Budget tax changes will push up price of fresh food, says Sainsbury’s boss
Changes to employers’ national insurance contributions announced in the government’s October budget will drive inflation, particularly on fresh food, according to the boss of Sainsbury’s as he announced a 5% pay rise for workers.“It is coming at us fast in a way that was unexpected and will bring inflation as a result,” Simon Roberts, the chief executive of Sainsbury’s, said of the unexpected changes to NICs, which will add £140m to the Sainsbury’s wage bill from April.While the retailer is sticking to plans to open more than 20 more supermarkets as well as new convenience stores, Roberts said Sainsbury’s would have to be “very thoughtful about where we hire” as a result of the higher costs.Roberts said that it would have been better if UK businesses had been given more warning about the tax changes, which could have been phased in more gradually.The company is also splitting its pay rise for 118,000 hourly paid employees into two parts – increasing to a minimum of £12.
45 an hour from March and then £12,60 in August in order to “navigate a challenging cost environment”,The decision will result in the minimum annual pay for a full-time worker outside London increasing from £22,882 to £24,026 by August,Roberts said Sainsbury’s would do “everything we can” to head off price rises for its customers as part of its existing plans to cut £1bn of costs from the business with more efficient operations, including more automated tills and “SmartShop” devices that enable shoppers to scan items direct from the shelves,Shoppers sought out discounts on food and other goods in the run-up to Christmas and spent less on big-ticket items such as furniture and large electronics, and Roberts said he expected those trends to continue this year.
He joined the Tesco chief executive, Ken Murphy, in calling on the government to avoid loading big retailers with additional costs from packaging regulations and reform of the business rates system.Roberts said that potential changes that could lead to higher bills for large stores would hit “parts of the UK where supermarkets play a fundamental role in the heart of the community”.The Sainsbury’s boss made the comments as a last-minute dash by customers to secure Christmas shopping lifted sales at Sainsbury’s over the festive period.Roberts said: “This Christmas customers shopped later than ever.The Sunday and Monday [before Christmas Eve] were really huge days.
” That helped boost grocery sales by 3.8% in the six weeks to 4 January, while sales at its Argos chain rose 1.1% in that period.The performance on groceries was similar to its rival Tesco, which on Thursday reported a 4% rise in underlying sales over the key festive period – with the UK’s two largest grocers thought to have benefited from difficulties at the smaller rivals Asda and Morrisons.Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionHowever, Sainsbury’s said sales at Argos, which sells non-food items, from ironing boards to gaming consoles and sofas, were down 1.
4% over the final three months of the year,The company said a rise in customer numbers and sales growth over the Black Friday and Christmas weeks was more than offset by “subdued customer spending outside these key periods and a highly promotional environment”,Sales of toys and large electronics, such as TVs, were hit particularly hard as shoppers reined in spending on non-essentials,Sainsbury’s said it had gained market share over Christmas and “more and more customers are choosing us for their big weekly shop”, with sales of fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and poultry all doing particularly well,Customers were prepared to celebrate, spending 16% more on the retailer’s premium Taste the Difference range, while clothing sales rose 2.
2% – in a declining market.The retailer said it would meet annual profit expectations of just over £1bn for its retail business and upped expectations for its financial services division, leading to the analyst Clive Black at Sainsbury’s broker Shore Capital to up forecasts by £10m.However, analysts at Jefferies said they did not expect a wider upgrade as Sainsbury’s had displayed “a familiar pattern: strong grocery performance offset by a weaker-than-expected Argos”.
Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’
Artificial intelligence companies have run out of data for training their models and have “exhausted” the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk has said.The world’s richest person suggested technology firms would have to turn to “synthetic” data – or material created by AI models – to build and fine-tune new systems, a process already taking place with the fast-developing technology.“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year,” said Musk, who launched his own AI business, xAI, in 2023.AI models such as the GPT-4o model powering the ChatGPT chatbot are “trained” on a vast array of data taken from the internet, where they in effect learn to spot patterns in that information – allowing them to predict, for instance, the next word in a sentence
Judge halts attempt to retrieve £600m bitcoin wallet from Welsh dump
A computer expert’s decade-long battle to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he says has been lost in a council dump has been halted by a judge.James Howells, 39, launched a legal case to force Newport city council to allow him to search the site to retrieve a lost hard drive containing the bitcoins.The council sought to strike out the claim, and a judge has ruled in its favour. Sitting as a high court judge, Judge Keyser KC said on Thursday that Howells’s claim had “no realistic prospect of succeeding” if he allowed the case to continue to trial.He said: “I consider that the particulars of the claim do not show any reasonable grounds for bringing this case
Musk ‘lying like hell’ over AfD interview, says ex-EU tech leader
A former EU leader on tech has accused Elon Musk of “lying like hell” by claiming the bloc was trying to stop an interview the owner of X had set up with the co-leader of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland.Thierry Breton, who quit as a European commissioner in September, having overseen the passage of ambitious legislation designed to regulate big tech, said Musk had been disingenuous in claiming the EU was trying to censor his discussion with Alice Weidel, which took place on Thursday evening.The US billionaire claimed on Wednesday on his social media platform: “First, the EU tried to stop me from having an online conversation with president @realDonaldTrump. Now they want to prevent people from hearing a conversation with Alice Weidel, who might be the next chancellor of Germany. These guys really hate democracy
Meta has ‘heard the message’ from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen
Mark Zuckerberg has “heard the message” from Donald Trump on restricting online content and his Meta platforms will intervene “less and less” on users during the president-elect’s administration, according to the whistleblower Frances Haugen.Haugen, who revealed the Facebook and Instagram owner’s struggles with user safety in 2021, said the US president-elect thought “the right way to run social media is with no restrictions”.Zuckerberg’s announcement on Tuesday that Meta was dropping third-party factcheckers in the US and making other moderation changes reflected this view, she added.“The announcement from Mark is him basically saying: ‘Hey I heard the message, we will not intervene in the United States,’” Haugen told the Guardian.Announcing the changes on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he would “work with President Trump” on pushing back against governments seeking to “censor more”, pointing to Latin America, China and Europe, where the UK and EU have introduced online safety legislation
Meta’s factchecking partners brace for layoffs
Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end factchecking on Facebook and Instagram in the US already has factchecking journalists bracing for cuts at their organizations, given the size of Meta’s funding.The social media giant has provided more than $100m for outside organizations certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to conduct factchecks on its social networks since 2016, which would result in posts receiving accuracy ratings and having their reach reduced if false. Major outlets like USA Today and Reuters have partnered with the social media company for these factchecks, as have factcheck specific sites like FactCheck.org. In all, 10 outlets are listed by Meta as current partners in the US
AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi
How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens. We’re talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace over here; I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. That’s exactly what a bot would say, isn’t it? I guess you’re just going to have to trust me on this.I’m taking great pains to point this out, by the way, because content created by real life human beings is becoming something of a novelty these days
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