 in every £8 in UK retail. Awesome stat