General Chat

Jack Cohen (Jacob Kohn, Sir John Edward Cohen) was born to an immigrant family in East End of London in 1898. They had escaped a pogrom with few possessions.

Father was a tailor and workshop was within their house. Jack served with the Royal Flying Corps in WW1, doing sewing repairs to planes, contracted malarial fever and was invalided out with a £30 war gratuity in 1919.

Worked markets for next 11 years and then found that property developers round London were failing to sell houses in Depression because established shopkeepers were not prepared to take a risk. No shops nearby, no house sales.

He was prepared to open his stalls in these empty shops as long as rates and rent were free for a year. By then he had established a retail market format that worked in new commuter places in Home Counties. He had 100 shops by outbreak of war - all with shutter fronts and none of them anywhere near 2,000 sq ft of sales area (which later became the definition of a supermarket0.

First self service experiment in UK was Co-op in Wembley in 1938. First Tesco self service experiment was 1948 in St Albans (and it failed!!!). First Tesco supermarket (over 2,000 sq ft) was Croydon in 1956. First Tesco "superstore" or "hypermarket" (over 20,000 sq ft) was Lee Circle, Leicester in 1961 followed closely by Crawley and Gravesend. :-)