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All Newsletter briefing articles
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NewsletterIntelligence Briefing: Four days till Burnham, June sales, and heatwave data
It is now almost certain that Andy Burnham will become prime minister on Monday after he was backed by the vast majority of Labour MPs, making it impossible for any other challenger to get the necessary number of nominations to enter the contest. The British Retail Consortium has ...
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Newsletter
Grocery Briefing: Have yourself a merry little Christmas, potential grocery consolidation and a long, hot, British summer
The UK may be currently sweltering through another week of record temperatures, but it’s now nearly mid-July and, in retail – and food retail most of all – that means one thing: everyone’s already looking ahead to Christmas. Yes, right about now, despite the Mediterranean temperatures outside, every grocery test ...
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Newsletter
Intelligence Briefing: Console price rises, heatwaves, and England fight on
I am an on-and-off video gamer, but having the latest console has been less important as I’ve got older. While I quickly bought the PS2, I held off for a couple of years before buying the Xbox 360, and later still, the PS4. This is partly a result of having ...
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Newsletter
Grocery Briefing: Ocado paves way for Steiner succession; Co-op locked in bot battle; Weight-loss pills hit the high street
Hello dear subscribers, and welcome to the maiden voyage of the new-look grocery newsletter. And the top story this week is fit for just such an auspicious occasion. After the best part of two weeks of furious media speculation, pureplay grocer and fulfilment technology provider Ocado yesterday laid out a ...
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Newsletter
Tech & Digital Briefing: Prime Day performs; Delivery robots cause controversy; and more
To no one’s surprise, Prime Day performed well yet again. Amazon’s annual four-day event rarely disappoints, and in the UK sales grew 11.4% year on year to £2.3bn as consumers sought out deals typically only seen over Black Friday. The retail behemoth also focused its efforts on AI with the ...
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Newsletter
Intelligence Briefing: Burnham and the high streets; Heatwave hits Topps; Germany has cheapest shop
Our seeming prime minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, set out his priorities in a speech at the start of this week, and retail got a big shout-out amid other announcements like the movement of some of the prime minister’s operational team to Manchester (unexpectedly bringing JD Sports and the Co-op close to ...
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Newsletter
Tech and Digital briefing: Beware of rising tech prices; Highlights from our Digital Transformation Summit; and more
I’m here to give you a bit of respite from Downing Street as the UK gears up to bring in its seventh Prime Minister in a decade. Well, I say respite, but I’m opening with a bit of gloomy news for consumers. AI data centres have sparked a surge in ...
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Newsletter
Intelligence Briefing: UK retail vs Amazon capex; Starmer out; supermarket spending
This morning, I am speaking at the Retail Week Digital Transformation Summit about AI and the retail sector. I have been covering AI since I started at Retail Week in late 2024, and one thing that has always been clear is that so much of what UK retailers are reacting ...
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Newsletter
Tech & Digital Briefing: Social media to be banned for youths; AI investment continues to ramp
One of the most controversial debates among parents, teachers, teenagers, retailers, and pretty much everyone in the UK at the moment is the potential social media ban for those under 16. It follows the same ban in Australia, which was implemented in December 2025, but research from the Molly Rose ...
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Newsletter
Editor’s Choice: Under-16s social media ban; Pureseoul co-founder Gracie Tullio interview, Tesco boss on softer sales, inflation and the World Cup
Politics has been making headlines all week, and the decisions of legislators typically have implications for retailers. While Andy Burnham’s victory in yesterday’s Makerfield by-election is dominating the news today, earlier this week PM Sir Keir Starmer revealed plans for a social media ban affecting under-16s. In an increasingly digitally ...
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Newsletter
Intelligence Briefing: Could AI upend online grocery?; Social media ban; Hormuz
New research out this week from Bain looks at what a partial realisation of the agentic shopping revolution (aka people instructing AI tools to do their shopping for them) could do to the grocery business model. The authors zero in on the potential threat to the “basket building model”, where ...
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NewsletterIntelligence Briefing: GLP-1 drugs hit grocery spending; An OK May
£780m. That is how much Worldpanel by Numerator think that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs are reducing British grocery spending, according to new figures published yesterday. The data firm’s latest report on the subject shows that 6.3% of households in the country now have at least one user of the ...
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Newsletter
Tech & Digital briefing: Amazon hones in on upskilling; Currys names new leader
I’ve visited many Amazon fulfilment centres around the world: Milan, Dortmund, Seattle, Nashville, and now… Dartford, UK. While not as glam as the aforementioned, it had a lot to offer. A key focus was on upskilling its workforce and getting more young people into training. UK country manager John Boumphrey’s ...
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NewsletterIntelligence Briefing: The UK consumer really doesn’t understand grocery margins
The Great British public may be good at many things, but understanding the profit margins of food retailers and hospitality businesses is not one of them. New data from the Institute of Economic Affairs found that Brits think that hospitality companies like pubs, restaurants and hotels are operating on 40% ...
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Newsletter
Tech & Digital Briefing: World Cup opportunity for retailers; Google’s new suite of products; and more
We’re now in June, and the countdown to the World Cup is truly on. No matter what you think of the England squad line-up, England and Scotland’s chances of going far, or the fact it’ll be hosted mainly in the US, we can all agree it’s typically a time when ...
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NewsletterIntelligence Briefing: Lidl guarantees Champions League qualification; retail sales dip
After a year of running close, Lidl finally overtook Morrisons to become Britain’s fifth-largest grocer in the latest Worldpanel by Numerator figures for the 12 weeks ending May 17, 2026. Gallingly for the Bradford-based retailer, it was overtaken four years to the month after Lidl’s fellow discounter Aldi knocked it ...
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Newsletter
Tech & Digital Briefing: Virtual-try on to help returns?; AI smart glasses sales rise; and more
Is virtual try-on actually being used by consumers? Well, Zara has seen over 7 million sessions in just four months across 45 markets. As was first revealed by Retail Week, JD Sports has also just launched a trial of a new try-on service for tracksuits on its UK website. Though ...
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NewsletterEditor’s Choice: Retail PR disasters; Alex Baldock to lead Boots; and more
This week, I wrote about the PR disasters for several grocers – most recently Sainsbury’s – surrounding the sacking of store colleagues for challenging shoplifters and responding to abuse in ways that are against company policy. Every case is nuanced and complex, and news coverage very often only tells one ...
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NewsletterIntelligence Briefing: April was awful and election fallout
The big political story running on from last week into this was the local election results, bad for Labour, and subsequent efforts by MPs to remove Keir Starmer as leader. This is not a politics newsletter, but there is one very current economic ramification for the sector, and that ...
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Newsletter
Tech & Digital briefing: eBay’s breaking new ground; It’s farewell to Kingfisher’s CEO; and more
A lot of eyes have been on eBay last week, as it was widely reported that video game retailer GameStop made a bid for the marketplace to turn it into a “legit competitor to Amazon”. The $56bn bid is being considered, and not much else has been divulged. Chief executive ...