Which is Britain’s fastest growing clothing retailer? Let me give you a clue. It is the same chain that pockets £1 out of every £8 we spend in the high street — yes, Tesco. The company aspires to sew up not only the sartorially slack, with its £3 jeans, but also the trend-conscious, who should be snapping up its Florence + Fred designer-inspired looks: think Miu Miu for much, much less, Chloé for the budget-minded.

However, my trip to the titan out-of-town Tesco Extra in Stockport, Cheshire, showed that chance would be a fine thing to lay your hands on some of this season’s most heavily promoted F+F copycat couture. I chose the Stockport store for its proximity to Manchester, believing that the vast expanses of its 119,400 square feet would be stuffed with enough designer-lookalike merchandise to satisfy the picky local market.

In my experience, Mancunians think Londoners either not quite cutting-edge enough or inappropriately dressed down.

But I could not find either the grey pencil skirt or the white military coat, both widely featured items from the F+F range. Tesco’s website indicates that all clothing is “subject to availability”, but it still seemed strange that there was not a single size left in either garment.

Like friends who have found themselves in the same position, I felt misled and disappointed. Asking the kindly assistants if the coat or skirt had ever been in stock seemed pointless. At the start of my visit, they were unable to give me the reason why the wide selection of legwear contained no black 15 or 20 denier tights, the staples of hosiery.

The closure of the café was also odd. At 10.30pm in a 24-hour store off a motorway, you should be able to get a cup of tea. But not in Stockport. My husband and son went in search of warm beverages elsewhere on the M60, leaving me alone in the great white shop, a retail Narnia where the normal rules did not apply. Even the grammar was off-key — surely at some point in the installation of the self check-out system someone could have eliminated the redundant apostrophes in the customer instructions?

In the past, I have bought jeans, trousers and shoes from F+F and Cherokee, the more casual Tesco label, pieces that people mistook for Seven for All Mankind and Chanel (how little they know me!). But, like the handful of other glum customers in the store, I was struggling to be impressed. A few F+F items did stand out from among the ordinary, a brown tweed skirt with sequin detail (£25), a green tweed skirt, also with sequins (£25), a blue taffeta bubble skirt (£30), with a matching V-neck sweater, again with sequins (£25).

Cherokee belied its Native American brand name by producing a little Chinese jacket (£25) that I bought for a relation. As I left the fashion department, the other customers had cheered up a bit, pleased by the biker and riding boots which at £35 and £45 lived up to the Tesco cheap chic promise.

I headed for the toiletries, where the next surprise was lurking. The displays were locked, preventing me from filling my trolley with Tesco’s superb make-up, designed by Barbara Daly. Wrinkling my brow to work out why (shoplifters? local laws preventing the purchase of lip gloss after nightfall?) left me in need of Tesco’s Face Lift moisturiser whose effects rival those of upscale brands. Yet another rip-off denied me, then, which was, I suppose, the story of the night I went to Tesco, Stockport.

Detail in the retail

Layout: Glittering glass and steel retail palace 7/10
Staff: Nice, patient people who deserve to be better informed by management 6/10
Changing rooms: Basic, but you would not expect more 6/10
Bags: Durable 6/10
Website: No online shoppping available 5/10
Overall score: Promises much more than it delivers 5/10

The links in the chain

Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain, made pre-tax profits of £1.96 billion on sales of £37 billion in the 12 months to February 26, 2005. Sir Terry Leahy is chief executive. There are 1,000 stores in the UK; 300 carry clothing. Terry Green, former chief executive of Allders, was recently appointed chief executive of the clothing division.

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