RETAIL RANDOMS

BEFORE YOU GO: PROFITABLE STREET NAMES / TROUBLE BREWING

WHAT’S A NAME? MORE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK...

Does your store happen to sit on Love St, Rose Ave or Diamond Way? If so, you could be benefitting in ways that you probably have never thought about.

In one of those random – and highly iffy – press releases you only get around Valentine’s Day each year, OnlineMortgageAdvisor.co.uk claims to have proven that having a romantic street name can increase your property value by over a million quid. Simples.

In a no doubt highly scientific survey, they found that there are 705 streets with romantic names in the UK. How do you define a romantic name, we hear you ask? Well, it’s mostly obvious: words like Rose, Love, Heart and Valentine, for instance, though they also include the word Ring, which is open to misinterpretation.

The jackpot you’re looking for in your street name is the word ‘Sweet’ which can make your property worth...wait for it.... £1.2m more. The explanation for exactly how this happens is suitably vague and entirely unscientific.

So if you own a nice wee CTN on Sweet Avenue, just off Rose Lane and near a Ring Road, do yourself a favour and sell up and go live on a tropical island until Covid blows over.

A SOBERING THOUGHT

While the local retailing sector is one of the very few sectors to have mercifully avoided the worst of the commercial downsides of coronavirus, spare a thought for our friends in hospitality. According to the latest information from the British Beer & Pubs Association, over 87 million pints of beer have been wasted since the pandemic started.

Let that sink in a second.

Literally 87 million pints of beer poured down the drain, costing the beer and pub sector an estimated £331m. Yes, most retailers will have to throw out an unsold pastie or sausage roll here and there, but 87 million pints? Ouch.

The trade association says this is revenue that would usually pay for hundreds of thousands of jobs in pubs and breweries across the UK, as well as the maintenance and upkeep of pubs in communities across the UK.

Furthermore, £1 in every £3 spent in a pub goes to the taxman because of what the BBPA calls “excessively high” beer duty. And to be fair to them, duty levels 11 times higher than in Germany or Spain seem fairly excessive.