Wednesday 8 July 2015

Supermarkets - Help my local store is a multinational!



Supermarkets – Help my local store is a multinational!

I have just been doing some research on supermarkets and am very disappointed to find out Morrison’s is a multinational.  It has a subsidiary in Hong Kong which deals with sourcing etc1.  It also has a store in Gibraltar which is a British Overseas Territory so I am not sure if that counts.2  I like Morrison’s and as I could walk there and back was really handy for me.  

However, I have just done some research Sainsbury’s3 which I was sure was a multinational isn’t so I can shop there instead.  Apparently it flirted with the idea of shops abroad in 20104 then decided not to.  Yeah!  It means a bus journey there and back but the car park is huge so I will some walking done after all.

Tesco is a multinational so I rarely shop there.5  I have one thing I buy in Tesco which is their frozen vegetable sachets which don’t have carrots in them (I am not a fan of cooked carrots).  I find Tesco meat very tough and everything is sold in huge amounts which is not great for a single girl.  I will miss the veg. sachets though.  

Asda6 became a subsidiary of Walmart the American store in 1999 so I haven’t shopped there for years.  Apart from anything else, my nearest Asda is miles away and I was never very fond of it anyway.

Lidl7 and Aldi8 are both German stores which have fairly recently moved into the UK market.  I never developed the habit of shopping in either although I do like the “interesting bins” which are up the middle of our local Lidl.  These are the ones that contain anything from cheap sandals, ski gear, workmen’s tools and furniture.  These were always worth a look but won’t kill me to give up.


  1. http://www.morrisons-corporate.com/About-us/HK/   
  2. http://your.morrisons.com/Store-finder/Store-Details/?recordid=452
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainsbury%27s
  4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8124540/Sainsburys-eyes-expansion-in-foreign-markets.html
  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asda
  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl
  8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi

2 comments:

  1. I did not know that about Sainsbury's either. Aside from Big Pharma I think your biggest challenge is going to be computer hardware and software. Though if you use open source you will be using people-based international cooperation. Kind of the opposite of mutinationals

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  2. But as a Scot don't you have problems with Sainsbury having stores in England?

    You are going to have big problems with your gas and electricity too. Perhaps your real beef is with the Behemoths the companies that are too big rather than just multi-nationals. It will be hard if you can't take the Stagecoach bus because they have busses in the USA.

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