Jack Cohen

Cohen began selling surplus groceries from a market stall in the East End of London in 1919 with his army gratuity. The Tesco name came from the initials of a tea supplier, T. E. Stockwell, combined with the first two letters of Cohen.

He moved from stalls to shops and then, crucially, brought American-style self-service supermarkets to Britain after visiting the United States — a change that cut labour costs dramatically and let prices fall.

Pile it high, sell it cheap

His slogan and his strategy. Volume at low margin, aggressive buying, and a willingness to fight the resale price maintenance rules that then kept prices artificially high in Britain — a fight that helped end them.

What there is to learn

Go and look at what works somewhere else

Self-service was not his idea; he saw it in America and brought it back. Visiting another market or another sector is one of the cheapest sources of genuine advantage available.

Buying well is where retail margin is made

The selling gets the attention and the buying makes the money. In any business that resells anything, procurement deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Attack the rule that protects your competitors

Resale price maintenance suited established retailers. Challenging it was a commercial strategy as much as a legal one, and worth asking of your own industry: which convention protects the incumbents?

The reputation problem

'Pile it high, sell it cheap' built the company and then constrained it. Tesco spent decades and a great deal of money escaping a downmarket image that his own slogan created, and the phrase is still attached to it.

Cohen was also, by many accounts, an autocratic manager whose succession planning was poor, and there was significant family and boardroom conflict over control of the business.

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