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The Sunday Times has names Terry Leahy, the outgoing Tesco boss, as business person of the year. This will not be the last honour Sir Terry will pick up. In its interview it highlights: He understands why his company is successful. When it stopped trying to overtake Sainsbury and focused on the shopper, it then overtook Sainsbury to become the UK's number one retailer. He grew up loving shopping: "I went shopping with my mother a lot as a child. She had four boys and I was the most amenable to shopping. I enjoyed it." He understood the opportunity. "There were no supermarkets. These post-war council estates were surrounded by a few local shops. They were convenient but they were very expensive. A lot of our disposable income went on food and it was a constant worry." He also talks about how he used the views of City analysts to create an us against them mentality within Tesco that helped drive its performance. He lists its successes and points out how Tes...

The chief executive of McDonald's, Jim Skinner, clearly knows why his customers love his company's restaurants and last week attacked US regulators keen to ban children's meals as undermining parents. This follows a decision in San Francisco to ban the sale of toys with food that did not meet limits on calories, sugar and fat. He told the FT: "We'll continue to sell Happy Meals. We've seen many years of someone trying to dictate behaviour through legislation. Our Happy Meals have been supported by parents since the 1970s. The nutrition of Happy Meals meets FDA guidelines." For UK local retailers, and their suppliers, this is significant in that most traders fear that the willingness of politicians to legislate to improve the health of the population is out of proportion with the success of many measures. MPs that I have spoken to clearly disagree. They say that the smoking ban is a fantastic success. While they are nervous at the impact on local shops ...

At the weekend, the Brent Cross shopping centre in north London, hard by the M1 and the north circular road, closed due to snow, losing half a day's trading. Anecdotal reports say it bounced back the next day, with so many people shopping that the centre manager thought it was the first day of the sales. Over the previous week a number of deals were done in larger retail properties and the FT took the opportunity to point out the leading retailers were in the market for new space, showing their confidence in the size of the UK shoppers' purse moving forward. The newspaper quoted DTZ, a property agency, that said only 100 of the 840 shopping centres in the UK would be regarded as prime. Big anchor tenants such as John Lewis are not interested in older, poorer-quality centres or in secondary towns. Obviously, regional shopping centres aim to attract customers from a wide area, perhaps an hour's drive or more from the centre. For a shopper to make the trip, the centre need...

It is a snatched photograph so you may not be able to make out the woman in the dark hooded jacket counting out the money from her purse as she holds on to her baby's pushchair. The man behind just darted past to enter the shop. You may not be able to make out the step that made it difficult for the woman to enter the shop to buy a copy of the Guardian. The child behind was also darting into the shop. It is minus 2 degrees, which is cold for London. Does the shopkeeper even know that he is going to gain a sale? How many barriers are there for this woman to contend with to buy her paper? Is she likely to make an impulse purchase as well? Should the retailer care? Yes. Firstly, because he is less than a two minute walk from a new Tesco Express. He needs to fight for every sales he can get. Secondly, because he needs to understand his shop from the shoppers point of view. Does all this clutter outside work? He may get the newspaper sale, but he has shoppers who never visit ...

In Time magazine's review of the first decade of the current century it followed up on the software pirates who threatened to undermine the publishing industry by creating file sharing software. One bullet point was particularly interesting - the way to compete with free on the internet was to make something easy. This is partly why the pirates did not win. Free is not enough. Today, Google has launched its book store on line. On the front page is a great list of benefits of its web reader: Unlimited storage of ebooks 2-page reading mode Search within book Adjust text size, typeface, line space, justification Free samples of books Information about book Worry-free archive The last bullet is particularly compelling as so many people worry about shopping on the internet or storing stuff on the internet. In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin writes about Marissa Mayer, who works for Google. Her job is to make interfaces work. She makes sure that the start page has the smallest...

I was talking to one retailer last month who said he had managed to raise bank finance for a second shop by remortgaging a residential property that he owned. While this is good news for him, it underlines how difficult it is to persuade banks to lend against good business plans. Daniel Thomas, writing in the FT, explains that one reason for this is that at present there is about £5billion available for real estate lending in the UK in a market that needs to fund around £25billion of activity each year. "It means banks are increasingly picking over clients, " he writes. However, in his definition of clients, local shopkeepers do not even figure. Broadly speaking, there is almost no money available from banks for ordinary property deals. This is an issue that retailers should take up with their MPs as the lack of finance for independents means that the supermarkets can continue their expansion plans into the convenience sector almost without constraint.