People Are Just Realising Why So Many 24-Hour Supermarkets Disappeared, And Huh
It was 4am. I could not believe such a place was open. I walked around its shiny lino floors, marvelling at the stringy bikinis hanging from plastic hangers ― what a mad country!, I thought, where you can buy beachwear after a night out!
I don't know if that particular Tesco is still a 24-hour one (I guess its proximity to an airport might make it an exception), but it seems shops like it have declined since.
Shoppers have noticed, too: 'What happened to 24-hour supermarkets?' a Redditor asked the members of r/AskUK.
So, I thought I'd ask Nick Drew, CEO and consumer trends expert at Wethrift, and Joosep Seitam, e-commerce expert and co-founder of Icecartel, what was going on.
'The pandemic has reshaped the manner in which customers shop,' Drewe told us.
'All but a few no longer want to shop odd hours of the night... and the need to venture out and shop at early morning hours has decreased' as work trends have shifted.
Then, there's the internet to consider.
'With next-day or even same-day delivery options like Amazon Fresh or Tesco Deliveries, individuals no longer need to venture out at 2 am for milk,' Seitam said.
'Online platforms handle what used to be impulse buys, so 24-hour stores are no longer required.'
Mostly, both experts agree, it boils down to the bottom line.
'Having a store open 24/7 [though in the UK they have to limit their hours on Sunday] increases the need for labour, security, and energy expenses,' Drewe added.
'Without someone who is making nighttime or early-morning purchases, you cannot have sales to offset the cost.'
Indeed Tesco's ex-chief executive Dave Lewis told the Financial Time Future Forum in 2021 that their huge 24-hour stores 'sell very little during the night.'
And 'there's the challenge of restocking and cleaning when customers are still walking through the aisles' to think about too, Seitam shared.
Logical as the reduced hours might be, many of us miss a 3am mosey 'round a Big Tesco's homewares aisle.
The 24-hour feature 'used to be a late-night lifesaver,' Redditor u/tirerunona wrote. 'Now it's all 6am to midnight.'
'I miss 24-hour supermarkets too,' u/Big-Scallion3644 commented.
'The Tesco in my town used to be open 24 hours a day. I would go in there after a night shift and there would be a few staff stocking the shelves, get my shopping and be one of the only customers. I remember having to find someone to put my shopping through the till.'
Another site user was less sentimental: 'Here we have fuck all choice post-midnight,' u/Berookes said.
People Are Just Realising What The Non-Fluffy Stripes On Towels Are For, And I Had No Clue
People Are Just Realising What Those Clumps In Trees Really Are, And I Had No Clue
People Are Just Realising What The 'Pooh' In Winnie The Pooh Really Stands For, And I Had No Clue
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
London stocks retreat; investors await Jackson Hole symposium
By Ragini Mathur (Reuters) -Britain's main stock indexes declined on Thursday, dragged by losses in consumer-related shares, while global investors turned their attention to the U.S. Federal Reserve's annual symposium in Jackson Hole. As of 1016 GMT, the blue-chip FTSE 100 <.FTSE 100> was down 0.2%, and the midcap index FTSE 250 declined 0.5%. The three-day gathering of central bankers is set to begin later in the day, with investors particularly focused on Fed Chair Jerome Powell's Friday speech for signals about a potential interest rate cut in September. In the UK markets, consumer shares fell 0.3%, weighing on the stock indexes. Healthcare shares also declined 0.4%. Travel retailer WH Smith slumped 41.7% and was on track for its worst single-day decline on record, after it lowered annual profit outlook. Stocks including InterContinental Hotels Group, Schroders, Entain and Mondi fell as they traded ex-dividend. The pullback comes a day after the FTSE 100 hit a record close, benefiting from a market rotation away from technology stocks that had triggered a selloff on Wall Street earlier this week. "While the FTSE's lack of tech stocks meant it has underperformed in recent years, the recent rotation into value has put the wind in the FTSE's sails," said Fiona Cincotta, senior market analyst at City Index. Supporting the gains on Thursday, aerospace and defence companies rose 1.1%. Energy sector added 0.5% as oil prices gained, bolstered by signs of strong demand in the U.S. and uncertainty over efforts to end the war in Ukraine. [O/R] On the economic data front, PMI figures for August revealed the British businesses are having their strongest month in a year thanks to a rebound in the dominant services sector. Additionally, Britain's public borrowing in the financial year so far has matched forecasts underpinning the government's tax and spending plans.
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Stephanie Shirley, who created a tech world for women, dies at 91
Advertisement When she started her software business, Freelance Programmers, in 1962, British women could not work on the stock exchange floor or even drive a bus. Her initial financing was 6 pounds (roughly $16.85 then and about $220 today), but she needed her husband's signature to open the company's bank account and deposit her own money. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In a 2015 TED Talk, Ms. Shirley said, 'You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads -- they're flat on top from being patted patronizingly.' She started her company at her dining room table with a revolutionary intention: to offer other women a work-life balance. At the time, many educated women left the computer industry after marrying or having a child. Ms. Shirley provided them an opportunity to reenter the workforce while remaining at home, writing code part time with flexible hours. Advertisement When the company's name was changed to F International -- and then F1, and eventually Xansa -- the F stood not only for freelance but also for flexible and free. In job interviews, she asked applicants one simple question: 'Do you have access to a telephone?' There were early frustrations. When she sent business letters signed Stephanie Shirley, they often went unanswered. At the suggestion of her husband, Derek, a physicist she married in 1959, she began introducing herself in correspondence as Steve. Increasingly, prospective clients granted her interviews, although she could see when she walked through the door, she later told the British newspaper The Telegraph, 'that they were almost annoyed at themselves at having been conned.' Still, work orders picked up, and she began hiring more programmers. Of her first 300 employees, 297 were women. The company designed software for the black box flight recorder on the Concorde supersonic jet and for scheduling buses and freight trains. It also developed software protocols that were eventually adopted by NATO. Ms. Shirley disguised the flexible, work-from-home nature of her business by offering clients fixed prices for projects. Her goal was for her company to be treated the same as any other company. 'Who would have guessed,' she said in a 2020 speech to the British Computer Society, that programming for the Concorde's flight recorder 'was done by a team of 30 women working in their homes?' In 1975, an anti-discrimination law required Ms. Shirley to diversify her workforce, and she started hiring more men. In 1991, she began restructuring her company to share ownership with her employees. By her count, 70 eventually became millionaires. Advertisement As she grew more prominent, she became widely known in Britain as Steve or Dame Steve. (in 2017, she was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for her work in information technology and her philanthropy.) 'She was ridiculously ahead of her time,' Sue Black, a computer science professor at Durham University in England, said in an interview. 'The thing is, we haven't even got companies like that now, 65 years later, that really champion women in that way and are led by a woman.' Stephanie Shirley was born Vera Buchthal on Sept. 16, 1933, in Dortmund, Germany. Her father, Arnold Buchthal, who was Jewish, lost his job as a judge when Adolf Hitler came to power. The family moved to Austria, the home country of her mother, Margaret (Schick) Buchthal, who was Christian. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, her father hiked through mountainous terrain into neutral Switzerland. In July 1939, Vera and her 9-year-old sister, Renate, were put on a Kindertransport train to London from Vienna. They were among roughly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, rescued by the British from Nazi-occupied territories. The girls' parents eventually joined them in England, but the dislocation of war left the family relationships strained. Vera bonded with her foster parents, Guy and Ruby Smith, and became a British citizen when she turned 18, changing her legal name to Stephanie Brook. She showed an aptitude for mathematics, but the girls' high school she attended in the town of Oswestry did not offer the subject, so she took classes at a nearby boys' school, where her tuition was subsidized. She found the experience distasteful, she told the BBC, because of the whistles and catcalls from other students, but tolerable. Advertisement After high school, she worked at a post office research center in London, helping to develop electronic telephone exchanges and a computer called ERNIE that generated random numbers for a monthly lottery. For six years, she took night classes, earning an honors degree in mathematics from Sir John Cass College, a technical school, in 1959. Then she spent 18 months working at a small company, designing an early computer. But she found her suggestions were often ignored. So in 1962, she formed her own company. During a recession in the 1970s, she feared the company might go bankrupt. To convince herself that things would eventually improve, she took to wearing a fur coat given to her by her husband on their 10th wedding anniversary, she told The Times of London in 2024, putting it on every day 'just to show that I wasn't bankrupt yet!' As it turned out, she needn't have worried. In 1993, she retired and sold the company for an estimated 150 million pounds, or $225 million at the time. (The company later went through mergers and acquisitions and reached a valuation of roughly $3 billion.) After retiring, Ms. Shirley wrote a memoir, 'Let It Go' (2012), and devoted much of her time to philanthropy, noting in her 2015 TED Talk, 'I am only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers.' According to news accounts and her website, she gave away about $94.5 million, primarily to support causes related to information technology and autism. Advertisement Her son, Giles, was born in the early 1960s, around the time she started her company. He was autistic, had epilepsy, and experienced debilitating seizures. Ms. Shirley spoke openly and wrote about how she and her husband struggled to care for Giles, who died in 1998 at 35, and how she considered suicide and experienced a nervous breakdown. She established two autism charities -- a school for young people and a provider of supportive living for adults -- and in 2004, founded Autistica, Britain's first national autism research charity. Ms. Shirley left no immediate survivors. Her husband died in 2021; her sister died several years ago. She should be 'one of the best-known people in tech in the world, or at least in the Western world,' Black said. Instead, she added, 'when everyone thinks of technology, we usually think of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. It's always the guys.' This article originally appeared in
CNBC
2 hours ago
- CNBC
UK faces legal challenge for attempting to force through data center development
The U.K. government is facing a legal challenge from campaigners over its decision to override a local authority and wave through development of a new "hyperscale" data center. Last year, the local authority of Buckinghamshire, England, denied planning permission for proposals to build a new 90-megawatt data center on green belt land. The green belt is a term in British town planning that refers to an area of open land on which building is restricted. Data centers, large facilities that house floods of computing systems to enable remote delivery of various IT services, have seen huge demand in recent years amid a global rush to develop powerful new AI systems, such as OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chatbot. At the same time, they have been met with concerns from environmental campaigners and activists due to the vast amounts of power they require to keep them running on an ongoing basis. AI, in particular, has been criticized for consuming massive amounts of energy. Plans to develop the Buckinghamshire facility were twice rejected by the council previously. However, they were again resurrected under the Labour government, which is pushing to make the U.K. a global artificial intelligence hub by ramping up national computing capacity. Buckinghamshire council again rejected the planned data center in June 2024, saying it would be "inappropriate" to develop it on the green belt. Then, last month, British Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner granted planning permission for the project, overturning the local authority's decision. Campaign groups Foxglove and Global Action Plan announced on Thursday that they filed a formal planning statutory review asking a court to quash Rayner's approval of the data center, raising concerns over the vast amounts of power and water such facilities require. "Angela Rayner appears to either not know the difference between a power station that actually produces energy and a substation that just links you to the grid — or simply not care," Foxglove Co-executive Director Rosa Curling, said in a statement Thursday. "Either way, thanks to her decision, local people and businesses in Buckinghamshire will soon be competing with a power guzzling-behemoth to keep the lights on, which as we've seen in the States, usually means sky-high prices." The U.K. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — which Rayner also leads — declined to comment on the legal action when asked about it by CNBC. The government has previously stressed the importance of building data center infrastructure to compete on a global level in AI development. Thursday's move comes after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in January announced plans to block campaigners from making repeated legal challenges from so-called "Nimbys" to planning decisions for major infrastructure projects in England and Wales. Nimby is a derogatory term that refers to people who protest developments they view as unpleasant or hazardous to their local area.
