Economy
Economic conditions have a direct impact on consumer spending, supply chain costs, and trading performance across the UK pet industry. Pet Gazette tracks how inflation, interest rates, labour shortages, and broader macroeconomic pressures affect pet retailers, wholesalers, and brand distributors. Coverage includes commentary on pet sector resilience during downturns, price sensitivity among shoppers, and shifts in demand for premium vs value ranges. We also report on government economic policy, retail footfall data, and financial forecasts relevant to pet businesses navigating changing market conditions.
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Jan- 2020 -29 JanuaryBusiness Bites
British Airways gets flighty and Starbucks smells the coffee over coronavirus
The business response to the coronavirus situation, which appears to be developing into a serious crisis, continues apace today. British Airways today announced that it was suspending all flights between the UK and Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originally broke out. In a statement it said: โWe have…
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21 JanuaryBusiness Bites
Global CEOs and the IMF reckon the UK is about to have a good year
Itโs not often there is some incontrovertibly positive news about the economy, but today weโve had some. Audit and business advisory firmย PwCย has polled 1,600 chief executives, and found that they think the UK is the fourth most important target in the world for companies looking to make investments.ย PwCย said Britainโs reputation…
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17 JanuaryBusiness Bites
The trillion-dollar club has gained Google as a member
Remember at school when teachers used to explain how one million was an essentially incomprehensibly large number? I recall one of mine showing the number represented on a huge rolled out piece of paper as wide and long as a carpet, with precisely one million individual dots. I was about…
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15 JanuaryBusiness Bites
Boohoo more valuable than M&S โ a sea-change encapsulated
From a purely journalistic standpoint it is now a de facto clichรฉ to refer toย Marks and Spencerย as the โhigh street bellwetherโ, yet that is the status it has held for so many decades. The once mighty monolith was the first British retailer to reach a market capitalisation of ยฃ1bn and…
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14 JanuaryBusiness Bites
Javid mulls three-year passenger duty holiday for Flybe
Things are not looking rosy for low-cost airline, Flybe, but the chancellorย Sajid Javidย may have some proposals that save it from complete collapse. It is reported this morning that he is considering cutting air passenger duty on all domestic flights โ a big boon for all the other airlines but also…
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9 JanuaryBusiness Bites
Who would have thought skinny jeans could be anyoneโs undoing?
Itโs not often that the business pages give you a good belly laugh. But today we have the spectacle ofย Marks & Spencerย blaming its poor Christmas trading results partly on an oversupply of skinny jeans for men. Apparently customer surveys revealed that the high street bellwetherโs ranges were โtoo oldโ the…
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6 JanuaryBusiness Bites
As long as WW3 does not kick off, 2020 looks set to be a better year
All eyes on are on the rising tensions between theย United Statesย and Iran after president Trump ordered the assassination of Iranโs most powerful general, Qassem Suleimani. The oil price has risen, stocks have fallen this morning, and the threat of war almost always depresses global trade flows. But letโs bask in…
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2 JanuaryBusiness Bites
The internet need not be the scourge of every sector โ just ask the CEO of Mountain Warehouse
The last decade in business was arguably characterised by one word: disruption. While the internet behemoths had already begun building serious fortunes in the 2000s, most would agree it was after 2010 that things really started motoring. Heralded as the great democratiser of information and services, the effects of a…
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Dec- 2019 -17 DecemberBusiness Bites
โJingle botsโ are artificially ramming online shopping baskets to use up stock
I have my reservations about this story because we spend a lot of time in our office poring over the news for interesting stories and takes, and we havenโt seen it reported like this before. But it comes from a company called Radware, which is a publicly traded web app…
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16 DecemberBusiness Bites
The latest business data is bad news, but the reasons given spell a good omen
This morning there was some bad news for business, but which definitely comes with a silver lining. So, the bad news first: the โFlash UK Composite Output Indexโ from data firm, Markit, which tracks private sector business activity, found that it shrunk during the month of December. It has dropped…
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