Within a year, the company boasted an e-commerce site. Barratt would make stock available at 3am in the morning because otherwise the volume of orders would crash the website, she claims. Within three seconds, her available stock of 130 units […]

A surge of successful applications for credit saw nearly £12.5bn advanced to farmers last year, according to the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), representing the highest annual rise since records began 15 years ago. Although the agricultural sector accounts for just […]

“Everybody wants to see higher wages at the bottom end of the labour market. And that’s a laudible objective that business will get behind,” he said. “But Government pushing that rather fast is a gamble, and it’s not obvious that […]

The Common Business Oriented Language, or Cobol, is the plumbing upon which banks have built ATM programmes, cheque-clearing services and the bedrock of their online applications that operate on mainframes. The last time Cobol really hit the headlines was when […]

Those concerns were heightened last week when Punch Taverns sold 158 sites to shopping centre owner NewRiver Retail. While NewRiver insisted it will not close locations, it does hope to use surplus land on the sites for residential developments and […]

When the Japanese economy hit the buffers 25 years ago, it had already reached the productivity level and living standards of the major western economies, and the scope for further progress was limited. China is still a middle income economy, […]

This followed the establishment of the world’s first code of practice in the UK, developed by the Department of Transport, allowing Britain to start testing driverless cars in Bristol, Coventry, Milton Keynes and Greenwich in south-east London. The global autonomous […]

While mental illnesses such as stress, depression and anxiety were not viewed more or less kindly by managers, employees were significantly more likely to lie about non-physical health. A survey of 1,000 non-executive employees found that 7pc would tell their […]

“I didn’t have time to look at France but now I am paying attention to it. I have brought my marketing department into Paris. I have big plans for France.” Do the French not recognise Le Creuset as a national […]

But it is not just the French. A movement has been growing within academic circles for a widespread ban on cash. It has been pushed by Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard economics professor and influential author of This Time Is Different, […]