First of all - I am still here! The eagle-eyed might have noticed that I've been looking for a job[1] and finishing my exams in the last couple of months, so I took a break from blogging while I threw my attention at both of those endeavours as well as the proliferation of great sport on TV this summer. The assessment is, thankfully, completely finished; the former has been hugely aided by the blog, which has put me in touch with a number of great people (ongoing, I should note!), and the latter has been exceeding even its own high expectations, probably aided by the prompt departure of the England team, who left no lingering hope to be brutally extinguished in the knock-out stages.

I'm left facing a portfolio which I feel slightly out-of touch with, then, but also thoughts and ideas which I have had but haven't blogged about. I'll spend the next few posts rectifying those outstanding matters, then, with a relatively open run around of things I feel like discussing.

Tesco (LON:TSCO)

Don't shoot me for starting with Tesco again. You'd be forgiven - or perhaps spot on - for thinking I have some sort of obsession with the retailing giant. I probably explained it best in my last post on the supermarkets:

I like the supermarkets. I like the supermarkets because they're the best example I can think of of capitalism in action. They're relentlessly profit driven machines in constant competition...

My strong suspicion is that the bearish rhetoric is just wildly overdone, both among the financial types and among the public. Aldi and Lidl have done a great job of persuading the public they're offering a whole new deal - I remember reading a BBC News article about Lidl where the comments were almost entirely singing the praises of the Germans and denouncing Tesco. Aldi and Lidl have 'incredibly efficient checkout people' and 'interesting ranges', they noted, two things I entirely agree with. They're also two things which could quite easily be rephrased as having your checkout person throw food at you like a industrial wood chipper and ranges which feel like you can never really know what you'll end up with.

Perhaps I'm just revealing my own biases, but I think news stories are self-fulfilling prophecies (there's a downward spiral of negativity and positivity in many human activities).…

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