Victor Value

Victor Value was a London-based supermarket group operating at the lower end of the grocery trade. It was founded by Victor Cohen in the early 20th Century and was subsequently run by Alex Cohen (who died in 2004 aged 99) and Morris Cohen (who were no relation to Jack Cohen, founder of Tesco). Its headquarters was in Waltham Cross (Dairyglen House) and the private label brand name was Dairyglen.

Old Victor Value stores which survive can often be identified by their distinctive blue and white tiled frontage.The Victor Value chain comprised a lot of fairly "grotty" looking stores, including some former Anthony Jackson Foodfare outlets, which it acquired in the early 1960s. It was well represented in what one might call the C2D areas, and was also well represented in market areas such as Chapel Market Islington, Church Street Paddington, and Leyton High Road.

In 1968, Victor Value had 217 stores, and was sold to Tesco for 1.75 million pounds. Tesco converted the larger branches to their own brand, but did not integrate the rest of the chain. In the early eighties, smaller town centre Tesco stores were rebranded as Victor Value, particularly in the North West of England. These town centre stores were used to trial new scanning and bar code technologies before launching them in Tesco-branded stores.Cite web
url=http://cep.lse.ac.uk/seminarpapers/24-05-04%20-%20Background%20paper%20by%20Geoffrey%20Owen.pdf
author=Geoffrey Owen
publisher=London School of Economics
title=CORPORATE STRATEGY IN UK FOOD RETAILING, 1980-2002, seminar background paper
pages=4–7
accessdate=2008-06-19
year=2003
month=February]

In 1986, frozen food supermarket chain, Bejam, purchased the business from Tesco, who rebranded it as Bejam, before being taken over by rival Iceland in 1989.

Victor Value was often known as VV. The name came from the handles on the doors of the store, which read "VV" when shut.

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