High street health and beauty retailer Superdrug has announced that it will be recruiting 800 new apprentices throughout its network over the next 12 months.

The recruitment drive has been launched in support of National Apprenticeship Week, which has been organised by the National Apprenticeship Service and starts on 6th February. The aim of National Apprenticeship Week is to celebrate the talents of apprentices across the country, and how much value they offer to all level of employers.

Established in 2007, Superdrug’s apprenticeship scheme has so far welcomed over 700 apprentices, and give employees the opportunity to develop their personal skills and build up confidence, as well as gaining a nationally recognised qualification.

The programme will be open to all Superdrug employees who have worked at the company for more than three months, and work at least 16 hours a week, meaning workers can “learn while they earn”.

Superdrug HR Director Jo Mackie said: “Superdrug is a people business and we know our success depends on the skills of everyone who works for us. Our Team Academy training programme offers colleagues the confidence and skills they need to expand their learning and further their career.

“We’re delighted to continue to support apprenticeships and see the results of the training every day in our stores, head office and distribution centres.”

Toy retailer The Entertainer has raised over £100,000 from customer donations using an electronic charity box scheme.

Using the Pennies electronic charity box, customers have donated their “small change” from transactions made by credit or debit cards in-store, or through purchases made online, replacing the traditional penny boxes that were commonplace next to tills in shops and food outlets.

Through the Pennies scheme, over 350,000 individual donations have been made by The Entertainer customers, with a peak in the week before Christmas where over £13,000 was donated.

The majority of the funds raised by The Entertainer will be donated to four children’s hospitals; Liverpool’s Alder Hey Imagine Appeal, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Appeal, which fundraises for Bristol Children’s Hospital.

The rest of the money will be shared amongst ten charities covering a range of different causes, including cancer patients, the elderly and education.

The Entertainer is the first high street chain to adopt the scheme, and they found that over half of customers who were asked to donate chose to do so.

Gary Grant, managing director of The Entertainer, said: “People are inclined to be generous, and we have provided this very simple option for them to easily donate their small change. It has been amazing to see how those micro-donations add up to make a difference.

“Our tradtional charity boxes would generate less than £2000 a year so it has been tremendous to see the donations come in so quickly and easily with the electronic charity box.”

The Pennies electronic charity box scheme is currently being employed by a number of high profile chains, such as Go Outdoors, Domino’s Pizza and Zizzi restaurants, as well as The Entertainer.

CEO of The Pennies Foundation Alison Hutchinson said: “We have always known that pennies are powerful, but we’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of The Entertainer’s customers. We are so pleased that they have embraced the micro-donations and are making a real difference to sick children’s lives.”

Grocery chain Waitrose has announced its intentions to install self-checkout services in all of its stores across the country.

The brand has announced that the self-checkouts will be introduced in every Waitrose store within the next two years, after a successful trial run of 175 self-checkout machines  in 37 of its branches.

The self-checkouts have proven to be particularly successful in the Canary Wharf branch, whereby the self-checkout machines account for 20 per cent of transactions and 13 per cent of total branch sales.

Graham Heald, director of retail services at Waitrose, told the Wincor Nixdorf Executive Briefing in New York: “Particularly at lunch time [in Canary Wharf], we get a huge influx that we could not accommodate with traditional checkout lanes. Self-checkouts work incredibly well. ”

Heald added that by combining self-checkouts with the store’s already established Quick Check /Quick Pay technology, whereby customers can scan their own products as they shop to monitor their spend, Waitrose could remove up to £7million in costs, as well as providing a rapid return-on-investment for installing both Quick Check/Quick Pay and self-checkouts in all of its stores.

He said: “The model only works for us when you bring the two together, so by the end of 2013 a branch without self-checkout and Quick Check will be quite rare.”

Over 24,000 former employees of the now folded Woolworths chain are set to share a compensation payout of around £67.8million.

An Employment Tribunal in London released the judgement on Friday, which ruled that the Woolworths administrators had failed in their legal obligation to consult the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) before making mass redundancies as the firm collapsed at the end of 2008.

As a result, the tribunal ruled that former employees should be awarded compensation of 60 days’ pay, capped at £330 a week; the highest possible amount that can be awarded in such cases.

However, the ruling does not apply to employees from some of Woolworth’s smaller stores, where fewer than 20 redundancies were made. This means that over 3000 employees from around 180 Woolworths stores may never receive compensation.

Usdaw general secretary John Hannett said: “My delight at the award for the vast majority of our members is tempered by the clear injustice that workers in smaller stores could miss out. Usdaw thinks that UK’s current interpretation of the law on collective redundancies is both unfair and possibly a breach of the European Directive which seeks to protect workers in large scale redundancy situations.

“We are taking further expert legal advice and it is highly likely we will appeal against this part of the judgement.”

Recent figures have shown that around one in five online retail searches in the month of December were made using mobile devices.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) and Google have released their Online Retail Monitor Q4 2011, which shows that retail search volumes grew by 24 per cent in the final quarter of the year. Furthermore, the number of retail searches made using mobiles or tablet devices snowballed, with a 164 per cent year-on-year growth.

On Christmas Day, even more retail searches were made on mobile devices, accounting for around 26 per cent of the total online searches for the day.

Food and drink items had the fastest growth rate when it came to online searches, with a 29 per cent year-on-year rise. The biggest year-on-year increases on mobile devices was for homeware items, gaining a 189 per cent growth.

Stephen Robertson, director general of the BRC, said: “The significant growth in searches from countries such as Brazil and Russia shows the opportunities presented by emerging economies. For many retailers, tapping into these booming consumer markets is an increasingly important strategy for growth.”

Peter Fitzgerald, Google retail director, said: “The usage patterns on the different devices are particularly interesting. Over Christmas desktop search volumes peaked on Monday 5th December and saw a marked drop thereafter. Mobile/tablet volumes remained consistent later into the month, peaking at the weekends, with many consumers likely to have been searching on their devices while out and about.”

The IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index value reached a record high in December 2011, and figures reveal that online sales recorded during December were up by 16.5% against December 2010.

These figures also show that British Christmas shoppers spent a total of £7.9 billion online during December. This works out as the equivalent of £155 per person. December sales saw an increase against the preceding November of 12.2% and against December 2010 of 16.5%. This goes down as a record index score.

In total, £68 billion was spent online in 2011, which is also a 16% increase on the previous year. The clothing sector experienced growth despite a year on year slowdown, and sales were recorded as being up by 12%, compared with 40.5%.

The index’s forecast for 2012 featured 13% growth and approximately £77 billion in total e-retail sales.

Figures show that online retailers had a successful Christmas, mirroring the success of the high street in Christmas sales with 2.2% growth reported by the British Retail Consortium.

E-retail now accounts for 17% of the total UK retail market and the percentage is likely to increase further given the rise of mobile commerce and the huge numbers of tablet computers purchased in the year 2011.

Chris Webster, head of retail consulting and technology at Capgemini says: “Strong online sales over Christmas were even more impressive since they built on a 25% year on year growth from 2009 to 2010.. During 2011 we saw continued pressure on sales as shoppers became savvier in looking for bargains and this continued in the run up to Christmas. The rapid rise of mobile in 2011 will continue into 2012 as consumers became familiar with shopping via tablet devices and smartphonest, some taking advantage of their recent Christmas presents. This changing landscape will open up a myriad of opportunity for retailers including the integration of stores into the multi-channel world and the potential of new capabilities like location based markerting services.”

Negative product reviews left by customers online can actually be good for retail business, a recent study has found.

According to data released by social commerce specialists Reevoo, 68 per cent of consumers find a company more trustworthy if there are both positive and negative product reviews, while 30 per cent suspect a company of forgery or censorship if they can find only positive comments.

Around three times more consumers go out of their way to look for negative product reviews than those who purposely look for positive ones. Indeed, negative product reviews proved to be much more popular than “most recent” or “people like me” reviews.

However, those consumers who actively seek out negative reviews online are actually 67 per cent more likely to convert their interest into a sale than the average customer.

The reasoning for this trend is that those who look for negative reviews are much more in depth with their pre-purchase research, having viewed four times as many products as the average consumer, and staying on the website for considerably longer.

Richard Anson, founder and CEO of Reevoo, said of the figures: “Consumers who seek out negative reviews outperform the average visitor to a website. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, negative user-generated content actually one of the most effective conversion tools.”

While Christmas sales were better than forecast, there was no end to the decline of the retail industry in the final quarter of 2011, according to the experts at the Retail Think Tank.

After meeting in January, the KPMG/Ipsos Retail Think Tank (RTT) reached the conclusion that the deterioration in retail health which plagued 2011 continued throughout the fourth quarter. The Retail Health Index (RHI) continued to drop, falling 2 points to 80 in the quarter. This marks the fourth quarter in a row in which the RHI has fallen.

While retailers attempted to kick start demand by slashing prices and increasing the number of unplanned in store promotions, they did so at a cost to margins and profits.

Alarmingly, these costs are impacting negatively on the health of the retail industry for the first time since the third quarter of 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. This illustrates the effect of increased investment in servicing multi-channel operations over the Christmas period.

The majority of RTT members agree to a worrying prediction that the rate of decline in retail health will not slow down in the first quarter of 2012 and the RHI will continue to drop, a further 3 points to 77. This would mark the lowest ebb in retail health since the RTT was established in 2006; and would create a downward momentum not seen since the early stages of 2009.

Helen Dickinson, KPMG, commented, “As we predicted three months ago Christmas was not experienced at full price. Retailers fought hard to get ‘their share’ by matching or exceeding competitors’ offers. This of course impacted margins significantly although it did drive a late uplift in demand in December, with some retailers doing significantly better than others.  However, there were many other austerity factors acting to hold it down across October and November. These included a depressing Autumn Statement from the Chancellor; high petrol, diesel and home energy costs; rising unemployment; public-sector strikes over pension changes; the Euro crisis and even the unseasonably mild weather at the start of the quarter.”

Retail analyst Nick Bubb commented, “Retailers who undertook reactive and unplanned discounting in quarter 4 effectively saved Christmas – so far as their balance sheets are concerned. But once you train consumers to expect deep discounts you make a rod for your own back when you attempt to increase margins again. Sadly, many of the best-performing retailers of the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s have continually downgraded their brands; losing brand equity as well as market share. Right now very nearly the only thing propping up demand is the illusion created by food price inflation, and that’s no comfort at all”.

Alliance Boots experienced a revenue increase of 14.1% in the last quarter of 2011, for their group, when compared with the same quarter of 2010.

The health and beauty division of the group, namely the Boots pharmacy chain shared success and enjoyed a 4.1% rise in revenue over the Christmas period; namely the five weeks ending 31 December 2011; as compared with that period in 2010.

Boots UK like-for-like dispensing volumes increased by 1.2% in the quarter while like-for-like retail revenue grew 0.6%.

Alliance Boots reported that total revenue in the quarter for all of its health and beauty division business, including Boots Opticians and non-UK health and beauty businesses, was flat when compared with the same quarter in 2010; but the group expects to deliver profit growth through gross margin management and tight cost controls.

The group is believed to be on track for success in reaching their 2011/12 targets, both financial and operational.

Executive chairman Stefano Pessina said in a statement: “Looking to 2012, we expect the economic environment to remain tough with continuing pressure on both consumer and governmental expenditure.  This will generate challenges but also new opportunities for us as we pursue our growth, organically and through further international expansion.”

He added: “I am as confident as ever that Alliance Boots will deliver another year of double digit trading profit growth for our financial year ending 31 March 2012.”

Tesco, the supermarket giant, has posted its worst Christmas period figures in decades and recorded a 2.3% drop in sales excluding VAT and fuel in the six week run up to January 7 2012.

The retailer said the results for the period were “below expectations and disappointing” and warned it would see “minimal” profit growth this year.

The loss is said to have been suffered predominantly because of the a fall in sales of food.

Philip Clarke, chief executive, said: “We will continue the process of change that we started nine months ago to address long-standing business issues, building on the important steps we have already taken in the US, in Japan and at Tesco Bank, as well as those we have begun to take in the UK.”

The supermarket chain believe that the Big Price Drop campaign was an important first step towards this but there was much more it could do to improve its customers’ shopping experiences.

Looking ahead, Clarke said: “In a challenging consumer environment at home, and with early signs of more cautious behaviour emerging elsewhere, we have seen more strain than anticipated on our profitability during the important seasonal trading period.

“As a result, while underlying profit before tax and earnings per share for 2011/12 will be broadly in line with market consensus forecasts, we expect group trading profit growth to be around the low end of the current consensus range.”