It might have been a bank holiday weekend but the papers didn’t see that as any reason to ease off on their unrelenting focus on Marks & Spencer. In the wake of last week’s annual results, which The Grocer reported on here, CEO Stuart Machin boosted his share of the weekend’s column inches following an interview with the Mail on Sunday, which was picked up and reshared pretty much everywhere.
In it, Machin refused to focus on the hackers responsible for the cyberattack, which has wiped £300m off the retailer’s profit forecast for next year, instead vowing that: “We intend to come back better and stronger than ever.” While admitting that news of the attack was a shock, The Telegraph picked up on the fact that Machin denied the incident – which started over the Easter break – could be termed a ‘crisis’, preferring to describe it as “an incident, a setback, a bump in the road, a disruption”. No biggie, then.
Elsewhere, the focus remained on moving forwards, after M&S revealed it is buying up 12 former Homebase stores to turn them into super-sized branches of M&S Food. The Times positioned this as ‘defying the hackers’, although the move – which will employ hundreds of staff and includes a plan for bakeries which will rival Gail’s – has clearly been in the pipeline for some time.
An op-ed in the Financial Times asked whether British shoppers would ever be able to forgive M&S, describing the retailer’s customer loyalty as the ‘magic ingredient’ that will help it to bounce back from the crisis. Sorry, not crisis – bump in the road.
Talking of bumps in the road, Donald Trump’s tariffs have been back in the news. News that the US president plans to impose a 50% tariff on goods from the EU adds an exciting twist to the UK-EU trade deal despite the ink on that particular contract being far from dry. Sky News reported that those particular plans – originally due to begin on 1 June – have been delayed until 9 July, giving more time for US negotiations with the bloc.
An op-ed in the Financial Times says that the UK’s trade performance remains dire, and the recent deals which have been struck with the US, EU and India will “not make a significant difference to Britain’s parlous position”. Harsh but not necessarily inaccurate as it goes on to suggest that the US deal, for example, will simply “limit the damage done by Donald Trump’s trade war”.
Despite all this uncertainty, a report in The Times revealed that UK firms remain confident about exports despite rising business costs, with more than 90% of them expecting to see some international growth over the next two years. Almost half (48%) said that trade had generally been positive, although 69% expect the cost of doing business to continue to rise “amid the global macroeconomic uncertainty”.
The use of cameras at checkouts continues to make headlines as it is revealed that Tesco is the latest supermarket to add VAR-style cameras to its self-checkouts, allowing it to helpfully let a customer know when they pass an item through the scanner but it doesn’t register. The system then shows shoppers an instant replay of themselves failing to scan the products. Busted.
The new AI-powered tech comes at the same time as the news that legal action is being bought against Asda by privacy rights group Big Brother Watch, which has filed a legal complaint against the supermarket for using facial recognition technology. It says the tech is “unlawful” and “infringes the data rights” of shoppers, as store staff can add people to the facial recognition watchlist, marking them as a ‘person of interest’ without letting them know.
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