You Can Stick It!

The run-up to a World Cup is a time when children (and nostalgic adults) start collecting football stickers and cards. However, the launch of the 2018 World Cup sticker album has been met with fury by some on social media after it was revealed that the price of a 5-pack of stickers had increased by 60% to 80p. And fans have reacted furiously to the news that there has been a 30p increase in a pack of five from the price of stickers 4 years ago. According to reports, there are around 700 players in the sticker album, plus managers, stadiums and other extras with reports suggesting it would cost around £600 to complete the entire album. Indeed, this year, a sticker costs 16p each with packs remaining the same size. The company’s 2014 World Cup album was its biggest-selling ever worldwide, with British collectors buying in huge numbers. Total sales from the album were an estimated £3.5m.

ASOS Typo

Success isn’t about never making mistakes – it’s about how you recover from them. Take note from ASOS, who, yes, messed up, but recovered in a brilliant way. ASOS managed to print 17,000 packaging bags with a rather prominent typo on them. Their slogan, ‘discover fashion online’, had the word ‘onilne’ instead of ‘online’. Not exactly what you want when you’re positioning yourself as a massive digital fashion brand that knows all about tech-y stuff. Being unable to handle a keyboard does make people doubt your abilities. Now, ASOS could have pretended this hadn’t happened. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway, right? And any snarky tweets about the brand’s spelling could have been ignored. ASOS could have issued an apology and moved on. But instead they decided to use their mistake to their advantage. ‘Ok, so we *may* have printed 17,000 bags with a typo,’ ASOS tweeted. ‘We’re calling it a limited edition.’

ASOS Typo

Fortnite

Fortnite Battle Royale has officially reached craze status. As a free-to-play game, however, downloads and players don't translate directly into sales -- players have to spend money on in-game cosmetic items for developer Epic Games to make a profit. A new report from SuperData estimates that people are indeed doing that in droves, and also that Fortnite has now surpassed chief rival PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Superdata estimates that Fortnite Battle Royale beat PUBG in terms of total revenue in February with $126 million compared to PUBG's $103 million, though it's unclear how Superdata arrived at those numbers. But despite the similar gameplay, there are some important differences on who can play these games and how they pay for them. Fortnite is free-to-play across PS4, Xbox One and PC, and is currently in a pilot program on iOS with Android to follow. PUBG is a $29.99 purchase on PC and Xbox One.

Fortnite

Flippy

Flippy the burger-flipping robot that started work this week in a California restaurant has been forced to take a break because it was too slow. The robot was installed at a Cali Burger outlet in Pasadena and replaced human cooks. But after just one day at work the robot has been taken offline so it can be upgraded to work faster. Its human helpers are also getting extra training to help the robot keep up with demand. In a statement Miso Robotics, which made Flippy, said it was testing the code that controls the robot to ensure that it can cook quickly enough to fulfil orders at peak times. Prior to starting work, Flippy was said to be capable of cooking up to 2,000 burgers a day. Cali said that it started to use the robot to get around the problems it has recruiting staff. The high turnover rate among staff in fast-food restaurants meant it often spent time and money training people to prepare food only to have them leave after a few months. Eventually, said the chain, burger-flipping robots will be installed in up to 50 of its restaurants.

Flippy

Change Please

For the last two years, London-based social enterprise Change Please has demonstrated a radically different way of doing things, and now it’s beginning to scale up rapidly to take on the industry’s really big names. For a start, all of its cups are 100 per cent recyclable. Its beans also come from farms that support local communities. One supplier in Peru helps victims of domestic abuse, while another in Tanzania supports people injured by landmines.  When the beans get to the UK, people who have been sleeping on the streets roast them and are also trained as baristas to work at the company’s 17 locations. Change Please pays the London Living Wage, currently £10.20 per hour, and provides help with opening bank accounts, housing, therapy and assistance with onward employment. All profits are put back into helping to reduce homelessness.

Change Please

Walkers 70th Birthday

Walkers is set to celebrate its 70th anniversary with a range of flavours inspired by every decade it has been making crisps. The crisp company are recreating the classic flavours from the UK’s favourite dishes of decades gone by. The flavours from the last six decades are: coronation chicken (1950s), roast lamb and mint (1960s), cheese fondue (1970s), chicken tikka masala (1980s), BBQ ribs (1990s) and sweet chilli (2000s).Walkers was founded in Leicester in 1948 by Englishman Henry Walker. The company started making crisps after World War II to keep customers satisfied while meat rationing took meat off the table. Rachel Holms from Walkers said: “To have been a household name in homes up and down the country for the last 70 years is a remarkable achievement.”

Walkers Birthday Range

World's Most Expensive Chocolate

The world’s most expensive chocolate went on display at a chocolate fair in Obidos in Portugal on Friday. Priced at 7,728 euros ($9,489) and covered in edible gold, the chocolate is part of a limited edition of 1,000 bonbons. It has a filling of saffron threads, white truffle, vanilla from Madagascar and gold flakes. It was guarded by two uniformed men. Its creator, Portuguese chocolatier Daniel Gomes, said the diamond-shaped chocolate was certified as the world’s most expensive by the Guinness Book of Records, which in 2017 listed $250 La Madeline au Truffe made by Danish artisan chocolate-maker Fritz Knipschildt’s as the record holder. Its crown-shaped box is decorated with 5,500 Swarovksi crystals and also carries personalized pincers.

Expensive Chocolate

Lego Not Clicking With Customers

Lego's latest set of annual numbers showed its first drop-off in profits and revenues for 13 years this week. It said it had produced too many bricks, and had to sell off excess stock at a discount. Every year it forecasts how much Lego it thinks it will need to manage its production, and last year its forecast wasn't on the money. A Lego spokeswoman said it had "too much" stock in warehouses and shops. "There wasn't enough room to get 2017 toys into the stores, and the toy trade is driven by newness," she added. Lego Group chief executive Niels Christiansen said there was "no quick fix" and it would take the firm "some time" to grow long-term. Also  the Danish toymaker said they would be making bricks with plastic sourced from sugarcane. The pieces will be included in Lego's box sets from this year onwards. The move is part of the Danish company's pledge to use sustainable materials in its products and packaging by 2030. The toys will be made with a polyethylene produced with ethanol made from sugarcane.

Lego Bricking It

New Look Shutting 60 Stores

New Look has become the latest high street retailer to fall victim to tough trading conditions, announcing on Wednesday that it plans to shut 60 stores which could cost almost 1,000 jobs. Like other high street retailers, New Look has been battling tough trading conditions, made worse by the surging popularity of online retailers. Last month the company posted a pre-tax loss of £123m for the three-month period to the end of December 2017. Earlier this month both Toys R Us and Maplin collapsed into administration, putting close to 5,000 jobs at risk. Several restaurant chains have also been forced to restructure and cut jobs, partially as a result of inflation squeezing consumer spending power and confidence, but also a rise in business rates and minimum wages.

New Look

Alcoholic Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is planning to produce an alcoholic drink for the first time in the company's 125-year history - with an alcopop-style product in Japan. It is keen to cash in on the country's growing taste for Chu-Hi - canned sparkling flavoured drinks given a kick with a local spirit called shochu. The product is typically between 3% and 8% alcohol by volume. A senior Coke executive in Japan said the move was a "modest experiment for a specific slice of our market". "We haven't experimented in the low alcohol category before, but it's an example of how we continue to explore opportunities outside our core areas," said Jorge Garduno, Coca-Cola's Japan president. It was unlikely the drink would be sold outside of Japan, he suggested. Chu-Hi - an abbreviation for shochu highball - has been marketed as an alternative to beer, proving especially popular with female drinkers.

Coca-Cola

Restaurant Trade Getting Eaten Up

The restaurant sector is hardly sizzling at the moment. Last month burger chain Byron agreed a rescue plan with lenders and landlords which could lead to the closure of up to 20 restaurants. Also in January, Jamie Oliver's restaurant group said 12 of its 37 outlets would shut their doors - the second wave of closures in the space of a year. And since the beginning of 2015, shares in the Restaurant Group, which owns Frankie and Bennys and Garfunkels, have lost two thirds of their value. Businesses in the sector are having to pay the new living wage, the apprenticeship levy, and deal with "upwards-only rent reviews", he says. Customers have so much choice that there is little loyalty, and social media lets people be more aware of a wider range of food. Fast-casual restaurant firms have to work hard to persuade people to spend - especially as people are already spending more on experiences. So to win customers restaurant chains have had to discount, making life even tougher.

Restaurant Trade

Great British Coin Hunt

Bank of England paper £10 notes are now no longer being accepted in shops. The Charles Darwin notes have been gradually replaced by the polymer Jane Austen note since September. On the same day the Royal Mint has unveiled a new collection of “quintessentially British” 10p coins. James Bond, fish and chips, an English breakfast and the Loch Ness Monster all feature on the 26 new designs in circulation.  The collection has been designed as an A to Z homage to all things British – from the Angel of the North to a zebra crossing. A total of 2.6 million coins have been struck, each of which will have one of 26 designs aimed at celebrating British life. You can join in the hunt by downloading the 'great british coin' app but some have already been seen on eBay as the hunt heats up to collect them all. 

 10p Coins

Handbag or House

How much is a handbag worth? Say £100? Maybe £500? Perhaps even £1,000?How about handing over £279,000 for one bag - and a second-hand one at that? For that price, you could buy a house in the UK and still have plenty left over. Yet astonishingly last year someone did pay that amount of money for a rare 2014 Himalaya Birkin - a matte white handbag by Hermes. It was fashioned from Nilo crocodile hide and adorned with 18-carat white gold and diamond-encrusted details. While £279,000 is a record breaking price tag for this "holy grail" of handbags, it is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the increasingly lucrative market for buying and selling pre-owned luxury "arm furniture". Auction house Christie's says the global pre-owned luxury handbag market has jumped from being worth £5.1m in 2011 to £26m in 2016. Heritage Auctions believes that the worldwide secondary auction market for the "ultra high-end bags" is between $75m and $100m "and growing". In investment terms, these assets can offer a huge return on your cash. Investment bank Jefferies reckons that some bags can generate returns of about 30% a year. Handbags made by Hermes, the French luxury goods house, are the most sought-after.

Handbags

Cheese-ter Egg

While most people love Easter and all the chocolatey goodness it has to offer, others who aren’t chocolate lovers don’t really see the big deal. However, if you’re more of a savoury fan – well, to be more specific a cheese lover – then you’ll be happy to know that you can get in on the Easter egg fun: Asda has just launched an Easter egg completely made out of cheese. After recent stats revealed that 60% of Brits would choose cheese over chocolate, Asda was inspired to create the Cheester Egg – aka a large egg made entirely out of cheese. The half egg-shaped cheese, half condiment will offer the entire cheeseboard egg-sperience (sorry), as it comes with crumbly mini oatcake crackers and a sachet of sweet caramelised onion chutney.

Cheese Easter Egg