Making sense of the last seven days
Five weeks ago, Retail Week was the first to warn of the looming Chinese textiles crisis. Since then, the fiasco has gone from bad to worse as bras, T-shirts and blouses bob around on the ocean waves or gather dust on docksides instead of gracing the shelves.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson - who played a key role in striking the inadequate agreement that created the problem - has admitted, with astonishing understatement, there is a 'glitch' in the system.

Retailers are fond of blaming external factors for problems - most famously the weather - but in this case they are right. The political powers that be have failed to act in the interests of the sector or the shopper. The lack of understanding of retail in Brussels' corridors of power is another argument in favour of a strong trade association that can bat powerfully for the industry. It's good to see that the British Retail Consortium has played a prominent role in the media and behind the scenes to explain the situation and try to resolve it to the benefit of retailers and consumers alike.

Store chiefs often complain that the 'City boys' who analyse their companies or make their cash advising on mergers and takeovers don't really understand the business of retail. They are just number crunchers and financial technicians, or so the argument goes.

So it will be interesting to see how dealmaker Chris Steed fares with MVC, the entertainment chain he bought from Woolworths for£5.5 million at the start of this month. Steed is best known to retailers as managing director of Argyll Partners, the corporate finance boutique that has done very nicely advising on transactions such as February's£140 million sale of Rubicon to Shoe Studio, or last November's£55 million management buy-in at MK One.

As the owner of MVC, Steed will need to demonstrate retail skills as sharp as his financial acumen to succeed in a crowded market dominated by bigger companies such as HMV and Virgin. He shows every sign of relishing the challenge, as a visit yesterday to his King William Street store in the City of London showed. MVC had just launched its Big Fat Bargain Sale, designed to clear out some of the surplus stock inherited from Woolies.

The shop was jam-packed and Steed was enthusiastically getting to know a bit about life on the shopfloor as he stacked shelves and stuck stickers on product, under the watchful eye of store manager Juliet Kennard.

It takes more than a day in a shop to understand how stores work but, apart from anything else, Steed's willingness to pitch in would have sent an important message to MVC's staff - no doubt demoralised by their understudy status while part of Woolworths and worried aboutwhat private ownership would mean.

But the employees - or at least some of them - will now know the faces of their new management and that they're serious about making the business work. It will be fascinating to see how MVC fares. If all goes well, perhaps Steed will fancy buying a few more chains himself instead of on others' behalf.