'Unconscious bias' training day at Starbucks
This is the day when Starbucks will close 8,000 stores in the US in order to give all its staff a four-hour anti-bias training seminar. This follows the scandal when the firm had to apologise over...
Have we reached peak prosecco?
This could be a great example of a brand becoming overexposed and overstocked. The growth in demand for prosecco has been phenomenal, as it became the inexpensive way of celebrating, an affordable...
Dairy Crest to invest £85m to help meet overseas demand
Crumbs – this is almost the perfect A Level Business news story – it has it all!
How All You Can Eat Restaurants Make Money
How do all-you-can eat restaurants make profits? The secret is in the layout + some other behavioural tricks customers are almost certainly not aware of!
Tesco Direct to close!
This has everything. Economies of scale; competitive advantage; Porter (both theories), marketing mix...and more. Not even Tesco had the buying power and scale to compete with Amazon in the sale of...
Revising all those business models!
There are business models aplenty to revise for A level. Handily, the Tutor2u business blog brings them all together in this cluster of useful tweets! Just follow the links!
A New MCQ Question Format from AQA - Watch out!
Watch out all students taking AQA A Level Business in June 2018. A new MCQ question format has appeared on the AS Paper 1 which looks like it might become an examiner favourite.
Global issues - measuring life expectancy
It can be very hard to measure the impact of government spending on healthcare, and the effect that it has on the living standards in a country. New data from the Institute of Health Metrics and...
With weddings very much in the news this week, here is a video 'How to dress a royal groom', showing the one-off or job production of a military uniform - featuring the tailors who produced the...
The Biz Quiz - 8 May 2018
The Biz Quiz returns for the summer term with 10 questions on recent business stories.
Inside iPhone City
A hat tip to Jon Inge who spotted this Business Insider report on a visit to the FoxConn complex 20 miles outside downtown Zhengzhou where more than half of the world's iPhones are assembled by a...
Vanilla ice cream makers feel the heat
Scheduling production of ice cream for the UK market must be one of the biggest operational management challenges - volatile weather means you can't plan far in advance, and when temperatures rise...
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is one of those business leaders who is frequently in the news - this morning, this is because he refused to answer financial questions from analysts on a routine 'earnings...
Sainsbury's suppliers and Porter's Five Forces
Not surprisingly, one of the responses to the news of the potential merger between Sainsbury's and Asda comes from their suppliers, who fear that it would make their life very difficult....
Confectionery market - Mondelez sales and profits up
Mondelez have just released results for the last quarter of the year which show that their sales rose 5.5% to $6.77 billion, which was higher than expected and has resulted in a rise in their share...
Sainsburys set for mega merger with Asda
Sainsburys is in advanced talks to acquire Asda which is owned by US retail giant Walmart. There is no doubt that a horizontal merger would attract the attention of the competition authorities...
The difficulties of digital marketing in 2018
Digital marketing is, by its very nature, a dynamic environment. Many businesses have come to base a huge proportion of their marketing communications on digital and social media, and it is...
Doing business in a customs union
As the UK's vote to leave the European Union took place after the 'new' A level specifications were written, issues such as doing business with a trading bloc or a customs union, and protectionism,...
Barclays boss faces penalty for 'conduct breach'
If you are looking at the impact of external, government regulation on businesses, the news that Barclays boss Jes Staley is facing a fine by UK regulators is a great example to use. This summary...
What happened to the winners of The Apprentice?
If, like me, you sometimes wonder whatever happens to those 'entrepreneurs' who win The Apprentice, look no further - Mail Online (which I confess I would never usually recommend to my students!!)...