Tesco announced today that it lost a whopping £6.38 billion over the past year.
That's a pretty huge amount of money. But exactly how huge is it?
1. Well, to put it in context, £6.38 billion would buy you 1.8 billion kilos of Tesco Everyday Value Beef Mince.
2. Or you could buy 10 billion cheese and tomato pizzas, which is enough to cover 77,000 World Cup football pitches.
3. If you were in the mood for something posh, you could buy enough Tesco Finest Premier Cru champagne to fill 96 Olympic swimming pools.
That's 319 million bottles.
4. You could also end hunger in Britain by buying everyone in Britain three sandwiches a day for more than two years, using Tesco Everyday Value Sliced White Bread.
Each loaf is 40p, meaning you could buy 15.9 billion loaves, which at 20 slices per loaf is enough to make 159 billion sandwiches, which is 2,480 for everyone in the country. At three sandwiches per day, that would last us for 2.26 years, assuming it didn't go mouldy.
Of course, not everyone would be happy with an all-bread diet.
@rcolvile but what kind of filling? Could we all choose? And led they have to be bought from Tesco?
@rcolvile although as you haven't bought butter or filling they'd be rubbish sandwiches
@rcolvile @jamesrbuk A sandwich that has no bread or filling? Like a knife with no blade of handle?
@rcolvile @jamesrbuk Millions of sandwiches. No butter. No filling. What kind of dystopia are you planning next?
So let's be generous and give everyone some ham in their sarnies – and even a nice bit of butter. At a very rough approximation, the amount of butter you'd need works out at 0.75 pats per loaf. If you give everyone two slices of Tesco's basic sliced ham per sandwich, your unit cost per 10 sandwiches climbs to a shocking £1.92. That means you'd have...
5. Enough to buy 33 billion ham sandwiches, which would keep us all going for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for about six months.
6. Alternatively, you could buy 33.5 billion tins of sliced carrots. Once drained, they would weigh the same as three Empire State Buildings.
7. Or you could buy four million tonnes of lard, which would weigh the same as 323,000 Routemaster buses.
8. Or 25 billion bottles of Everyday Value Curry Sauce – enough for 1,560 curries for every single person in the UK.
9. Finally, if you're on the Tesco board, you could drown your sorrows with 638 million bottles of vodka. That's roughly a tenth of the entire global annual supply.
