In its attempts to lure cash strapped customers with cheaper products, Tesco’s sales growth touched it’s lowest since mid-1990s.

The biggest supermarket chain in Britain, reported that excluding petrol its like-for-like sales rose only by 2% in past 3 months, amounting to half the growth it had achieved in the previous quarter.

Tesco’s figures reflect on the tight situation the UK retail sector has been put into by the recession in the country. High street giant Moss Bros had to issue profit warning while Marks & Spencer had been compelled to offer 20% discount to stimulate sales.

According to the Tesco spokesman sales were the lowest since 1994 mainly due to increased sales of new Discounter range, launched to attract customers from Aldi, Lidl and Asda.

The spokesman informed that Tesco had deliberately to provide cheaper products to customers through sale of Discounter range, reducing prices at all stores and introducing large number of new promotions. These measures created a negative impact on sales value though it helped in attracting 300,000new customers per week to all stores. The spokesman claimed that this was the right move to help business through extremely tougher trading conditions.

Whether Tesco’s Discounter range could succeed in preventing customers’ defection from its side was not clear. According to Time’s report, £10m spending moved to Morrisons from Tesco and another £22m moved to Asda in 12 weeks ending October.