Ex-boss fights John Lewis bid to turn Brum into Detroit
EX-JOHN Lewis boss Andy Street’s blood appeared to be boiling yesterday as he vowed to fight his former employer’s plans to shut its Grand Central store in Birmingham. The local boy made a big deal of the opening back in 2015, and took the momentum on to become the city’s metro mayor two years later. At the store’s opening he said the development could boost investment in England’s second city: “We could have been like Detroit — the fact is this is nothing like Detroit, this is an economic revival. There will be a Harvard business case about the revival and the change in the economy here.” Don’t wait by the phone for Harvard to call, Andy.
SO, a £1000 bribe to employers not to fire furloughed staff from our cool as a cucumber Chancellor. Fair enough. Isn’t there at least a danger employers will fire the unfurloughed staff instead?
A JOKE of the day: “It’s raining, and because of Covid, our local hairdresser is asking people to sit outside as they wait their turn. I said: ‘This isn’t barber queue weather’.”
IN lockdown, hiring people over a video has become the norm. So how does recruitment boss
Robert Walters conduct his calls? “I do mine against a blank wall,” he says. Something to hide, Bob? “It’s not because I have Trotsky or anything on my bookshelf,” he laughs. As founder and boss of a £300 million firm, Spy is inclined to believe him.
SPEAKING of video calls, Spy dialled up Ralph Findlay at Marston’s. The pubs boss looked remarkably clean-shaven for these locked-down times. Findlay explains he had a beard pre-Covid but got rid of it when facial hair got increasingly popular as barbers and boardrooms were off limits. What a contrarian.
DISAPPOINTMENT abounds for US oil traders, who thought they’d cracked a way to monitor fuel demand. In April Apple unveiled a tool to track human mobility trends, letting traders see how many drivers were out. The only snag was, on days when there were clearly more cars about, it didn’t work. So it’s back to satellite tracking oil tankers and thermal imaging cameras on storage tanks. Or they could hack the CCTV of every petrol station in America?