tesco press trip

I turned the clock back this week. For the first time in years, I went on a company press trip. It was intense, illuminating and exhausting, physically and emotionally. So nothing has changed.
Tesco, the most successful UK supermarket group of the past 20 years,
is trying to break into the notoriously xenophobic US retail market. After several years' preparation, and all of three weeks since its first Fresh and Easy branches opened, the company felt confident enough to parade its achievements.
You can see the results on the websites of the London Times, Telegraph and Guardian - smoothly polished accounts of Tesco's plans, with an assessment of their chances of carving out a niche. But beneath those measured sentiments lay two days of chaos.
At one level, a press trip is one long party. New friendships are made, old friendships renewed. It seems as if it's going to last for ever - then suddenly it's all over and you're in an early-morning taxi on the way to the airport on your own: what was all that about?
At another level, of course, the journalists are there to work, and they are all competing with one another for the best angle, the best quote, the tantalising possibility of a scoop - or the fear that one of the others will get that scoop.
One of this group came with a readymade scoop pedigree. Jonathan Birchall of the Financial Times had run a string of exclusive stories about Tesco's US project with, so the jealous rumor ran, the connivance of Tesco on the grounds that it wanted soft coverage in the British financial world's Village Voice. But to me, Birchall looked a highly competent reporter rather than someone's patsy. He had done his research, deep throat or no deep throat.
Then there was the little matter of the embargo. This may come as a mild shock to American readers, but Tesco made it a condition of coming on the trip that the journalists had to hold off writing about the trip until December 3, three days after it was over. Crucially, December 3 was a Monday so the embargo was designed to keep the Sunday papers at bay for another week. As I was covering the trip for the London Sunday Times, I had a personal interest in this arrangement and had voiced my unhappiness weeks earlier.
As it happened, Tesco itself paved the way for unlocking the embargo by inviting analysts and institutional shareholders to tour the project immediately before the press. At least one, the analyst from Dresdner Kleinwort, published a note about what he had seen while the journalists were still on tour. As that note contained some of the information Tesco was trying to embargo, the embargo was over. I showed the note to Tesco's PR, Greg Sage, who could only agree, as long as none of the Tesco executives' comments were quoted. Naturally, this agreement was not announced or the daily papers would have been able to go public at once. As you can see, it can become a dirty game.
So, after a visit to the Fresh and Easy head office and a visit to one or two branches on the Thursday, I made my excuses and went back to the hotel to write my story. I did truthfully have to rewrite my column for the Sunday Times Money section, but I would also have ample time to file a Tesco story while everyone else was being scared by King Kong and Jaws on the Universal Studios back lot tour.
But my carefully laid scheme fell apart the next day. After a 100-mile coach ride through driving rain, we were taken round Tesco's massive Riverside distribution depot. At one stage I noticed the boss, Tim Mason, calling to one side a co-director, Lucy Neville-Rolfe and the legal counsel, Mary Kasper. Something had to be up, and it was.
We were allowed to plod round, changing in and out and in and out of protective clothing at the ultra-hygenic cooking facility, and munching our Tesco lunch boxes, before scurrying through the rain back to the coach to go to the local airport.
We had hardly got going before Mason took the mike and said that Kasper had something to say about a legal case involving the March Joint Authority, the body responsible for the land on which the depot stood. Basically, the judge found against the authority and Kasper had to admit that - theoretically, of course - that could mean the depot shutting down, which would in turn starve the supermarkets it serves. Potential disaster, although highly unlikely.
But you can't tell that to a bunch of journalists, several of whom were by now up against their London employers' Friday night deadlines. As the coach drew up next to our plane to Las Vegas, several mobile phones were running red hot and I was emailing for all I was worth on my iPhone. But the bottom line was that Saturday morning's papers were full of the law suit and The Sunday Times eventually decided to hang fire. Tesco had got its way, but not in quite the way it wanted.
However, in the process I had had to come clean about having filed the day before, which was met with stunned silence by a couple of my colleagues: journalists are shockable after all. But it was all for nothing.
But by the time we landed at Las Vegas the drama was over and we were being ferried around the drab suburbs of that city, the parts the tourists never see unless they make a wrong turning, for the sake of visiting yet another Fresh and Easy store as well as a truly breathtaking Wal-Mart Supacenter. This is the gamble Tesco is taking: will American consumers choose the dry functionality of Fresh & Easy over the sheer showmanship of Wal-Mart, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. Tesco will tweak the Fresh & Easy format until it gets it right. The ones who should be worried are Kroger and Safeway, who between them own Ralphs, Vons and Pavilions - the mid-market supermarkets that stand to be squeezed by the others.
But, for the press contingent, it was a case of checking in to the magnificent Wynn hotel on the Strip, relaxing in a deep bath and strolling downstairs to the classy Daniel Boulud restaurant, ending up with a tour around nighttime Vegas. Then back to the hotel for a chance to gamble. Me, I had to be up at 6 am so the tour ended right there. But never was I glad to see the inside of LAX's Terminal 2, which I had been through so often when flying to and from London. I was home, and the synthetic frenetic of a press trip was no more.