RETAIL GIANT Tesco is offering Open University students money towards their university fees, using points on Tesco clubcards. For every £10 of vouchers, a student would get £40 towards the cost of their course.
It is not purely a saintly act – to get £10 of vouchers, a student would need to spend £1,000 in Tesco. It sounds a bit like the company’s previous ‘vouchers for schools’ scheme, where parents would have to heap up vouchers from £250,000 worth of shopping to get their school a computer costing £1,000.
In 1998-99 the value of computer equipment given to schools was equal to 1.1% of Tesco’s British profits – that percentage went down year by year until it was 0.52% in 2005 while Tesco’s profits have been spiralling up every year.
