In a landmark case Tesco have been fined £300,000, and ordered to pay costs of £65,000 after they were caught misleadingly claiming that 400gm punnets of strawberries selling for £1.99 were “half-price” in 2011.

The price tickets were marked with crossed-out prices of £2.99 and £3.99 and noticed by pensioner Daphne Smallman in Tesco’s Sheldon, Birmingham store. When she asked staff there whether the strawberries had ever been on sale at the crossed-out prices the staff promised they would “get back to her” but never did, rejecting her complaint. Accordingly she suspected she, and thousands of others in Tesco’s 2,300 stores were being duped by Tesco and called in local trading standards officers who investigated.

In court Tesco admitted that the strawberries had been sold for the higher, crossed-out prices for just two weeks, and the lower “half-price” for 14 weeks, this in breach of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act 2008 The lower-price sale should not last longer than the time the higher prices were being charged. Continue reading →

The all-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has published a withering report on the Government’s £50 billion plan to build a high speed rail link from London to Manchester and Leeds, via Birmingham.

Criticisms include claims that the Department of Transport has based its decisions on questionable forecasts of future use of rail travel for business, and equally questionable ten-year old assumptions that business types would pay a premium for shorter journey times because “they could not work on trains using modern technology”. (such as mobile phones, perhaps?)

Other concerns were that the line would suck jobs down to London rather than boost employment in the North, that the £50 billion estimate did not include any contingency or impact costs of construction on small business, that the taxpayers money could be better spent on improving other parts of the rail network and benefit many more people and that the figure given was likely to spiral upwards as benefits spiralled downwards.

A study by web security company AppRiver has found that despite the amount of easily-exploited and confidential business and personal information stored on mobile phones only 50% of users say they bother to secure them with a password.

Apparently more than 50% of users claim to suffer from “Nomophobia”, a fear of being without their mobiles, perhaps because they know that they contain items that they would really like, or need, to keep confidential. The study also found that women were 17% more likely to be nomophobic than men.

Another blow to the rapidly dwindling circulations of “lad’s mags” has been delivered by the Co-op, which is proud of its ethical approach to business matters and is insisting that the magazines be packed in pre-sealed “modesty bags” designed to obscure the front covers.

Publishers of Loaded, Front, Nuts and Zoo were given until September 9 to comply or be taken off the shelves of 4,000 Co-ops, where many of the stores have low-level shelving units which can easily be viewed by children, who many parents are concerned are becoming sexualised by the proliferation of lewd images. It is an offence to display indecent and obscene matter – that which has a tendency to deprave and corrupt – in a public place. Continue reading →

Plucky and deeply principled government campaigner Harriet Harman, who has tirelessly fought the “blight” of betting shops, courageously gave up her opposition to them when bookmakers Paddy Power gave her 30-year old son Harry a well-paid job in its advertising department in July this year, this reported in The Sun, so it must be true.

Harman, the deputy leader of the Labour party and shadow culture, media and sport secretary, told us all with impressive conviction at the beginning of this year that the proliferation of gambling shops was “causing a blight on people’s lives and on our high streets” and pointed out in 2011 that Paddy Power was targeting poorer areas and the less well-off with its location of shops, having “three in Tottenham High Road but none whatsoever in Highgate Village or Muswell Hill”. Continue reading →

Those wanting a long life could cut back on their consumption of coffee, a new lifestyle study of 43,727 Americans has warned.

The study found that drinking more than four cups a day increased death rates of men and women up to age 55 by 50%, with young coffee addicts especially at risk.

A fleet of “Duckmarine” amphibious vehicles used as city tour busses has been repossessed in Liverpool after two incidents where the vehicles, which are supposed to float, sank in the Salthouse Dock.

Tourists loved the splashdown finale in the dock at the end of the road trip but some were less keen on the emergency evacuation experience.

Your bank charges may soon be sharply increasing if you bank with Bank of America, Barclays, Bear Stearns, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, J P Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC or UBS.

These are the thirteen banks that are being probed by the European Commission, which has charged them all with acting to stop two big exchanges, Germany’s Deutche Borse and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, from entering the trillion pound Credit Default Swap market during the period 2006-2009, in breach of European anti-trust regulations. Credit Default Swaps are a type of bet on the credit of a country or company and played a significant part in the financial crisis that damaged the economies of so many countries. Also being investigated is the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, which has a large number of banks in its membership.

Continue reading →