LONDON (AP) — Tesco PLC, Britain’s largest retailer by sales, is to pull out of the U.S., selling off its lossmaking Fresh & Easy supermarket chain at a cost of 1.2 billion pounds after it failed to transfer its winning formula from the U.K. to the western states.

The writedown from the U.S. misadventure helped send the supermarket group’s net profit for the year down 96 percent to 120 million pounds ($183 million). Fresh & Easy — which employs about 5,000 people and has about 200 stores in Arizona, California and Nevada — failed to make money for Tesco despite extensive research into what Americans wanted to buy and how they want to shop.

“It’s never easy to walk away from something,” Tesco chief executive Philip Clarke told the BBC. “The world is so different now from 2004 and 2005 when the research was originally taken. Who was shopping on a smartphone back then?”

Clarke hopes to sell the stores as a single unit in the hope of securing jobs. He said there was already interest expressed in the chain, but he did not name a buyer — or price.

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