As an American in the UK, I have grown to accept certain things. Pre-packed sandwiches. The weather. Instant coffee.

As an American in the UK, I have grown to accept certain things. Pre-packed sandwiches. The weather. Instant coffee.

I can’t say I would be so forgiving if I was living in California. Tesco’s Fresh & Easy operation, which has been in the red since their 2007 market entry, simply misjudged the American consumer.

We like to pick our own fruit and veg, we expect someone else to bag our groceries (in fact, we demand it), and we like sliced cold cuts from the in-store deli – none of that pre-packed meat nonsense.

We also like our loyalty cards, something that Tesco has failed to deliver on despite having created what is hands-down the most successful loyalty scheme in the world. Well, that’s about to change.

In the US, very few retailers have been able to get away without having a loyalty card – namely Walmart, Florida’s Publix and the dollar stores.

American shoppers are loyalty card addicts because the majority of schemes result in immediate discounts at the checkout. So if you forget yours at home, the cashier will gladly swipe their own. It’s effectively a two-tier pricing model – and you’re a sucker if you don’t have a card.

But the Fresh & Easy model will be points-based as in the UK; in fact, Tim Mason said it will differ radically from anything in the US market. Errr, except maybe a little grocer named Kroger.

Kroger is not only America’s largest supermarket chain but also half owner of dunnhumby US. Talk about love triangle. We analysts cut Fresh & Easy quite a bit of slack over the years for its lack of loyalty scheme because after all sharing a shopper database with your competition was never really going to be on the cards. Instead, Fresh & Easy will have to work with dunnhumby UK.

Mason maintains that a loyalty scheme has always been “the icing on the cake, not the cake itself” – although I remember an almost identical quote from Andy Bondtalking about Asda getting into smaller formats and look at them today.