Well, really! Drastic he may be, but for Dave Lewis to pull the country’s largest (for now) retailer out of the BRC is quite beyond the pale! I mean, once Sainsda gets the nod it can only be a matter of time before the Mike ‘n’ Rog show gets the same idea. And if the Consortium starts losing all its biggest members, who then is going to champion the industry with neither fear nor favour, courageously challenging the power brokers in the face of current threats to the very existence of the high street?
Actually if you put it that way, I can see Tesco’s point. Despite all that lovely outsourced data they put out once a month the BRC aren’t exactly the Retail Red Brigade, are they? In any case I got Clarke to put fresh AAA batteries into the Frexit Nissan Leaf and we positively scooted across London Bridge to the glamorous BRC treehouse to see what might be done.
Dear Helen, OBE (as the boss likes to be called) was really rather brave about it all. “Donna,” she said, “I’m not concerned at all. We’re about to publish a brochure which will explain how the government should really sit down one of these days and have a jolly good think about everything, and then come up with some ideas about how to put everything right. Then we can all try to find time in our diaries for some kind of informal gathering, perhaps somewhere nice, where we can explore our inner voices with an Ayurvedic leader or something. And then maybe do another brochure.”
I left her practicing on her violin. But I might have a sneaky word with Drazzer up in Welwyn anyway. I mean, speaking as a power broker myself, the BRC is exactly the kind of opposition we need.
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