[emersonbiggins]

NYT article

Great time to be opening new brands in the U.S.!! Oh wait, no it's not.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')LONDON — Britain’s largest retailer, Tesco, is finally ready for its American debut.

It has sent executives to board with American families, watching what they eat and where they shop. The scouts have built a clandestine store inside a California warehouse to test the reactions of selected people, telling any busybodies who inquired that it was a movie set. They have run computer models and pored over economic data and mapped demographic trends.

And, of course, they have sized up the competition.

“We’ve been looking at the U.S. for 20 years,” said Greg Sage, a spokesman at the company’s headquarters in Cheshunt, England.

This year, the company will begin showing the results: neighborhood convenience stores called Fresh and Easy, selling mostly food, in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas and San Diego.

It may sound like a modest parry for a company known for bold thrusts, but Tesco is treading lightly where other big British retailers have fallen before.

For example, the supermarket chain J Sainsbury left the American market in 2004, and the venerable dry goods retailer Marks & Spencer sold Brooks Brothers in 2001 for less than a third what it paid 13 years earlier.

Other retailers have found the United States perilous, too. The Dutch supermarket giant Royal Ahold has faced a series of crises, from accounting irregularities to restive unions, at its American operations.

The Tesco strategy can be considered an end run around the world’s other giant retailers, Wal-Mart and Carrefour, which have recently been withdrawing from difficult markets after a race to plant flags in as many countries as possible.

...

[Tanada]

When I see stuff like this I don't know wether to laugh or cry! On the one hand i wonder if they are nuts jumping on a bandwagon which is oput of controll careening down hill at ever increasing speed, or am I crazy and salvation really is just around the corner but i am blind to it?