Tesco PLC, Britain’s largest retailer by sales, is to pull out of the United States, selling off its lossmaking Fresh & Easy supermarket chain after it failed to transfer its winning formula from the U.K. to the western states.
The writedown from the U.S. misadventure helped send the supermarket group’s net profit for the year down 96 percent to $183 million. Fresh & Easy which employs about 5,000 people and has about 200 stores in Arizona, California and Nevada failed to make money for Tesco despite extensive research into what Americans wanted to buy and how they want to shop.
