Tesco cheered by Christmas

TESCO hailed its strongest Christmas performance in three years today as recession-weary customers bought festive treats and its bumper voucher handout paid off.

The supermarket said like-for-like sales in the six weeks to 9 January grew 4.9 per cent, excluding petrol and adjusted for the change in VAT.

It said its Finest range was a "real winner", growing 16 per cent, while 35 per cent more bottles of champagne were sold than last year.

Tesco handed out around 100 million in extra loyalty vouchers before Christmas and the firm said around 40m worth of those were redeemed.