Here are a few news articles from our digital archives. We hope you enjoy them.

Every 10 years or so another product defect appears to plague building owners. The latest is RAAC (Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete). Structural failures of school roofs built of RAAC in the 1970′s and 1980′s is bad news for budget-stricken education authorities…

The launch of the redeveloped Wool Market provides a retail and dining experience in Doncaster to show that Markets are still vital to town centre regeneration.
Following extensive input from Quarterbridge Market Developments and Quarterbridge Lettings, Doncaster’s newly refurbished Wool Market has enjoyed a hugely successful first week’s trade.

Government officials took time off from Brexit negotiations last month to launch two crucial initiatives: A ‘traffic light’ scheme from DEFRA proposing retailers add red, amber or green labels to show if their packaging is recyclable. And a ‘calorie cap’ recommendation to limit the size of takeaway pizzas. A pleasant change to worrying about Brexit no doubt but rather missing the point – the need to reduce consumption. Curbing the volume of unnecessary packaging and banning double sausage and egg McMuffins would be a start. Quite how HMG would implement these proposals is not clear. Maybe Brexit will provide an answer.

In retail today we take many things for granted and forget someone had to invent them. Machine-readable barcodes – the basis of stock control and EPOS – were the brainchild of Alan Haberman in the 1970’s but 40 years before then the late Sylvan Goldman, owner of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ grocery stores in Oklahoma invented the ‘greatest ever development in the history of merchandising’ – the shopping trolley.

Caveat Emptor

September 2018

Buying companies as a going concern is fun. Sometimes. Despite purchasers’ best efforts when sniffing around accounts, staff contracts, order book, supply contracts and other ‘due diligence’ they inevitably spend a couple of years digging up buried bodies:‘Oh sorry, didn’t you know the HQ is built over an old mineshaft?

Consider the UK’s High Streets. Hard on the heels of House of Fraser’s announcement of dozens of closures and the rumours about Debenhams you could almost forget how long they’ve been a bad news story. It was back in 2012 the penny finally dropped they were in trouble and it couldn’t be blamed on the 2008 banking collapse or the previous Labour government.

Epsom Ladies day, 1st June was extra scary this year. The usual scrummage of hats and high heels at the bars turned nasty when the Visa credit card system crashed. A lot of ladies were less than impressed and bar staff had to be rescued by security.

In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ Alice takes part in a race with the Red Queen only to discover that despite running constantly she remains in the same place. The Red Queen is not sympathetic: ‘A slow sort of country!’ says the Queen. ‘Here you see it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast!”

If you are an ambitious business promoting itself on the internet then you need to know about the General Data Protection Regulation which comes into effect on 25thMay. The Customer database you are building is subject to the regs., especially if you ‘process’ the information e.g. categorise Customers so you can target them with special offers.