Retail news

• HMV was too ‘unimaginative’, says Waterstones boss

  30-12-2018 20:15
  Daunt acknowledges chain’s main problem was challenging market with rise of streaming
  
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• Retailers' Christmas woes to to become clearer this week

  30-12-2018 17:08
  Early data shows a drop in footfall of 3% on last year – the third consecutive annual fallInvestors will this week gain a clearer picture of retailers’ performances over the crucial Christmas period, as vultures circle the sector after HMV became the first victim of weak sales.Initial data from Springboard, a retail consultancy, showed that footfall in the week to Saturday fell by around 3% compared with last year, in line with declines seen throughout the Christmas trading period. I
  
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• Retailers' Christmas woes to become clearer this week

  30-12-2018 17:08
  Early data shows a drop in footfall of 3% on last year – the third consecutive annual fallInvestors will this week gain a clearer picture of retailers’ performances over the crucial Christmas period, as vultures circle the sector after HMV became the first victim of weak sales.Initial data from Springboard, a retail consultancy, showed that footfall in the week to Saturday fell by around 3% compared with last year, in line with declines seen throughout the Christmas trading period. I
  
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• Food prices to finance: what a no-deal Brexit could mean for Britain

  30-12-2018 15:56
  Guardian journalists spell out the potential impact, sector by sector, on national lifeIf Theresa May fails to get her deal through parliament in January, the prospect of the UK leaving the EU without a deal becomes more likely. Here, Guardian journalists examine what a no-deal Brexit could mean for the country, sector by sector. Related: Post-Brexit customs gridlock could choke UK trade, experts warnRelated: A no-deal Brexit survival guide: what food to stockpileRelated: London to lose €80
  
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• Business own goals: 2018's worst corporate blunders

  30-12-2018 15:47
  From #MeToo claims (categorically denied) to the most inflated bonusesThis year’s awards were judged in the humble Observer offices, despite a temptation to hold a gala dinner at London’s Dorchester hotel on the date previously occupied by the now disgraced Presidents Club charity event.The Observer’s only hat-tip to the defunct fundraiser, where men were the only guests and waitresses were forced to wear tight cocktail dresses, was that participants were permitted to sport a f
  
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• HMV is a bedrock of the British music industry – its loss would affect us all

  30-12-2018 14:31
  The retail chain, now in administration for the second time, weaves music culture into the fabric of our cities – something Spotify can never doThis particular music nerd dutifully filled out his HMV application form in April 1997, and on it wrote that his musical hero was the maverick and frequently unlistenable industrial auteur Jim “Foetus” Thirlwell. Amazingly, the manager of the Southampton store appeared not to view this as a reason to hurl the document into the nearest w
  
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• Ten things to look out for if UK is heading for economic recession | Larry Elliott

  30-12-2018 13:41
  Crashes seem to come round once a decade. Are we looking down the barrel of a new one?Recessions are always easy to spot in retrospect. With the benefit of hindsight, it is always easy to identify the warning signs of serious trouble ahead.Correctly forecasting recessions in advance demands a higher level of skill, as the Bank of England found in 2008 when it mistook the biggest slump since the second world war for a temporary growth slowdown. Related: Never mind the Brexit sideshow – rece
  
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• A pudding of a year for the UK’s junior market

  30-12-2018 11:00
  Aim shares fell 15 per cent, compared with 6% for FTSE 100 and 10% for FTSE 250
  
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• The UK’s house price boom is slowing: and that’s welcome news

  30-12-2018 08:00
  A moderate rise in prices in 2019 could mean an unsustainable boom will have ended in a soft landingBritain’s passion for rising house prices is both strange and irrational because by any yardstick a surging property market is bad news. It makes people feel wealthier than they actually are and so encourages them to take on more debt than they can afford. It diverts investment from more productive uses. It helps those who own housing assets at the expense of renters. And for every boom ther
  
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• The Business Agenda 2018 awards for corporate own goals

  30-12-2018 07:59
  From #MeToo claims (categorically denied) to the year’s most inflated bonus, there was fierce competition for booby prizesThis year’s awards were judged in the humble Observer offices, despite a temptation to hold a gala dinner at London’s Dorchester hotel on the date previously occupied by the now disgraced Presidents Club charity event.The Observer’s only hat-tip to the defunct fundraiser, where men were the only guests and waitresses were forced to wear tight cocktail
  
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• We can hardly mourn the demise of HMV when we won’t pay for music | Barbara Ellen

  30-12-2018 06:59
  The old school industry may have been bloated, but it kept artists and shops in businessThe music and film retailer HMV is calling in the administrators for the second time in six years, with 125 branches and 2,200 jobs at risk. Just like that, a slice of mainstream pop-cultural history, 97 years in the making, threatens to implode. Aside from the widespread retail slump, the general public isn’t buying DVDs or music in the way it used to. Where music specifically is concerned, people have
  
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