Every Christmas the proportion of money we spend online escalates. This year probably more than a third of all our festive gifts and food will be sourced via the internet. With this will go the usual hand-wringing about consumerism causing neighbourhoods to become clogged up with delivery vans and the death of our high street.
Angela McAuslan-Kelly is a normal sixth-former at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen. Her dad is a bus driver and her mum works in a coffee shop. ‘They are not very wealthy,’ explains Holly Cram, a former captain of the Scottish national women’s hockey team. Angela, though, is off to Princeton in September. ‘I completely get
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In this week’s episode: What’s the mood on the ground in Ukraine and Russia? For this week’s cover piece, Owen Matthews asks whether the invasion of Ukraine will mean the end of Putin’s regime. And in this week’s Spectator diary, Freddy Gray reports on pride and paranoia on the streets of Lviv. They join the
Huntsman, at No. 11 Savile Row, was once an understated beacon of good taste. But if you visit today, you are likely to be met by a gaggle of tourists posing for selfies in front of the window across which is splashed in very large letters: ‘The King’s Man, only in cinemas now.’ The tailor,
When you pick up a packet of meat from the supermarket and it says ‘Willow Farms’, what is the image you conjure up in your mind? Do you imagine the chickens reared on this farm happily pecking around a thatched cottage, searching for grubs in a field that rolls gently down to a river flanked
Let’s get one thing clear: bookshops are a good thing. Waterstones — even putting aside the abandonment of its apostrophe — is a good thing. James Daunt, the man who has turned Waterstone’s from a basket case into a profitable enterprise, is a good thing. But what the company has done in Southwold, Rye and
‘Brexit to chop food bills’, said the headline in the Sun on Sunday this weekend. The paper ran some research from the campaign group Leave Means Leave, which claimed food prices could fall by hundreds of pounds a year if tariffs are axed after Brexit. Though nobody knows what deal we will strike with trading partners once we leave
Food waste is on the increase. British households are throwing the equivalent of 500 meals into the bin every year. Understandably, there has been a lot of hand-wringing. Baroness Parminter, the Liberal Democrat’s environment spokeswoman (the party has so few MPs its environment spokeswoman sits in the Lords), declared: ‘We need legislation to make real
Britain was once a nation of shopkeepers. But one wonders for how much longer. As if the combination of Amazon, councils’ parking charges and above-inflation business rate rises wasn’t bad enough, we now have a petition. Of course, we do. The petitions wants all large shops to be shut on Boxing Day, as they are on Christmas Day. It argues that
When the history of capitalism is written, November 8 2016 will deserve a footnote. No, not the date the 45th president of the United States was elected, but the day Mondelez, the giant US confectionery company, changed the shape of the Toblerone bar. This may sound hyperbolic. But the altering of Toblerone’s distinctive silhouette is
Which? was once upon a time known as the Consumers Association, and it used to do a sterling job of explaining which washing machine to buy and how to avoid being ripped off at a bureau de change. But the charity now seems to have become less interested in fighting consumers’ corner and more interested in being
