If you’ve visited a supermarket in the past couple of weeks you’ll know that there isn’t a strawberry to be had in the land… not.

In fact, despite the crop disaster forecasts you can barely get through the doors of any of the mults for piled high ‘half price’ strawbs. And now apple growers discover that most of their harvest is going to be “wiped out” (Daily Mail) by the weather, so they should have a bumper season too.

Contrariness in the face of doom-mongers must be the only reason The People’s Supermarket has survived this long. The news that they are looking for franchisees fills Karoline (with a K) with spiteful delight.

Any hint of a co-operative is viewed by her as thinly disguised communism (this makes Peter Marks, spelt Marx, “Stalin’s drummer” she says) and so she creates a series of spoof franchisee recruitment ads, looking for hippies with no sense of business who don’t much like food or, indeed, retailing. Or money.

You can tell Karoline’s got some time on her hands. After some 30 years of Puff & Fluff, she’s now talking about rebranding the agency, inspired by Kraft’s concoction of Mondelez to try to expunge the Cadbury name from the earth. Bitter that she’s never had her name above the door and that her co-founders Suzy Puff and Felicity Fluff left about 29 years ago, she apparently decides that from the autumn we are going to be The K Agency.

Though this rumour is about as reliable as a Fruit Shoot Magicap it still fills us all with utter gloom only compounded by the rain and the news that Poundland sold half a million garden gnomes last year. Even laughing at the Whole Foods Market results can’t lighten our mood.