Black Friday 2014 lifts UK retail growth to 10-year high December 18, 2014 UK retail sales growth surged to a 10-year high in November thanks to roaring trade on Black Friday weekend, when retailers offered discounts on thousands of products. Falling commodity prices and the ongoing supermarket price wars have left households better off and helped boost consumer spending. Retail sales volumes rose 1.6 per cent on the [...]
UK house prices rise unexpectedly: Stamp duty to the rescue? January 19, 2015 Are these the first signs of a bounce back in the property market? Data from Rightmove, a property portal, has shown that average asking prices have risen by 1.4 per cent in January. This may not sound like a huge leap back to the heady heights of last summer, but January is not traditionally a [...]
Sainsbury’s Christmas in number December 15, 2014 WHAT is the distance between London and Madrid? The answer is around 23m pigs in blankets. That is how many Sainsbury’s is preparing to sell in the week before Christmas. The grocer expects to be inundated with 30 per cent more food orders than a normal week and to make a record 100,000 deliveries in [...]
George Osborne likes to think the unthinkable: Now he should abolish the Budget March 16, 2015 It’s a well-known saying that “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”. So calling for George Osborne to take to the despatch box tomorrow and announce that he’s abolishing future Budgets – in turn, greatly diminishing the Treasury’s power – might seem a fanciful plea. In truth, it’s about as likely as Ed Miliband offering journalists the [...]
Shoppers face longer delivery times from M&S December 8, 2014 MARKS & Spencer’s online customers are set to be disappointed this Christmas shopping season, as they face longer waiting times for online deliveries. Standard deliveries will now take up to two weeks, according to the retailer’s website, as opposed to the normal five-day waiting period. The delay follows the shopping bonanza Black Friday, on 28 [...]
2014 Black Friday, Cyber and Manic Mondays set to break all UK records December 1, 2014 Black Friday became a weekend-long shopping spree yesterday as consumers were set to spend about £650m during Cyber Monday. Yesterday marked another pre-Christmas internet shopping frenzy, and industry body IMRG estimated that about £451,000 was spent per minute – making it the busiest online shopping day ever and a 26 per cent increase on last year. Market [...]
Apple sets new record as sales smash forecasts January 27, 2015 APPLE sales smashed even the most optimistic expectations after the tech giant sold a record number of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus smartphones over the Christmas quarter and won thousands of new fans in China. The company sold 74.5m iPhones in the first quarter to 27 December, thanks to more people switching from Android than [...]
High street suffers Black Friday hangover as retail sales drop January 12, 2015 RETAILERS were hit by a slowdown in sales over Christmas after the Black Friday shopping bonanza pulled forward holiday spending into November. Like-for-like sales dropped by 0.4 per cent compared to the same month a year ago, according to the latest data from KPMG and the British Retail Consortium (BRC). Total sales were up one [...]
City Link mapped: Which depots are closing down and where are the 2,586 redundancies being made? January 7, 2015 The administrators of collapsed parcel delivery firm City Link have announced further redundancies as it closes depots across the country after falling into administration on Christmas Eve. EY said 51 depots will close in the next week with the loss of another 230 jobs on top of the 2,300 announced on New Year's Eve, bringing [...]
Thorntons’ share price collapses 25 per cent following profit warning December 23, 2014 Chocolate maker Thorntons has ended the year on a disappointing note, warning falling sales will hit the company's earnings for the full year. The company's share price slumped a whopping 25 per cent when the market opened. Thorntons announced its UK Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) division had faced "challenges" that hit sales performance in [...]