A spokesman for Asda said: "As far I am aware all our fish - including the sharks which we used to sell but do not sell any longer - are from a sustainable source. In terms of them being endangered, I don't know where Greenpeace are coming from."

Given that there are no common/desirable fish available from 'sustainable' sources, it's hard to tell where ASDA is coming from. Given that most of the desirable fish stocks are somewhere between overfished, extremely rare, and all but extinct, it's surprising that fish is still on the menu.

D (High Street Diversity) = f (m,b,c) where m is a wide mix of businesses best suited to normal spending patterns; b is the availability of everyday goods; and c is the presence of a wide number of businesses selling the same kind of thing

Under pressure from the Treasury, John Prescott's Office of the Deputy Prime Minister announced that developers could get permission to build on greenfield sites if there is no suitable inner-city land available in particular areas.

Oh where have you gone John Gummer, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you...

This is just so stupid to be unbelievable, although given this government nothing really does surprise me. Out of town shopping centres kill existing retail developments, and make it harder for the poor and the less mobile to buy cheap food.

And one does wonder what on earth this has got to do with the Treasury... is the Treasury really the guiding hand behind all government policy, or just a convenient scapegoat?

Despite this minor wee problem, the OFT seems to have decided that retailers were treating their suppliers fairly... rather than continuing their investigation 'till they've actually figured out what is going on in the supermarket business...

A good analysis of how many of the basic statistics we take for granted are built on a series of compromises and value judgements which disappear from view by the time we get "results".

As seems usual in the UK these days, store owners have been 'warned' when they should have been 'prosecuted'.

Ah, the humble banana. My grandfather used to grow bananas, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the yellow tubers we buy in the UK are just absolute rubbish.

Come to think of it, most of the fruit you get over here is flavourless rubbish.

Yes, that'd be putting it mildly.

From Saturday, retailers can refuse to process a card purchase if the buyer does not know their four-digit personal identification number (PIN). Surveys suggest that millions of people have no idea of their number"

While this [C&P] does have disaster written all over it, I am rather more confident about it than I was two weeks ago, having seen just how badly implemented the US version of C&P is. The logic of C&P is that retail staff don't provide an adequate check of the card's signature [true, particularly in the US where clerks often never look at same] with the signature on the receipt, and so an alternative has to be found which forces the consumer to more accurately identify themselves - hence the need to enter a PIN number.

Now half of this problem could have been solved if more card issuers had just put people's pictures on the cards, but that was too simple. So now we will have to constantly use our PIN numbers if we want to buy anything in the UK, which is almost guaranteed to make it easier for other people to steal same, and since it will be much more difficult to prove this has happened, fraud costs which were previously passed on to the retailer will now be passed onto the poor consumer. Result, if you're a bank that is.

The worst implementation of C&P [or equivalent] that I've seen so far [and it was so bad it was absolutely breathtaking] was in a Duane Reade drug store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. A woman in line in front of me paid for her purchases with a card, and was instructed to enter her PIN number on an 8" x 12" LCD touch-screen, mounted at head height in front of the cash register so that everyone standing behind her [and there were probably twenty or thirty of us] could see her tap in each number.

WRONG.

We know, as there is plenty of empirical evidence to back it up, that

1. the longer you have been on-line, the more likely you are to be comfortable with the net and therefore shop online


2. that the longer you have been online the more probable it is that you have broadband

We also knew that #1 was true several years before we knew that #2 was true, and that there is no evidence that #2 invalidates #1.

But we also know that the BBC tends to re-write press releases as news stories, rather than thinking about them in any great depth, so we can surmise that, as usual, they have got it utterly wrong once again.

Britain's biggest publishers, which include IPC, Emap and Dennis are reluctant to publicly criticise Tesco, which has rapidly built its share of the magazine and newspaper market in recent years. It will become Britain's biggest magazine retailer, pushing WH Smith into second place, if current trends continue.

Tesco's moves into small 'food' stores [i.e. Tesco Express etc.] bear closer scrutiny.

This is widely regarded as true, despite being completely inaccurate. Tesco's smallest stores aren't really food stores, despite beliefs to the contrary: they're really newsagents cum off-licenses [liquor stores] which happen to sell Tesco branded food. Now, in most neighbourhoods these stores open, there are already plenty of newsagents and places to buy booze: however, there often aren't many places to buy food.

And when up to a third of a 3,000 square foot store is devoted to alcohol and newspapers, that's a lot less food choices for your local consumer.