British Retail Consortium

Yeah.

So when we reported on this in the spring, and we were speaking to the BRC, so this is the British Retail Consortium representing the, the major supermarkets, and the Food and Drink Federation representing the manufacturers, they were projecting close to double-digit food price inflation by the end of the year.

And what's important for us to realize is whatever's happening in the world right now, it's not an immediate effect on food price inflation.

There's a time lag that means between the event happening, for example, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the peak of food price inflation could be 9 to 12 months.

There's also the September Consumer Confidence poll to be treated with the appropriate degree of skepticism.

The UK September British Retail Consortium Shop Price Index showed slower inflation in all of the key categories.

In theory, the number was below consensus.

In reality, only four economists bother to forecast this number, so the consensus is not really meaningful.

We've got three people on our business panel.

Helen Dickinson is Chief Executive of the British Retail Consortium.

Michelle Ovens, founder of the campaign group Small Business Britain, and Steve Rigby, businessman who's co-chief executive of the Rigby Group, which owns IT services company SCC, along with airports and hotels across the UK.

Let's first of all look at what you were all hoping from the speech and whether you actually got what you were hoping for.

It's not just a one-month blip, and the online spending in the three months to July was 3% higher than in the previous three months and 11% higher than in the same period in 2025.

The British Retail Consortium, or BRC, they showed that online non-food sales were up 1.3% year on year in July, when non-food overall declined.

So part of this was undoubtedly weather.

We saw people who were maybe too hot to go out staying at home and buying online instead.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what people are actually buying.

Customers seem to be choosing smaller treats over big purchases, and this, again, is fairly aligned with what we've seen over the last couple of years.

The British Retail Consortium July numbers give us a particularly interesting clue, because total retail sales value were up 1.3% year on year.

Food was up 3.8%, but non-food was down 0.7. And within non-food, there were winners and losers.

And that's how you would maybe think of yourself and describe yourself.

And you might be a member of the British Retail Consortium, the Engineering Employers Federation, that kind of thing.

um and although we do have family business representatives what is in this country um one of the one of the things that's noticeable is that family businesses don't seem to be great joiners of things you know they they they keep their heads down uh they they do the day job of running their business employing people looking after their customers um and i suppose that that To some extent, the sector suffers a little bit from a lack of high-profile ambassadors.

I mean, we can come on to that in a minute, but there aren't a lot of people out there being an advocate for this model.

We've had to be much more flexible about part-time work in students as well.

I think we've just partnered with the British Retail Consortium with the Open and Shift initiative that you would have seen out in the press today.

And actually, we have a charitable arm in Pret called the Pret Foundation.

And over those years, we've brought on board over 1,000 ex-offenders or homeless people into employment.

But that is how they're feeling in, in the moment that they were asked about this.

British Retail Consortium also had some, uh, slightly more positive news out, and then private new car registrations up by a fifth in August too.

Although the people who put that out, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, are saying beware, though.

September's the important month in all of this when the new plates come out for cars.

This is an opportunity to see the wide range of opinions held within the bank, although the caliber of the questions asked by members of parliament is not necessarily always of the highest order and do not necessarily ask what investors actually care about.

The UK's British Retail Consortium's August retail sales data showed positive food sales and negative non-food sales, though these measures do not adjust for inflation effects.

The complication of the UK's series of heat waves has also disrupted consumption patterns, so it's not clear what sort of signal can actually be taken from this.

In the United States, we have the release of the New York Fed's one-year inflation expectations index ahead.