This column has recently noted retailers' growing enthusiasm for 'Bugof' promotions - the practice of livening up bags of lettuce and other mundane fare by (accidentally) including the dessicated corpse of an exotic creature or two.

Osgrow has now raised the stakes by deliberately offering a bonus with a real sting in the tail. The weird-meat merchant celebrated the bank holiday by wooing - or threatening, depending on your tastes - customers with the offer of a free helping of chocolate-covered scorpions every time they splash out more than £30 on actual edible food, such as wildebeest and, erm, rattlesnake.

Whether it pushed sales up or down is not yet known.