Tesco and Sainsbury: A financial appraisal

The Retail Consortium rarely misses an opportunity to criticise the Government's policy on margin controls or inflation, and naturally had its own comments to make when the Price Commission published its second quarter report at the end of July. Its findings were that profits in both food and non‐food retailing were (and presumably still are) at a very low ebb and margin controls were becoming more and more of an irrelevance when the average net for the former was 51.2% of reference levels, while for the latter it was only marginally better at 57%. All of which bears out the sort of criticism voiced by most retail group chairmen in this year's annual reports and accounts. And of course fixed overheads are increasing at an amazing rate, with all the huge rises in rates, rents and power.