Reading. Tesco (Elem)

Tesco has more supermarkets than any other company in the UK, and there aren’t many bigger supermarket chains in the world. There are more than three thousand Tescos in towns all over Britain and Ireland, and there are three thousand more in countries in other parts of the world, including China and Japan. In Malaysia and Thailand, no other supermarket chain is bigger than Tesco.

Tesco started in 1919 when a young man called Jack Cohen started selling food from a market stall in the East End of London. On his first day, Mr Cohen made a profit of £1 from sales of £4. Five years later, in 1924, Jack bought a lot of tea from a man called T. E. Stockwell. Jack decided to combine the initials of Mr Stockwell, T, E and S, and the first two letters of his own surname, C and O, to make a name for his stall – TESCO. And that was the name Jack used when, in 1929, he opened his first Tesco supermarket in North London.

Today, Tesco runs many different types of shops. Some of the smaller shops are in city centres, and they sell basic things that everybody needs, like bread and milk, chocolate bars and toilet paper, sandwiches and sweets. Outside the city centres, you can often see huge Tesco superstores or the even bigger hypermarkets called Tesco Extra Stores. These sell everything from TVs and mobile phones to exotic fruit and unusual types of meat. Tesco also has online services. For example, you can bank online with Tesco. It really is one of the most important companies in Britain, and it employs hundreds of thousands of people, and makes millions of pounds in profit every year.