Tesco has hailed its strongest Christmas performance in three years as recession-weary customers bought festive treats and its bumper voucher handout paid off.
The supermarket said like-for-like sales in the six weeks to January 9 grew 4.9%, excluding petrol and adjusted for the change in VAT.
It said its Finest range was a "real winner", growing 16%, while 35% more bottles of Champagne were sold than last year.
Tesco handed out around £100 million in extra loyalty vouchers before Christmas and the firm said around £40 million worth of those were redeemed.
Tesco's performance was at the top end of analysts' expectations for the Christmas period and reflects a strong trading period across the industry. Rival Sainsbury's, which has already reported its figures, saw like-for-like sales growth of 4.2% in the quarter to January 2, excluding VAT and fuel.
Tesco finance director Laurie McIlwee said the additional vouchers boosted its like-for-like sales figures by about 0.5 percentage points and ensured customers shopped with the supermarket.
He said the supermarket was slowly reducing its promotional activity, but said there was still a discount-driven environment.
Consumers had wanted to put aside the worries of the previous year and treat themselves over the festive break. "There is an element of people being fed up of continuous bad news - they wanted to enjoy Christmas," he said.
Clothing, electrical goods and toys were among the non-food items to have performed strongly over the festive period. And online sales grew nearly 20% in the six weeks, with rises in both food and other items.
Mr McIlwee praised staff for keeping stores open in spite of the snowy weather and said the transport problems had seen customers turn to online purchasing.
