‘Over the top and fun:’ TGI Fridays boss insists time is right for a UK revival

“I am a little crazy maybe,” admits Ray Blanchette, a former TGI Fridays kitchen manager who has taken on the revival of the bar-restaurant chain’s UK business in the face of blasting industry headwinds.Blanchette’s family investment firm, Sugarloaf, rescued the Dallas-based parent business from administration in 2025. He then went on to pick up its UK arm in January after the local franchisee got into difficulties, retaining 33 UK restaurants but closing 16, with the loss of 456 jobs.British restaurants and cafes have been struggling with higher staffing, energy and food costs while diner numbers have dwindled as households avoid eating out as their spare cash has been squeezed by similar forces. Increases in tax – including employers’ national insurance contributions and business rates – have layered on the pain

Lord Haskins obituary

Chris Haskins, Lord Haskins, was perhaps the most prominent business supporter of Tony Blair’s New Labour project, brought in to Downing Street at the start of his administration to advise on cutting red tape, and later as “rural tsar” in the wake of the devastating foot and mouth outbreak of 2001. What Blair would praise as Haskins’s invaluable “no nonsense approach” was honed during 40 years building up Northern Foods into Britain’s leading food manufacturer. There he was credited with developing the chilled food techniques that have made possible today’s enormous growth in ready meals and convenience foods.Haskins, who has died aged 88, combined the acumen of an entrepreneur and enlightened business manager with a socialist conscience. Alongside it went a compulsion to tell the truth as he saw it, which could sometimes get him into difficulties

Wake-up call: how Telstra’s ‘unreasonable’ price rises may cause customers to hang up

Telstra has long traded on its claim to have better – and far more expansive – mobile coverage than its rivals to justify a steep pricing premium that has accelerated in recent years.But the telco’s latest changes, which include steep price hikes and the closure of its cheaper “starter” plan to new users, combined with a dramatic rejection of its coverage claims by the industry regulator, risk putting off many of its traditional customers, according to consumer advocates.Telstra recently announced sweeping price changes including raising monthly charges on its mobile plans, a big money printer for Australia’s biggest telco.Telstra’s standard monthly mobile plan will increase from $70 to $74 for 50GB of data, representing an aggressive second price hike in less than a year.Its announcement cleared the path for rivals, including Optus, to make similar increases

US jobs market surpassed expectations in March but February losses were worse than first reported

The US labor market picked up in March as employers showed signs of resilience amid the US-Israel war in Iran.After an extraordinary contraction in February, employers added 178,000 jobs last month, ahead of economists’ expectations of about 70,000.The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February, the economy lost 133,000 jobs, according to revised figures

Food prices spiked in March as Middle East conflict drove up energy costs, UN says

Food prices rose sharply in March as war in the Middle East drove up energy prices and freight costs around the world, a UN report says.An index of food commodity prices by the UN’s food and agriculture organisation increased by 2.4% in March, its second consecutive monthly rise.The index – which tracks grain, sugar, meat, dairy and vegetable oil costs – had risen for the first time in five months in February.The biggest increases were in vegetable oil and sugar prices, which increased by 5% and 7% respectively in March

M&S calls for crackdown on ‘brazen, organised, aggressive’ retail crime

Marks & Spencer has called on the government and London’s mayor to crack down on retail crime, saying it has become “more brazen, more organised and more aggressive”, after reporting an increase in shoplifting and violence at its stores.The M&S chief executive, Stuart Machin, has written to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and its retail director, Thinus Keeve, has written to the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, saying greater resources are needed for police to tackle the crime effectively and target repeat offenders and crime hotspots.“In the past week alone we have had gangs forcing open locked cabinets and stripping shelves, two men brazenly emptying the shelves of steak and walking out, a large group of young people ransacking a store before assaulting a security guard, a colleague head- butted trying to defuse a situation and another hospitalised after having ammonia thrown in their face,” Keeve wrote on the M&S website.“It is worse in London, but it is happening across the country, and it is becoming routine, because it seems there are no consequences.”Police responded to reports of antisocial behaviour involving a group of “several hundred young people” this week in Clapham, south London, as part of “link-ups” using social media apps, including TikTok and Snapchat