This is a supermarket here in the UK, the cheapest one of all. It was recently bought by Wal-Mart and upon reading some supermarket industry magazines I found laying around the colleague canteen I found out that the Adsa brand name is to be no more. Soon will follow a short-term series of co-branding with Wal-Mart (some stores have already been converted in to "Adsa-Wal-Mart") and once the British public are used to it they will kill the Asda name for good. Another thing they're gonna do is introduce three new own-brands, including Sam's Choice, which i'm told is all over Wal-Mart. The Sam in Sam's Choice is Sam Walton, the original guy behind Walton's, now known as Wal-Mart.

Bet ya didn't think you were gonna' learn all that about Asda and Wal-Mart today, eh? :-)

NB: As of the last quarter of 2002, ASDA no longer exists; 1999's takeover by Wal-Mart has finally seen the supermarket take on the dubious American monolith's corporate identity.
I've been informed that Asda is not the cheapest supermarket. This may be true, however I mean cheapest for domestic non-imported goods.
ASDA* is a supermarket chain in the UK, which trailed for many years behind Tesco, Sainsbury's and Safeway. It was founded in 1965 by a group of Yorkshire farmers. They sell the normal supermarket staples (groceries and other consumable domestic goods) as well as clothing in the George line, and offer many other specialisations from consumer electronics to financial products. Asda's brand image consists of dark green livery and the slogans "Permanently Low Prices Forever"** and "That's Asda Price" (with a pat of the back pocket).

They were recently (1999) purchased by the world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart. One upshot of this is that the employees have become subjected to Wal-Mart's hippie-dippy 'we are all one big family' philosophy (for example, employees are called 'colleagues' rather like Starbucks's 'partners'). Another has been accelerated growth of the company, opening ten or more new outlets each year.

A friend of mine (who has been employed by Asda for over five years) warns against buying from the Asda bakery, as employees like to push their fingers into the dough. He also reports that popular pastimes in the warehouse include playing hockey with mini Babybels and bowling with Edam (using bottles of salad dressing for pins).

www.asda.co.uk


* short for "Associated Dairies"; according to employees, "Anything Simple Doesn't Apply".

** This doesn't make grammatical sense as far as I can see.

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