The only thing I may be in the market for is a leaf blower and I bought one last year when time was a good deal tighter. So I've been spending some of my spare time on my next favourite pastime - visiting shops.
When I lived and worked in London I became acutely aware that the PAs and secretaries who roam the shops of our major cities at lunchtimes are some of the real people who dictate shopping behaviour, trends, fashions, likes and dislikes. Listening to them talk about shopping is not a bad place to start to form judgements on what you are doing right and where you are going wrong.
Consequently, overheard in Selfridges on Oxford Street:'That's a lovely lamp - my mum would love it for Christmas.' 'Yeah, but all the sales are going to start before Christmas this year - get it in the last week.'
You may have missed out on some of the more colourful dialect and you are definitely missing something about bird flu, which I hope not to come back to again at a later date.
Given our obsession with like-for-likes and year-on-year figures, it's not hard to see where this takes us. The public, while admiring all of our indecently early seasonal paraphernalia, will wait and wait for the sale. We will panic and give in first in the face of poor like-for-likes, only to see massive year-on-year increases in the last week while we are on sale. Then comes the reckoning - a massive margin hit at the time of our highest volume.
Now for the rant, which is aimed at the Bank of England's MPC - leave your offices and listen to your admin staff, ask them about consumer confidence and about their spending plans. Talk to some real people, then do something about it now, not after it's too late. Lower interest rates now.
What can we do? Stare down the barrels of our seasonal guns and wait until we see the whites of their eyes again - ever was it thus. Yes, there will be losers and winners - I hope you will be a winner.
Tony Vasishta will be joining Tesco as property director - programme.
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