Lidl’s secret sauce – why you should buy bottom feeders

Piling it high and selling it cheap is not the easy money-making strategy it might seem. Buy up those who can do it well, says Matthew Lynn.

Tim of "Jack's" beans
Cheap as chips and hard to make money from
(Image credit: © Alamy)

That didn’t last long – Tesco decided last week that competing with Aldi and Lidl at the bottom of the grocery market was a lot harder than it looked and closed the “Jack’s” chain set up only four years ago to take the fight to the German discounters. Tesco launched its low-cost chain, which was named after Jack Cohen, Tesco's founder, with great fanfare in 2018. The idea was to compete with Aldi and Lidl, discount grocers who were taking an increasing chunk of the British grocery market with their cheap, limited ranges. If Tesco allowed the two newcomers to advance too far into its core customer base it could quickly find itself in big trouble. And with its vast buying power and its expertise in the market, Tesco’s executives may well have thought they could swat aside their rivals with ease.

That didn’t work out as planned. Four years on Jack’s has only a handful of stores and hasn’t made any impact on the market, while its German rivals have kept on growing. At the same time, Tesco has managed to stabilise its market share and its finances, and the share price has recovered. It makes more sense to focus on cutting prices at its existing 4,000 stores and matching its rivals right across the range.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.