Remember this story a few months ago? :

Tesco backs minimum price for alcohol sales

Supermarket chain Tesco says it wants to see curbs on the sale of cheap alcohol during this Parliament.

Tesco has welcomed a promise by the coalition government to ban below-cost sales of alcohol in England and Wales.

The UK’s biggest retailer goes further, saying it would back the more radical step of introducing a minimum price.

Tesco says polling for the company found excessive drinking and the anti-social behaviour it causes is one of the public’s most serious concerns.

Customer polling my arse (to coin a phrase). It would seem that Tesco’s own number crunchers had worked out the sums before the IFS got around to it :

Minimum alcohol price ‘would give retailers a windfall’

The largest supermarket chains would reap a £700m windfall if minimum alcohol price levels were introduced across the UK, research has claimed.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies looked at the likely impact of a 45p minimum price per alcohol unit.

Anyone with half a brain could have worked that one out but who would benefit the most? Well, a certain retailer beginning with T seems to fit the bill (pdf) :

The largest beneficiary in cash terms would be Tesco (which gains around £230 million), followed by Asda (£130 million) and Sainsburys (£100 million), although some of this would be shared with producers. The biggest relative gains are made by low-price and discount supermarkets, which sell the largest proportion of their alcohol below the 45p threshold

Why am I not surprised?