Research has found that lengthy queues for checkouts in retail stores is costing British businesses over 21 million potential customers every year. Market research company YouGov conducted an online survey amongst UK adults to detemine whether long queues hindered retailers’ abilities to make sales, and how consumers thought retailers should go about reducing the amount [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]