Sainsbury’s talks to sell Argos to Chinese retailer JD.com collapse

Sainsbury’s hopes of offloading its retail business Argos to one of China’s biggest retailers have collapsed as talks ended on Sunday.The supermarket giant confirmed it was no longer in discussions with JD.com to sell Argos, the general merchandise arm it bought for more than £1bn less than a decade ago.On Saturday it had announced talks with JD.com for a sale that it said would speed up the transformation of Argos, whose business has gone increasingly online and within larger Sainsbury’s branches

Australia’s workers reaping greater share of national income than before pandemic

Workers are now receiving more of the “economic pie” than before the pandemic, with the increase in labour’s share of national income delivering an extra $28bn into the pockets of Australians over the past year alone.Pat Bustamante, a senior economist at Westpac, said his analysis suggested that the tighter post-Covid labour market was behind the greater share going to workers, from an average of 53.8% through the 2010s, to more than 55% now.While the movement in the division of national income appears small, even fractional changes translate to tens of billions of dollars in an economy of about $2.8tn

Here’s a tip: eliminate US tipping culture and pay people a living wage

I’m here in Las Vegas for a conference where I just paid $7 for a cup of coffee and then was shamed into tipping another $1 to the server for pouring the coffee and handing it to me. Welcome to America. I feel like I’m tipping for everything, everywhere. And now it’s only going to get worse. And for that I blame President Trump

‘Cider to the power of 10’: bumper apple harvest has UK cider makers drooling

“If you love cider, this is cider to the power of 10,” says Barny Butterfield, speaking about the flavours packed by some of this year’s “special” apples.Indeed Butterfield, the owner of Sandford Orchards, near Exeter, is buying extra tanks to increase cider production after the UK’s hottest summer on record resulted in an abundance of fruit.“I think God’s a cider maker,” he joked. To thrive, fruit trees need heat and light and this year “we had lots of both”.“I’ve had boughs breaking on trees under the weight of fruit,” Butterfield continued

Apprenticeships have collapsed in England – Labour needs to fine-tune the solution, fast | Heather Stewart

Ensuring England’s workforce has the right skills for a rapidly changing economy is key to Labour’s hopes of boosting social mobility and kickstarting economic growth.So it seems unfortunate that more than a week after Keir Starmer’s drastic reshuffle, ministers are still wrangling over exactly which bits of the skills agenda will now move to Pat McFadden’s beefed-up Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).Broadly speaking, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is expecting to hang on to responsibility for further education, while McFadden will probably take on apprenticeships and adult skills. Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, will work across both departments.Labour market experts say there is some logic to the shift: ensuring the right training is available in the right places is one crucial part of tackling the issue of economic inactivity in a rapidly changing employment market, which falls within the DWP’s bailiwick

Anarchy in the IPA: as punk brewer’s sales stall, are we past peak BrewDog?

There comes a time in every punk’s life when they are no longer the snarling face of the avant garde.In the UK beer community, opinion is divided about exactly when that sobering moment arrived for BrewDog, the self-styled “punk” brewery founded in Scotland in 2007 whose once-fizzing sales are now turning flat.Some point to the 2021 open letter by Punks with Purpose, a group of BrewDog staff who claimed to have endured a toxic “culture of fear”, engendered by the company’s bombastic and showmanlike founder James Watt.“For those who had given them the benefit of the doubt, that was the moment when people thought that they don’t deserve to be held up as a paragon of independent beer,” says Matt Curtis, the founding editor of the drinks magazine Pellicle.Others go back further, to when the investment group TSG Consumer Partners paid £213m for a 22