A soling and heeling for Boots, or just another round of hunt the thimble?

Boots, Boots, Boots, Boots, moving up and down again — no discharge in the war …. Just another change of strategy and an alliance with Alliance. Perhaps it will work better than in-store chiropody. Salients have come and gone, casualties mount, the line is rectified, and commanders succeed one another like British generals in the Western desert. The new plan is to merge with Alliance UniChem, thus giving Boots even more chemists’ shops. Until now, armchair strategists — the High Street is full of them — have assumed that Boots has quite enough shops. Its trouble has been to know what to do with them. What would people rather buy from Boots than from Tesco? Sandwiches? Something for the weekend? Put like that, you might have expected a line of thought to suggest itself. Health has pushed its way up our list of obsessions and up our shopping lists, too.