Welcome to the 1 September Warehouse & Logistics News, the latest issue of the UK’s only fortnightly publication for the industry. We’ve got all our regular sections plus our Weighing feature, covering the different aspects of weighing in the warehouse environment. It’s been a gloomy summer in weather and economic terms, but there’s some good news if you look around. Proving even heavy rain clouds have silver linings, UK retail sales rose again in July, as the wet weather lifted demand for furniture and other home goods.
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That’s the upbeat news from the British Retail Consortium, which reports UK-wide like-for-like July sales up 1.8% versus 2008, an improvement on June’s 1.4% rise.
Driving this growth, July saw furniture and home wares’ sales’ biggest annual growth in three years, admittedly against last year’s very low base and lifted by extensive discounting. Even so, it’s good news all round for everyone in the supply chain.
The logistics operations driving our retail supply chains for food, drink and non-food products are pretty impressive, but they are in action every day carrying out the same operations, unlike the logistics involved in staging music gigs and festivals.
Even in recessions, people still want to go to music gigs, and music festivals, events and tours mean work for people in the logistics industry. And the scale of these tours is getting bigger. At the end of August, U2 completed their latest world tour’s European leg, carrying around a 64-foot high, four-legged steel structure, giving the fans an all-round view.
Nearly 200 trucks were used for production and for the structure and the towers, not forgetting nine truckloads of field protection. We look forward to hearing from the different logistics partners involved in making such a feat possible!
Finally, as the exam results come out, the kids who didn’t ‘make the grade’ are faced with tough choices about what to do next. But they shouldn’t give up, says Chancellor Alistair Darling, covering for Gordon Brown. At the end of last year the Government had ‘record numbers’ of young people in education and training. They will, this September, be able to guarantee 16- and 17-year-olds education or training. And from the beginning of 2010 the Government “will be able to guarantee” people who have been unemployed for a year a job, training or further education. We look forward to hearing what this will mean for the warehouse and logistics industry.
Have a good month.
Warehouse & Logistics News
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