Co-operative reveals £80m earnings hit from ‘malicious’ cyber attack
The Co-operative Group has revealed it slumped to a half-year loss after taking an earnings hit of around £80 million from a “malicious” cyber attack in April.
The retailer said it tumbled to a £75 million underlying pre-tax loss for the six months to July 5, down from profits of £3 million a year ago as the hack took its toll.
We popped into our local Co-op a few days ago and as usual only one checkout was open but we didn't have to wait long as nobody in front of us was buying much.
We don't know how it keeps going - never busy, never any problem with crowded aisles, isn't cheap and sells very little that isn't available in any of the major supermarkets.
Our Co-op is handy, plonked as it is in the centre of town, so maybe that's what keeps it going, but the customers do look old.
Our Co-op is handy, plonked as it is in the centre of town, so maybe that's what keeps it going, but the customers do look old.
4 comments:
I think thats their business model, try and locate stores in places where they have a localised monopoly, particularly of the elderly and those who don't have cars.
A small market town near me only had a co-op, so if you didn't drive or fancy hauling bags of shopping on and off a bus from the supermarkets in the next town a few miles away it was the only food store in town. Then Aldi popped up and put in planning for a store on the edge of town. The planners were minded to refuse it, but the locals were so hacked off with the co-op a load of them turned up at the planning committee meeting and demanded that it be passed because they wanted it, as it would be far cheaper than the co-op. And amazingly the committee listened and gave permission for a new Aldi store. Then the co-op got involved, they actually went to court to demand this permission be overturned because of some minor infringement of planning rules. Which case they eventually won, and forced Aldi to go through the rigmarole of making a whole new application. All of which took a year or more, during which time the co-op continued to enjoy their monopoly.
But Aldi have the last laugh, they got their store eventually, its now trading and the co-op is a ghost town.
Great job, Mossad. Hit these antisemitic companies where it hurts ie bottom line.
We use the Co-op because it's handy, their bread is better than any other supermarket bread we've tried, and (for one year at least) their green grapes were easily the best we could find. They also used to sell a wonderful Speck - ham from the South Tyrol. Alas, no longer.
And one Xmas they did save our bacon, as it were, by still having a stock of decent smoked salmon when everyone else was sold out. But since then Aldi has arrived and its smoked salmon is decent too.
Our local CO-OP 'superstore' was in a state of managed decline. More and more of its floorspace was rented out to other businesses or just sealed off, and the food shelves carried less and less. They also carried copies of the Morning Star newspaper but I expect that was a correlation rather than a cause of the decline.
I suspect that the store was 'too big' for their localised monopoly strategy.
Post a Comment