Heh... Tesco . They're nothing if not tenacious. Many moons ago, while still at secondary school , I worked as a checkout operator (beep... beep... beep...) for a Scottish grocery chain called William Lows . Tesco bought Lows in 1994 for the princely sum of 257 million pounds. Since I worked in the "flagship" Edinburgh store, the transformation from one retailer to another was tremendously visible. From then until I hopped over the pond exactly ten years later, Tesco was a permanent (if somewhat mundane) fixture of my life. The "Tesco Value" store brand (with its trademark white & blue striped labels ) will always remind me of my student days in St. Andrews . One student I knew had literally plastered an entire wall of his room with Tesco Value Baked Bean labels. Very artistic, to be sure, but it scares me to think about the sheer amount of methane production that resulted from such conspicuous bean consumption... Jumping forward, it only seems like