Time is not something many CEOs can take for granted, especially not in the age of 24-hour news, Twitter feeds and next-generation Hudl tablets.

So Tesco CEO Philip Clarke will have known today that his vow to stick to his guns on Tesco’s UK turnaround plan goes nowhere near far enough to please some of his critics in the City.

Those calling for Tesco to launch a full-out price war to blow its discount rivals out of the water will not have been too encouraged, as Clarke aimed a few barbed comments at the likes of Aldi and Lidl, branding their tactics on the number of store openings and frenzied couponing activity as economically unviable in the long term.

There are others, however, who believed it would be madness for Tesco to abandon its £1bn store turnaround in favour of an all-out price war, or – even more expensively – to try to combine the two strategies at the same time.

No doubt the retailer has been given a drubbing by the discounters in recent months and Clarke admitted today it had not anticipated the market slowdown since the summer, which has seen its sales fall by 1.5%.

But to switch the focus onto price, 18 months into a strategy based on improving service, quality and availability would be a huge risk for the CEO.

What Tesco surely must do, as he again admitted today, is to speed up its store improvement programme.

Today it revealed it has “refreshed” 108 of its larger stores but there are still far too few examples of the sort of full-scale revamp at its Watford Extra store, which is truly transformational, both in terms of the quality of its fresh food offering and its incorporation of elements to make it a real destination store.

Clarke is right when he pinpoints Tesco’s large store estate as its “biggest opportunity” but the process is proving painfully slow.

Take its rollout of Giraffe restaurants, which nine months on has resulted in just two in store. The Harris + Hoole coffee chain, though proving popular, has only seven. It will only be once these features, alongside the enormous improvements in layout and range seen in Watford become common place across the UK that the hugely important word-of-mouth element will come into play for Tesco.

Yes, the UK shopper has turned to the discounters because of what Tesco described as the “unprecedented” squeeze on incomes, particularly for the most hard-up shoppers. But it would not take long for momentum to grow behind Tesco once its changes reach a critical mass.

Sadly for Tesco, it’s another ‘c mass’ that is going to get in the way. The next few weeks is not a time for store refurbishments; like last year, the festive season will have the added impact of slowing still further its turnaround plans – while the discounters wade into the fray with an increasingly impressive array of Christmas goods.

If only everything was as straightforward for Clarke as producing the next generation of electronic tablets, something likely to be a familiar sight in Santa’s stocking this year. In one piece of good news today, the embattled CEO was able to point to sales of 300,000 Hudls since its launch in September, with a similar amount predicted to be sold over Christmas. No wonder he announced plans for Hudl 2.

Sadly, rolling out a new generation of large stores is significantly harder and more expensive.

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