Why Costco is so loved

Keeping customers, employees and investors happy is no mean feat writes The Economist

image: getty images

Feb 15th 2024 

In the nearly 40 years that The Economist has served up its Big Mac index, the price of the McDonald’s burger in America has more than tripled. In that same period the cost of another meaty treat—a hot-dog-and-drink combo at Costco—has remained steady at $1.50. Last year customers of the American big-box retailer devoured 200m of them. Richard Galanti, Costco’s longtime finance boss, once promised to keep the price frozen “for ever”.

Customers are not the only fans of Costco, as the outpouring of affection from Wall Street analysts after Mr Galanti announced his retirement on February 6th made clear. The firm’s share price is 430 times what it was when he took the job nearly four decades ago, compared with 25 times for the s&p 500 index of large companies. It has continued to outperform the market in recent years. What lies behind its enduring success?

Costco is the world’s third-biggest retailer, behind Walmart and Amazon. Though its sales are less than half of Walmart’s, its return on capital, at nearly 20%, is more than twice as high. Charlie Munger, a famed investor who served on Costco’s board from 1997 until his death last year, called it a “perfect damn company”. Mr Galanti, who describes Costco’s business model as “arrogantly simple”, says the company is guided by a simple idea—hook shoppers by offering high-quality products at the lowest prices. It does this by keeping markups low while charging a fixed membership fee and stocking fewer distinct products, all while treating its employees generously.

Start with margins. Most retailers boost profits by marking up prices. Not Costco. Its gross margins hover around 12%, compared with Walmart’s 24%. The company makes up the shortfall through its membership fees: customers pay $60 or more a year to shop at its stores. In 2023 fees from its 129m members netted $4.6bn, more than half of Costco’s operating profits.

Joe Feldman, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, a research firm, argues that the membership model creates a virtuous circle. The more members the company has, the greater its buying power, leading to better deals with suppliers, most of which are then passed on to its members. The fee also encourages customers to focus their spending at Costco, rather than shopping around. That seems to work; membership-renewal rates are upwards of 90%.

Next, consider the way the company manages its product lineup. Costco stores stock a limited selection of about 3,800 distinct items. Sam’s Club, Walmart’s Costco-like competitor, carries about 7,000. A Walmart superstore has around 120,000. Buying more from fewer suppliers gives the company even greater bargaining heft, lowering prices further. By limiting its range, Costco can better focus on maintaining quality. Less variety in stores helps it use space more efficiently: its sales per square foot are three times that of Walmart. And with fewer products, Costco turns over its wares almost twice as fast as usual for retailers, meaning less capital gets tied up in inventory. It has also expanded its own brand, Kirkland Signature, which now accounts for over a quarter of its sales, well above average for a retailer. Its margins on its own-brand products are about six percentage points higher than for brands such as Hershey or Kellogg’s.

Last, Costco stands out among retailers for how it treats its employees. Some 60% of retail employees leave their jobs each year. Staff turnover at Costco is just 8%; over a third of workers have been there for more than ten years. One reason for low attrition is pay. Its wages are higher than the industry average and it offers generous medical and retirement benefits. Another is career prospects. The company prefers to promote leaders from within. Although Mr Galanti’s successor has come from outside, the rest of Costco’s executive team has been with the company for more than 20 years. The late Mr Munger was confident that Costco had “a marvellous future”. Its customers could be enjoying $1.50 hot dogs for many years to come. 

The public sector isn't perfect but at least it doesn't fleece us

A culture in which the customer comes last will fail and fail again

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Saturday 8 February 2014 20.05 GMT

However friendly people working a call centre are, they are caught in a process that puts the customer last. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Observer

Lloyds Bank casually announced last week that it was setting aside another £1.8bn to meet potential claims from customers after knowingly selling them expensive insurance policies they could not need nor use. The grand total of provisions it has made is now nearly £10bn for claims from up to 700,000 people – a stunning indictment of its business practices.

Yet there is little public angst. Last December, Lloyds was fined a record £28m by the Financial Conduct Authority for the period between 1 January 2010 and 31 March 2012 – during which the government held a 39% stake in the bank – for having lax controls and incentivising its staff to treat its customers as milch cows. Extravagant "champagne" bonuses were offered to staff who could loot their customers with policies cynically designed to offer nothing of value, nothing less than organised theft. In Ireland at least, the former executives of the bust Anglo Irish bank are on trial. In Britain, the former head of Lloyds retail banking division, Helen Weir, has gone on to become finance director of John Lewis, but at least she has said how sorry she is. That's all right then.

Otherwise, Lloyds Bank is hardly eating humble pie. While Barclays chief executive, Antony Jenkins, is trying to engineer a massive change in his bank's culture, his counterpart at Lloyds seems to be focused on one target only – ensuring sufficient profitability to allow the government to offload more of its stake and, along the way, to vastly enrich himself. There has been zero pressure from his largest shareholder – the government – to reproduce Jenkins's initiative and do more about the mis-selling scandal than to utter bromides about winning back trust. The solution is for the bank to become 100% owned by the private sector as soon as possible, seen as an unalloyed good thing.

This combination – feckless owners, in this case HM Treasury, which cares nothing about the bank's ethics but only about its share price, alongside managers who appear to see their customers as objects to be fleeced – is deadly. But the media are hardly abuzz with sustained complaint and protest. Rather, they have helped construct the doctrine that anything done in the private sector is generally fabulous, and that £10bn scandals such as Lloyds, while deplorable, are the exception. Meanwhile, anything done in the public sector is by definition abominable, wasteful and ripe for privatisation or contracting out. The sooner Lloyds is in the private sector away from the "dead" hand of state ownership the better. But the state has not been a dead hand: it has been preoccupied with its own financial interests, like every other private owner.

Lloyds is not alone: the other banks have earmarked another £10bn for mis-selling similar products. Their investment bank arms are engulfed with charges of colluding to rig interest rates and foreign exchange markets on a global scale, along with more record-breaking fines. Meanwhile, the average customer's experience remains dismal. Staff in disempowered branches and industrialised call centres do their best to be friendly, but work within processes in which a good customer experience is plainly a low priority. Trying to exercise my right to flex a credit facility recently was a descent into a privatised Orwellian madness, while anyone who has had to look after an elderly relative's financial affairs enters a bureaucratic, time-consuming labyrinth.

This is not a culture confined to banking. Bombardier recently walked away from a £350m contract to provide signalling for London Underground: it had underestimated the technical complexity and would not commit the resource to meet its side of the bargain. But last week it picked up the £1bn contract to build 65 trains for Crossrail, with its disgraceful behaviour over the signalling contract forgotten, threatening to close its Derby plant if it did not get the business.

Then there are Serco and G4S, with their litany of failures as holders of government contracts. The root of their difficulties is, whatever their original virtues, both have built a culture in which exploiting, rather than serving, the customer comes first – whether it's Serco charging the state for electronically tagging prisoners who did not exist or G4S woefully underproviding security guards for the Olympics. The same dynamic – transient, greedy owners and pay systems that over-reward short-term financial success and cutting corners – produces the same result.

Now large parts of the probation service are to be run in the same way by the same kind of company, with the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, absurdly promising more " reform" and "efficiency". He is outdone by his colleague Dan Poulter at health, selling off 80% of Plasma Resources UK, the NHS company that secures blood plasma for British patients, to Bain Capital, the private equity company built by presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Bain's sole interest is financial, constrained only by its fear of a reputational disaster if patients start dying as it cuts costs and over-rewards managers who try to fleece the NHS, as they necessarily will. Who could consign the provision of blood plasma to such custodians? Only a fool, knave or Tory politician.

The NHS takes a daily pummelling, but enter its portals and a very different culture rules. Despite all the efforts of successive New Labour and Conservative ministers intent on reproducing the private sector "disciplines" that so animate Lloyds, Bombardier, Serco, G4S et al, it still manages to combine humanity and efficiency. Its systems are not extravagant, but there is a sense, as I recently discovered with a close family member in a long spell in hospital, that the patient remains at the centre of everyone's preoccupations.

The public sector is imperfect: it is run and operated by fallible human beings. There are spectacular failings, ranging from the BBC's wasted £100m on its digital media initiative to the unfolding IT disaster over universal credit. But what it does not deserve is universal castigation because a priori it must be useless. It is accountable. It does not loot its users. It is pretty efficient. It is humane.

Nor does the private sector warrant such fawning praise or the self-pity of many of its leaders who claim that profit is still a dirty word. It can do magic – the smartphone, anti-cancer drugs, multiple apps, robots – but it cuts corners too. The headlines, as I write, are of a food scandal in which a third of sampled foodstuffs are wrongly labelled. Regulation, derided as a burden on business, is, rather, what society deploys to keep business honest, whether it emanates from London or Brussels. It is time for a reset and a rebalance. End the jihad against all things public and invite business genuinely to earn its profits.

How I bought drugs from 'dark net' – it's just like Amazon run by cartels

Last week the FBI arrested Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of Silk Road, a site on the 'dark net' where visitors could buy drugs at the click of a mouse. Though Dread – aka Ross Ulbricht – earned millions, was he really driven by America's anti-state libertarian philosophy?

• 
• • Carole Cadwalladr
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 October 2013

The FBI alleges Ross Ulbricht ran the vast underground drug marketplace Silk Road for more than two years. Photograph: theguardian.com

Dear FBI agents, my name is Carole Cadwalladr and in February this year I was asked to investigate the so-called "dark net" for a feature in this newspaper. I downloaded Tor on to my computer, the anonymous browser developed by the US navy, Googled "Silk Roaddrugs" and then cut and pasted this link http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/ into the address field.

And bingo! There it was: Silk Road, the site, which until the FBI closed it down on Thursday and arrested a 29-year-old American in San Francisco, was the web's most notorious marketplace.

The "dark net" or the "deep web", the hidden part of the internet invisible to Google, might sound like a murky, inaccessible underworld but the reality is that it's right there, a click away, at the end of your mouse. It took me about 10 minutes of Googling and downloading to find and access the site on that February morning, and yet arriving at the home page of Silk Road was like stumbling into a parallel universe, a universe where eBay had been taken over by international drug cartels and Amazon offers a choice of books, DVDS and hallucinogens.

Drugs are just another market, and on Silk Road it was a market laid bare, differentiated by price, quality, point of origin, supposed effects and lavish user reviews. There were categories for "cannabis", "dissociatives", "ecstasy", "opioids", "prescription", "psychedelics", "stimulants" and, my favourite, "precursors". (If you've watched Breaking Bad, you'll know that's the stuff you need to make certain drugs and which Walt has to hold up trains and rob factories to find. Or, had he known about Silk Road, clicked a link on his browser.)

And, just like eBay, there were star ratings for sellers, detailed feedback, customer service assurances, an escrow system and a busy forum in which users posted helpful tips. I looked on the UK cannabis forum, which had 30,000 postings, and a vendor called JesusOfRave was recommended. He had 100% feedback, promised "stealth" packaging and boasted excellent customer reviews: "The level of customer care you go to often makes me forget that this is an illegal drug market," said one.

JesusOfRave boasted on his profile: "Working with UK distributors, importers and producers to source quality, we run a tight ship and aim to get your order out same or next day. This tight ship also refers to our attitude to your and our privacy. We have been doing this for a long time … been playing with encryption since 0BC and rebelling against the State for just as long."

And so, federal agents, though I'm sure you know this already, not least because the Guardian revealed on Friday that the National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ have successfully cracked Tor on occasion, I ordered "1g of Manali Charras [cannabis] (free UK delivery)", costing 1.16 bitcoins (the cryptocurrency then worth around £15). I used a false name with my own address, and two days later an envelope arrived at my door with an address in Bethnal Green Road, east London, on the return label and a small vacuum-packed package inside: a small lump of dope.

It's still sitting in its original envelope in the drawer of my desk. I got a bit stumped with my dark net story, put it on hold and became more interested in the wonderful world of cryptocurrencies as the value of bitcoins soared over the next few months (the 1.5 bitcoins I'd bought for £20 were worth £300 at one point this spring).

Just under a month ago I was intrigued to see that Forbes magazine had managed to get an interview with "Dread Pirate Roberts", the site's administrator. And then, last week, came the news that Dread Pirate Roberts was 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, a University of Texas physics graduate who, according to the FBI's documents, had not just run the site – which it alleges earned him $80m in commission – but had hired a contract killer for $80,000 to rub out an employee who had tried to blackmail him.

If that sounds far-fetched, papers filed last Thursday show that he tried to take a contract on a second person. The documents showed that the FBI had access to Silk Road's servers from July, and that the contract killer Ulbricht had thought he'd hired was a federal agent. It's an astonishing, preposterous end to what was an astonishing, preposterous site, though the papers show that while the crime might have been hi-tech, cracking it was a matter of old-fashioned, painstaking detective work.

Except, of course, that it's not the end of it. There are two other similar websites already up and running – Sheep and Black Market Reloaded – which have both seen a dramatic uplift in users in the last few days, and others will surely follow. Because what Silk Road did for drugs was what eBay did for secondhand goods, and Airbnb has done for accommodation: it created a viable trust system that benefited both buyers and sellers.

Nicholas Christin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who conducted six months of research into the site, said that what surprised him most was how "normal" it was. "To me, the most surprising thing was how normal, when you set aside the goods being sold, the whole market appears to be," he said. And, while many people would be alarmed at the prospect of their teenagers buying drugs online, Silk Road was a whole lot more professional, regulated and controlled than buying drugs offline.

What's apparent from Dread Pirate Roberts's interview with Forbes and comments he made on the site's forum is that the motivation behind the site does not seem to have been making money (though clearly it did: an estimated $1.2bn), or a belief that drugs hold the key to some sort of mystical self-fulfillment, but that the state has no right to interfere in the lives of individuals. One of the details that enabled the FBI to track Ulbricht was the fact that he "favourited" several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian Alabama-based thinktank devoted to furthering what is known as the Austrian school of economics. Years later, Dread Pirate Roberts would cite the same theory on Silk Road's forum.

"What we're doing isn't about scoring drugs or 'sticking it to the man'," said Dread Pirate Roberts in the Forbes interview. "It's about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we've done no wrong."

And it's this that is possibly the most interesting aspect of the story. Because, while Edward Snowden's and the Guardian's revelations about the NSA have shown how all-encompassing the state's surveillance has become, a counterculture movement of digital activists espousing the importance of freedom, individualism and the right to a private life beyond the state's control is also rapidly gaining traction.

It's the philosophy behind innovations as diverse as the 3D printed gun and sites as mainstream as PayPal, and its proponents are young, computer-savvy idealists with the digital skills to invent new ways of circumventing the encroaching power of the state.

Ulbricht certainly doesn't seem to have been living the life you imagine of a criminal overlord. He lived in a shared apartment. If he had millions stashed away somewhere, he certainly doesn't seem to have been spending it on high-performance cars and penthouses.

His LinkedIn page, while possibly not the best arena for self-expression for a man being hunted by the FBI, demonstrates that his beliefs are grounded in libertarian ideology: "I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind," he wrote. "The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments … the best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed … to that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a firsthand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

Silk Road, it turns out, might have been that world. Anybody who has seen All the President's Men knows that, when it comes to criminality, the answer has always been to "follow the money". But in the age of bitcoin, that's of a different order of difficulty. Silk Road is just one website; bitcoin is potentially the foundation for a whole new economic order.

From coffee shops to airlines, the trend to 'personalise' products only serves to underline how impersonal services have become

OK, this mug's got my name on it – but that doesn't mean Starbucks cares

• 
• • John Harris
  • The Guardian, Monday 27 May 2013

‘Somewhere between Margaret Thatcher and the fall of Lehman Brothers, there were signs of half-decent customer service.' Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

'A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking," said Andy Warhol. "All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good."

Such was the capitalism that was embodied not just by Coca-Cola, but the Ford Motor Company – and named, towards the end of its dominance, "Fordism". Now, though, we are said to like our transactions personalised and touchy feely. Ergo a summer-long promotion titled "Share a Coke", whereby the usual logo has been replaced by 150 first names – from Aaron to Zoe, via Faisal, Josh, Lauren and Saima. That all this rather cuts across the imperious yet egalitarian brand that Warhol so loved does not seem to have occurred to anyone; nor, apparently, has the whole idea's air of awful tweeness (while writing this, I bought my obligatory "John" bottle from Marks & Spencer, and remained unmoved).

At Starbucks, meanwhile, they now insist that your hot caffeine also comes emblazoned with your name – written on a sticker, to be hollered by a barista. This scheme arrived in early 2012, in a similar flurry of faux-enlightened PR: "Have you noticed how everything seems a little impersonal nowadays?" ran the promotional text.

Unlike the Coke wheeze, though, it was also a see-through attempt at damage limitation: six months later, the company's byzantine tax arrangements would be under intense scrutiny. But in the ordinary world, Starbucks was already becoming a byword for sloppiness and mess, not to mention coffee that tastes like the hot milk my nan used to make me circa 1973. As a former 'Bucks addict, my own epiphany came in their branch in Birmingham's Bullring Centre, where the tables were piled high with dirty cups and plates, only two staff seemed to be on duty – and if the place had been an independent business, you would have taken one look and assumed it was rightly headed for the knacker's yard.

Yet Starbucks is still here, making handsome worldwide profits. Yes, after a major reputational wobble, it has nobly offered to throw £20m over two years at Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs. Hosanna! They now shout your name when they hand you your cup of warm milk and a plywood panini. But going to any of its outlets remains a dependably joyless experience, suggestive of something remarkable: the company is not so much too big to fail, as too big to really care. Once enough competitors are out of the way, it seems, modern branding can work magic: providing you avoid killing anyone, that enough people will carry on trudging through your doors, whatever happens

My own recent experience of sclerotic, unresponsive, mind-bogglingly awful treatment runs from Virgin Media (hours waiting on "helplines", which reached an acme of annoyance when I was offered a choice of what music would be played down the phone – by genre), through the train giant First Great Western (frequently late, insane ticket prices) and on to such behemoths as McDonald's (vast queues) and PC World (don't get me started). When it comes to the ubiquitous Amazon, there are once again lines to be drawn from its tax arrangements, through standards of service – I have long given up on its "next day" delivery option – to its predatory behaviour, last seen when it hiked up its fees to independent "marketplace" sellers by up to 70%.

Running through a lot of this, I would imagine, is much the same business model: workforces hacked down to the bare minimum and poorly paid, the apparent belief that if you track your customer's buys via data accumulation and give them what you think they want, more quaint ideas of customer service can be dumped, fast.

To all this, there is an obvious enough response: hasn't a mixture of flimsy "personalisation" and arrogant business–as-usual always been the capitalist way? Perhaps. But somewhere between the arrival of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of Lehman Brothers, there were at least fleeting signs of an embrace of half-decent customer service – as proved by plenty of businesses, not least the big British supermarkets.

Bear with me, please. Though I cannot quite date them, I have clear memories of visiting Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's, and realising that though they were strangling independent competitors, squeezing producers and offering an illusion of choice under which lay a remarkably Fordist way of operating, their customer service was actually very good. You may recall the dedicated bag-packers, or the staff's breezy openness to being sent to scour the aisles when you reached the checkout and realised you'd forgotten the broccoli .

More often than not, my own supermarket shopping now ends with an exasperated glimpse of gridlocked checkouts, and the usual trudge through the self-service terminals sometimes known as "the fast lane": a con trick that would have caused Marx and Engels to hoot with mirth, whereby the customer now doubles as the worker. I contacted Sainsbury's, Asda and Tesco to ask how many were now in operation, and what the increasing dominance of fast lanes meant. Their replies were uniformly evasive, and the one from Tesco was particularly grim: "We believe in giving our customers choice. Over a third of shoppers choose to use self-service tills, not least because they find them quicker and more convenient. For customers who need assistance, there is always a member of staff on hand." Somewhere in those words is the same arrogance you can taste in your average grande skinny cappuccino and granola bar.

There is, then, a new model of business, which rather puts me in mind of words uttered not by Andy Warhol but the market traders of the West Midlands. "Never make a mug of your punter," they used to say. But that is what modern business does. And strangest of all, contrary to all that stuff about consumer sovereignty, it seems to be not just getting away with it, but prospering.

If everyone did a Worrall Thompson, maybe Tesco wouldn't be too big to fail

Tesco's poor results have led it to review its practices. The self-service tills used by Wozza may be a good place to start

• 
• • Marina Hyde
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 January 2012 21.00 GMT
  • larger | smaller

Illustration by Otto

Sad news for Tesco, which this week discovered an unexpected item in its bagging area. The rogue element has since been identified as "awful Christmas sales and a profits warning", and the company's chief executive Philip Clarke now appears to be having problems removing this item before continuing with Tesco's hitherto unstoppable rise. I do hope he has to wait a long time for assistance.

Britain ceased to be a nation of shopkeepers some time ago, as the local independent stores had the life bled out of them by the supermarket giants. But we're a nation of shoppers, and perhaps this two fingers to the daddy of them all is our retail version of the Arab spring. Watching the suddenly humble Clarke promising to address product quality, customer service and "longstanding business issues" rather put one in mind of a besieged dictator. "Wait!" is the despot's reaction to increasingly volatile protests. "I am literally just about to introduce a raft of democratic reforms!"

It will take rather more than Clarke's needy mea culpa to reverse the perception that Tesco stands for everything that is monolithic, mercilessly expansionist, and machine driven. Tesco is a place that people more principled than myself probably manage to avoid entirely, but into which most of us feel compelled to go fairly frequently because it's nearby, or because it has effectively shut down any alternatives.

For a long time, criticism of it was crushed by that pat little assertion that it was "what the people wanted". Tesco executives and their defenders appeared to be graduates of the Richard Desmond school of debate, which is to paint anyone who questions your methods as snobs or enemies of enterprise. They acted as if everyone criticising Tesco must have the luxury of shopping at Waitrose or M&S, when this week's evidence has revealed that they might just as easily get their goods at Aldi or Lidl.

Thus the unthinkable has happened. And now that Tesco appears to be not so much what the people want, what precisely does it have going for it?

Its expansion has certainly told us little we did not already know about this septic isle, merely throwing into even sharper relief the iniquities of such institutions as council planning departments. Countless ordinary citizens have tales of their applications to make minuscule home improvements being rejected, while mock Tudor Tesco superstores are waved through with as many clock towers and metal-effect weather vanes as their architects care to spike them with. Since the 90s, 200 have been plonked down like spaceships, pulling customers off high streets with their seemingly irresistible tractor beams. Yet we now discover that these behemoths are among the "less potent" parts of Tesco's enterprise. Whether scarcely 15 years of rapacious profits was worth leaving a blight of potential white elephants scattered across the countryside, only time will show.

But it is in the area of employment, and its effect on customer service, that the Tesco modus operandi has been most pernicious. There are few sights in modern retail more pathetic, in the true sense of that word, than that of the lone, low-paid human charged with overriding technical glitches in the banks of self-service tills that have already claimed the jobs of countless check-out assistants, knowing that they will soon enough claim theirs. (Eighteen months ago, Tesco began trialling a stall with no manned checkouts at all, merely the single overseer.) Given the Japanese government is investing heavily in technology that could provide robot care for the elderly, it seems a likely bet that Tesco hopes one day to have its shelves robotically stacked, and even the automated till supervisors replaced by customer service droids. A similar process of dehumanisation has been afoot in car plants, but few of us have the occasion to pass through those very often. Nowhere is the rise of the machine at the expense of human employment more evident than in supermarkets such as Tesco. It is an everyday dystopia.

What is to be done? Oddly enough, perhaps one mad answer lies in the other Tesco-related story of the week. Just possibly – and obviously entirely unwittingly – shoplifting chef Antony Worrall Thompson has suggested an act of civil disobedience. If a critical mass of shoppers were to decide to do a Wozza for moral reasons, then the robotic scanners would become less economically viable than human checkout workers. Pilfering from Tesco would become a political act. However, if your preference is for grandiose schemes that won't involve accepting a police caution before embarking on psychiatric treatment, perhaps we could get up a campaign for a sort of Tesco Tobin tax, in which some tiny percentage of every penny spent in one of their out-of-town stores would be dedicated to reviving Britain's denuded high streets.

That, of course, is about as likely to happen as one of Tesco's machines accepting you've placed your 25g packet of parsley in the bagging area. Alas, Britain's biggest retailer is such a massive part of our economy that it presumably won't be long before someone is explaining that it is too big to fail, in keeping with the vogue for the most rampant capitalists becoming socialists in their many hours of need.