General
Discounters proved to be great disappointment
If Tesco had known just how badly the discounters would ultimately handle their post-recession come-down I don’t think they’d have worried so much about them during the downturn and even bothered launching their Discounter Brands range. The latest evidence to emerge of their continued weak performance comes from grocery experts IGD that found the main…
Read MoreGroup buying set to excite online shoppers
Has online shopping ever been interesting, exciting and fun? Probably not that much. That’s certainly the view of a couple of online price comparison pioneers who helped develop Kelkoo and have just launched Keynoir to address this problem. Each day an offer appears on the site that requires a minimum number of people to make a purchase before it is…
Read MoreOcado’s flotation far from certain
The long-rumoured flotation of online food retailer Ocado continues to rumble on and advisors are supposedly due to be hired after Easter. The road to a stock market listing took an interesting turn with an article in the Sunday Telegraph that reported an unnamed analyst from an “expert retail analyst firm” had handed over a detailed…
Read MoreCan we please clog up the roads with yet more traffic
Flicking through the Evening Standard ES Magazine on Friday highlighted the level of brainless and selfishness that unfortunately pervades the capital. The magazine has a regular Q&A section called ‘My London’ and this week it featured WBA World Heavyweight boxing champion David Haye who reckons if he was Mayor for the day he would abandon the congestion…
Read MoreAnother nail in retail’s coffin?
The announcement this week of an investment of £2.5 million in online furniture selling business Made.com sounds like little for retailers to worry about. It’s an online start-up and it’s a trifling amount. But this might be a mistake because the investors putting in the cash are Lastminute.com co-founder and mydeco.com founder Brent Hoberman and the less well known…
Read MoreSam Smiths Boots out Branded Snacks
Esoteric brewer and pub owner Sam Smiths has finally removed the last branded products from its boozers with all its bagged snacks now entirely own-label. This might not sound like earth shattering news but it makes Sam Smiths a rarity in the market as I doubt many other pub operators or retailers would have the…
Read MoreOlympics are Massive Opportunity for Retailers
It might be more than two years away but retailers should at least be looking to get their heads around the 2012 Olympic Games because it represents a one-off opportunity to bag a chunky amount of extra sales. Attending this week’s 2012 Opportunites for Retailers conference was an interesting experience if only for the statistics it threw up. Just consider the…
Read MoreUncertainty at Games Workshop Group
It seemed rather strange that Games Workshop Group should have ruled itself out of the competition to win the ‘Turnaround of the Year’ category in the annual Plc awards run by the FT, having been shortlisted. The thing to conclude from this is that its management did not want to win because it did not believe the…
Read MoreRetailers’ appetite for smaller stores grows
For many years the focus in retail has been skewed to ever larger stores located out-of-town and many operators have been unwilling to dirty their hands operating smaller units on, god forbid, the high street. Some retailers like Asda have publicly stated their aversion to opening smaller, convenience type stores, in town centres because they…
Read MoreWho’d be a buyer of online retailer Figleaves?
For a company that has a ‘For Sale’ sign atop its virtual store, the chief executive of Figleaves wasn’t really selling the business particularly well to the audience at the Retail Week Conference. Julia Reynolds was keen to stress that anybody can sell other people’s brands, which is largely what Figleaves does, and this made…
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