Kendall Field-Pellow

It is a grey and miserable January afternoon, but Waitrose’s supermarket in St Albans is bustling. That’s perhaps unsurprising; St Albans is exactly the sort of affluent, home counties town where Waitrose does best. Last year, the Hertfordshire store was given a multimillion-pound revamp as part of a broader £1 billion expansion drive by its owner, the John Lewis Partnership (JLP).
Some shoppers were a little sceptical of some of the changes. "I’m still wondering why they’ve got a sushi counter."

Britain’s yacht-building industry, like many other sectors, had to weather storms of supply chain disruption after the pandemic when demand for a private escape on the water boomed.
The difficulties in obtaining key components meant that lead times for orders were lengthened and production cost estimates were thrown into chaos.
Yards owned by private equity companies are cutting costs and laying off workers.

As more than 40 breweries became insolvent in the past year, the craft beer boom of the 2010s may be coming to an end.

Higher wage costs after the budget, inflation on ingredients such as grain, higher electricity bills as well as the rising cost of living tightening consumers’ pockets have all made it more difficult for many crafteries not to pass on rising prices to their customers — as they themselves receive a smaller share from the on-trade of pubs and bars.

New vape models may not encourage proper recycling after the single-use ban, a regulation expert has warned.

An officer at the Chartered Trading Standards Institute said consumers might lack the financial incentive to treat reusables differently to disposable vapes.

Vape retailers have been selling refillable and rechargeable vapes, such as “big puff” vapes with larger amounts of liquid, before the sale of disposables is banned on June 1.

An asylum seeker who arranged the smuggling of thousands of African migrants into Europe while living in Hounslow has been jailed.
Ahmed Ebid, 42, started organising boats, crews and supplies for voyages across the Mediterranean Sea from Home Office-provided accommodation weeks after he arrived illegally in Britain.
The Egyptian national was found to have organised seven crossings of a total of 3,781 migrants on fishing boats from Libya to Italy between October 2022 and April 2023.

Authentic. Confident. Unique. A voice can say many things about a person, but how often do you think about the way you sound?
When Stephen Davidson moved from Canada to London in his mid-twenties in 2010, two years after he transitioned to living as a man, he was on a journey to rediscover his voice after taking the male hormone testosterone, known as T.
"My voice was really hard to use after I transitioned and because it was 2008 at the time, there wasn't very much good information out there."

MPs and campaigners have called for an allergy tsar to lead efforts to address the rising prevalence of allergies.
Becky Gittins, the Labour MP, backed a call by an allergy charity for the government to appoint a public champion for those suffering from allergies to co-ordinate specialist care across the country.
Gittins said that the rising prevalence of allergic diseases was causing “an unacceptable number of preventable deaths”.

One of Britain’s biggest high street banks has ordered staff to return to the office for an extra day each week, becoming the latest company to tighten its policy on working from home.
Barclays told its 85,000 employees in a memo this week that most will be required to come into the office at least three days a week, or more for some staff.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund returned the highest profit in its near three-decade history last year, driven by bets on “Magnificent Seven” US technology stocks.
The largest government fund in the world, which manages $1.8 trillion and is overseen by the Norwegian central bank, returned 2.51 trillion crowns ($222 billion) last year, surpassing the 2.2 trillion crowns record set the year before.

More than a fifth of last year’s Harvard MBA class are still unemployed months after graduating.
Three months after leaving Harvard Business School last spring, 23 per cent of the master of business administration (MBA) graduates were still seeking work, up from 20 per cent in 2023 and 10 per cent in 2022, according to the school’s statistics.
More than a dozen of the top MBA programmes in the United States had poorer employment outcomes last year.

The world’s largest contract chipmaker expects that increasing use of AI-powered features in smartphones will fuel demand for the next generation of devices.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) reported a record $26.3 billion in net sales in the past quarter, up by more than a third year-on-year, and generating profit of $11.4 billion.
The company, founded in 1987, is now the main semiconductor supplier to Apple, which accounted for a quarter of its revenue, and the AI technolog...

A recruitment company has told investors it no longer expects to make a profit for the year as the sector struggles in the UK and internationally.
Robert Walters had earlier forecast a profitable year, while the market had forecast an annual pre-tax profit of £2.2 million.
“We now expect a broadly breakeven position at the profit before tax level for the full year,” Toby Fowlston, the chief executive of Robert Walters, said in a trading update.

Fewer companies are expanding their workforces in anticipation of the higher costs announced in the budget.
The proportion of employers that hired additional staff fell to 24 per cent in the final three months of last year, down from 27 per cent in the previous quarter, a survey by the British Chambers of Commerce found.
The survey showed that 79 per cent of those attempting to recruit faced difficulties, up from 76 per cent the previous quarter.

Tesla has released an updated version of its best-selling car in China in the face of strong competition.

The electric carmaker priced the new Model Y at 263,500 yuan (£29,200), 5.4 per cent more than the previous version, in its second-largest market after the United States.

Tesla was the biggest seller of electric vehicles in China in 2020 but its market share slipped to 10.4 per cent last year, down from 11.7 per cent in 2023.

The model railway manufacturer Hornby enjoyed strong Christmas trading as traditional toys continue to thrive in the era of smartphones and video games.
The Margate-based company, which dates back to 1901, said December sales were up 23 per cent year-on-year. Revenue for the last three months of 2024 rose 7 per cent.
It cheered strong trade from first-time customers as direct-to-consumer sales pick up pace, with nearly half of all Black Friday sales coming from new customers.