Coming to a town near you soon? (Tesco Home Plus)

Member Name: azana

Product:	Tesco Home Plus
Date:	29/05/09 (318 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They sell everything bar food

Disadvantages: Taking over the High Street?

Tesco, love or hate them, you have to admit that they are doing pretty well on the High Street, and this fairly new venture from my experience, seems to be another roaring success. Tesco Homeplus launched in 2005, and there are a number of stores round the country, I first heard of these stores only this year.

Tesco Home Plus is Tesco, without the food, and with more variety of clothing, toys, beauty products and home products than your average store.

The particular store I visit is situated in Bracknell, and has been open since May 2009. So far, anecdotedly, it is a roaring success. Everyone I know who has been there has raved about the choice available and the price of the products on offer, and despite myself it has already become a shop that I visit regularly.

The Bracknell store had about £1.5 million spent on it and is shiny new, looming over the other stores in the Peel Centre, which was rather run down prior to the arrival of this store.

When you enter the store you first encounter the make up and beauty section with a huge range of the Barbara Daly products. This is followed by clothing for all groups - the kids' clothing is particularly good, on my last visit I bought Cath Kidstonesque hats for £3.50 for two and t-shirts for £3 (all with 20% off).

There is a huge baby section with buggies and baby equipment, and a massive toy, book and garden section. Everything is well displayed and there are great offers - I bought a remote controlled train for £1.94, and there were plenty of other toys to stock the ever ready "present drawer" that I have a must for all those kids' parties my children are invited to.

Upstairs in this particular store there is a home section, cafe, and then cunningly a catalogue section which is a bit like a mini-Argos. You can see all the goods on the shop floor and then select them at the counter. There is also a good range of TV's, computers and the like, all at good prices (so my husband informed me).

The concept is successful in that they have things that you actually want to buy, that there is no food is not a problem as you get dazzled by the range of items on offer. You could probably clothe all your family and stock your entire house and garden in a Tesco Homeplus store.

Whether this is a good thing or not is probably open to debate, but I have to say that it is hard for me not to find this store good value and convenient as I don't get to browse when shopping and here I can find everything and the offers are tempting.

When you have selected all your purchases and put them in the extra large baskets on wheels (no trolleys here) when you go to pay, in the Bracknell store anyway, there are more self service tills than manned ones, which is a bit strange at first but again a sign of things to come elsewhere I think.

I don't know whether Tesco are planning to roll out more of these stores - I suspect so, they certainly seem to have hit on a winning formula if the queues on Bank Holiday are anything to go by!

Summary: It is like Tesco, only bigger and with no food.