Worries over basic bank accounts

1 November 2012 Last updated at 20:01 ET

A watchdog has claimed that “dark clouds” are gathering for the future of simple bank accounts designed for vulnerable and low-income customers.

Consumer Focus said that basic bank accounts – assisting those with chequered credit histories – have been a success for the banking industry.

But it warned that a minimum standard was needed to ensure they survived.

The Treasury Committee has sought reassurance that ATM access for these customers will not be restricted.

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One in five UK adults have a basic bank account as their only or main account, according to Consumer Focus. They were first offered about a decade ago and have most commonly been used by people needing an account to allow their wages to be paid.

These accounts do not offer overdrafts. Some have a debit card, but with only limited facilities and no chequebook. They do not incur a monthly fee.

There are about 20 basic bank accounts available. They have tended to be used by people who have experienced difficulties with credit in the past and so are turned down when applying for a regular current account.

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These are simple accounts which allow customers to have their wages, benefits, and cheques paid in.

Customers can gain access to their money from some cash machines, or the Post Office.

Bills can be made by direct debit from the account, but these accounts offer no overdraft facility or access to credit – unlike most standard current accounts.

However, only Barclays allows undischarged bankrupts to sign up, after the Co-op withdrew from this market in September.

Meanwhile, RBS and NatWest joined Lloyds Banking Group in withdrawing access for basic bank account holders to the Link cash machine network.

Consumer Focus said that action was needed from all banks and building societies to ensure there were no further restrictions of basic bank accounts in the future.

It is calling for minimum standards for basic accounts that include:

• Full cash machine and Post Office counter access


• Free electronic payments and debit card use


• Buffer zones to cover small overdrafts


• No large fees for unpaid charges

“The last thing these consumers need is a race to the bottom between banks which keep chipping away at the features these accounts offer,” said Mike O’Connor, chief executive at Consumer Focus.

“Without intervention, these accounts could become less useful or more expensive for low-income consumers.”

The Co-operative Bank, which blamed an “un-level playing field” for pulling out of offers to undischarged bankrupts, has also expressed its fear that the standards for basic bank accounts will continue to deteriorate.

Cash machine access

In tandem with the campaign from Consumer Focus, the Treasury Committee said providers including Bank of Ireland, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank, the Co-op and Nationwide had confirmed they had no plans to restrict cash machine access for basic bank account customers.

Similar undertakings were given by Barclays, HSBC and Santander during the committee’s inquiry into ATM access earlier this year.

“We have now obtained confirmation from other providers of basic bank accounts that they have no plans to restrict access to cash machines for these customers. That is a step forward,” said Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the committee.

“However, the letters that I received make clear that this might change. That RBS and Lloyds should want to cut their costs is understandable. But the cash machine network is a cost shared by all banks; if one bank decides to withdraw from the system, it is more likely that others would be forced to follow suit.”

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10 Wooden iPhone Cases for the Geeky Lumberjack

1. Grove Cases

A mix of bamboo and plant fiber composite combine to create this classic Grove case. There are tons of achingly cool etched patterns to choose from on the site, or you can design your own. For: iPhone 4/4S, 5, Cost: From $ 79

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: YouTube’s 20 Most-Shared Ads in October]

If you’re in the market for a new iPhone case, why not give wood a chance? We have found 10 gorgeous cases made from natural materials.

Take a look through our hand-picked selection in the photo gallery above. Let us know in the comments below if you’d consider a wooden cover for your Apple device.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Suicide Silence singer Lucker dies in California motorcycle accident

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Mitch Lucker, the lead singer of extreme heavy metal band Suicide Silence, died on Thursday of injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident in Huntington Beach, California, police said.

The band from Southern California was given the Golden Gods award for best new talent by Revolver magazine in 2009.

Lucker, 28, was on a new Harley Davidson motorcycle driving in the Orange County city of Huntington Beach on Halloween night when he lost control and crashed into a light pole, according to a statement from the local police department.

He was taken to the University of California, Irvine Medical Center where he later died, police said. Investigators said they were looking into the cause of the collision and whether alcohol was a factor.

“There’s no easy way to say this,” the band said in a post on Facebook. “Mitch passed away earlier this morning from injuries sustained during a motorcycle accident.”

Suicide Silence in 2007 came out with the album “The Cleansing” and followed that up with the 2009 “No Time to Bleed” and last year’s “The Black Crown,” which made its way to No. 9 on the Billboard hard rock chart.

The band, whose musical style is referred to as “deathcore,” is originally from Riverside, California, a working-class community 50 miles east of Los Angeles.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Will Dunham)

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U.S. FDA finds bacteria in New England Compounding drugs

(Reuters) – U.S. health officials have found bacteria in lots of an injected steroid and a heart drug made by New England Compounding Center, the pharmacy linked to contaminated steroids that have claimed the lives of at least 28 people.

The Food and Drug Administration said it identified different types of bacteria in three separate recalled batches of NECC‘s preservative-free betamethasone and in a single batch of NECC-supplied cardioplegia solution.

Betamethasone is an injectable steroid, while cardioplegia is used during heart surgery.

The FDA had previously confirmed the presence of a deadly fungus in two different NECC batches of a different injectable steroid tied to the national fungal meningitis outbreak. That drug, preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate, was used to treat back and joint pain.

The agency said it did not know how significant the bacterial contamination was in terms of the risk for human disease and said it had not received reports of confirmed cases of infection related to the organisms found in the two products.

However, the findings “reinforce the FDA’s concern about the lack of sterility in products produced at NECC’s compounding facility,” the agency said in a statement.

Federal health officials previously said they were investigating whether two other NECC products could be linked to fungal infections in three patients, including two who had undergone heart surgery.

NECC, located in Framingham, Massachusetts, shut down in early October and recalled all of its products.

The FDA said tests for fungus in the lots of betamethasone and cardioplegia are still underway.

The latest tally from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists 386 cases of fungal meningitis and 28 deaths linked to injections of NECC steroids.

(Reporting by Deena Beasley; Editing by Andre Grenon and Lisa Shumaker)

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“Wage scar” threatens U.S. labor recovery: Manpower CEO

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A “wage scar” caused by workers accepting lower pay could slow the pace of U.S. economic recovery for years to come, the chief executive of global staffing services company ManpowerGroup said on Fri day.

Workers are accepting lower pay because a U.S. labor recovery, while encouraging, remains muted.

“You get this kind of wage scar that occurs,” Jeff Joerres said in an interview following a stronger-than-expected October jobs report that also showed a dip in average hourly wages.

“You make a compromise and you’re now making $ 25,000 and you used to make $ 30,000,” Joerres said. “That kind of follows you … throughout your career. So by the time you’re 50 years old, when you normally would’ve been making $ 60,000, you’re now making $ 52,000.

“Those things are going to happen. We’re going to see lower disposable income and a more tepid economy for a long time.”

The U.S. economy added 171,000 jobs outside the farm sector last month. That was more than economists forecast, but the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent.

At that pace of payrolls growth, it would take more than two years for the labor market to reach pre-recession levels.

FRAGILE RECOVERY

Friday’s jobs report showed 13,600 temporary help jobs added in October. Those jobs, which rose at a slightly faster pace sequentially than is typical, are considered a leading indicator of broader labor activity because employers add or cut temporary workers before hiring or firing permanent staff.

The percentage of temps in the labor force rose to 1.9 percent but remains below its year 2000 record above 2 percent.

Temp jobs usually rise as companies ramp up in October ahead of the holiday shopping season. Although the move was encouraging, Joerres said, the jobs recovery remains fragile and a prolonged period of flattish growth is much more likely than a fast, ‘V-shaped’ recovery.

“It’s a hand-over-hand crawl out of where we were. If anybody wants to see a number like 250,000 to 300,000, which would not be unusual if we start really motoring, we have a ways to go before that,” he said. “When we talk to clients, the more conversations recently are about holding back as opposed to moving forward, and part of that is just a wall of uncertainty.”

Some uncertainty will lift once it is clear who wins Tuesday’s election, but attention will immediately turn to the so-called “fiscal cliff” of budget cuts and tax hikes that could begin in the new year.

“What we need to get on very quickly is the fiscal cliff. Regardless of who wins, what are you gonna do with that?” Joerres said. “That’s the one that really starts to affect the economy.”

Employers have cash but are waiting to see a clearer direction for the economy before they commit to spending it. Besides the U.S. fiscal situation and the possibility that President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms could be reversed if he fails to win re-election, corporate chiefs worry about the European debt crisis, China’s economy and recent tensions between Japan and China over disputed islands.

“The interconnected world is creating variables that we just can’t understand,” Joerres said. (Reporting by Nick Zieminski in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)

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Mexico’s Day of Dead brings memories of missing

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Maria Elena Salazar refuses to set out plates of her missing son’s favorite foods or orange flowers as offerings for the deceased on Mexico‘s Day of the Dead, even though she hasn’t seen him in three-and-a-half years.

The 50-year-old former teacher is convinced that Hugo Gonzalez Salazar, a university graduate in marketing who worked for a telephone company, is still alive and being forced to work for a drug cartel because of his skills.

“The government, the authorities, they know it, that the gangs took them away to use as forced labor,” said Salazar of her then 24-year-old son, who disappeared in the northern city of Torreon in July 2009.

The Day of the Dead — when Mexicans traditionally visit the graves of dead relatives and leave offerings of flowers, food and candy skulls — is a difficult time for the families of the thousands of Mexicans who have disappeared amid a wave of drug-fueled violence.

With what activists call a mix of denial, hope and desperation, they refuse to dedicate altars on the Nov. 1-2 holiday to people often missing for years. They won’t accept any but the most certain proof of death, and sometimes reject even that.

Numbers vary on just how many people have disappeared in recent years. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says 24,000 people have been reported missing between 2000 and mid-2012, and that nearly 16,000 bodies remain unidentified.

But one thing is clear: just as there are households without Day of the Dead altars, there are thousands of graves of the unidentified dead scattered across the country, with no one to remember them.

An investigation conducted by the newspaper Milenio this week, involving hundreds of information requests to state and municipal governments, indicates that 24,102 unidentified bodies were buried in paupers’ or common graves in Mexican cemeteries since 2006. The number is almost certainly incomplete, since some local governments refused to provide figures, Milenio reported.

And while the number of unidentified dead probably includes some indigents, Central American migrants or dead unrelated to the drug war, it is clear that cities worst hit by the drug conflict also usually showed a corresponding bulge in the number of unidentified cadavers. For example, Mexico City, which has been relatively unscathed by drug violence, listed about one-third as many unidentified burials as the city of Veracruz, despite the fact that Mexico City’s population is about 15 times larger.

Consuelo Morales , who works with dozens of families of disappeared in the northern city of Monterrey, said that “holidays like this, that are family affairs and are very close to our culture, stir a lot of things up” for the families. But many refuse to accept the deaths of their loved ones, sometimes even after DNA testing confirms a match with a cadaver.

“They’ll say to you, ‘I’m not going to put up an altar, because they’re not dead,” Martinez noted. “Their thinking is that ‘until they prove to me that my child is dead, he is alive.”

Martinez says one family she works with at the Citizens in Support of Human Rights center had refused to accept their son was dead, even after three rounds of DNA testing and the exhumation of the remains.

“It was their son, he was very young, and he had been burned alive,” Martinez said by way of explanation.

The refusal to accept what appears inevitable may be a matter of desperation. Martinez said some families in Monterrey also believe their missing relatives are being held as virtual slaves for the cartels, even though federal prosecutors say they have never uncovered any kind of drug cartel forced-labor camp, in the six years since Mexico launched an offensive against the cartels.

But many people like Salazar believe it must be true. “Organized crime is a business, but it can’t advertise for employees openly, so it has to take them by force,” Salazar said.

While she refuses to erect an altar-like offering for her son, she does perform other rituals that mirror the Day of the Dead customs, like the one that involves scattering a trail of flower petals to the doorsteps of houses to guide spirits of the departed back home once a year.

Salazar and her family still live in the same home in Torreon, though they’d like to move, in the hopes that Hugo will return there. They pray three times a day for God to guide him home.

“We live in the same place, and we try to do the same things we used to,” said Salazar, “because he is going to come back to his place, his home, and we have to be waiting for him.”

Mistrust of officials has risen to such a point that some families may never get an answer they’ll accept.

The problem is that, with forensics procedures often sadly lacking in Mexican police forces, the dead my never be connected with the living, which is the whole point of the Mexican traditions.

“As long as the authorities don’t prove the opposite, for us they’re still alive,” Salazar said. “Let them prove it, but let us have some certainty, not just the authorities saying ‘here he is.’ We don’t the government to just give us bodies that aren’t theirs, and that has happened.”

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Civility efforts seek better behavior on campus

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Jewish students in the University of California system labeled terrorists for their support of Israel. Black high school students pelted by bananas on a Tennessee campus tour. A hostile student in Maryland challenging his professor to a fight after the teacher limited the use of cell phones and laptops during lectures.

In a society where anonymous Internet commenters freely lob insults, and politicians spew partisan barbs, the decline of basic civility isn’t limited to academia. But the push for more polite discourse — often as an extension of more entrenched diversity efforts — is firmly taking root on campus.

From the University of Missouri to Penn State and Vanderbilt, colleges across the country are treating the erosion of common decency as a public health epidemic on par with measles outbreaks and sexually transmitted diseases.

“What we’re trying to do is remind me people of what they already know, to get back in touch with things they probably learned growing up,” said Noel English, who heads a new Missouri civility campaign called “Show Me Respect,” a nod to the state’s nickname.

The Missouri campaign comes after two white students pleaded guilty in April 2010 to misdemeanor littering charges for dumping cotton balls outside the school’s black culture center during Black History Month; the students were sentenced to 80 hours of community service, two years of probation and had their driver licenses suspended for two months. A 2009 survey of more than 3,500 students found that nearly one in seven reported incidents of harassment on campus, from racial slurs to hostile emails.

At a campus civility workshop earlier this week, Eric Waters, a junior from Mansfield, Texas, who is the football team’s starting tight end, described how other students often label Mizzou football players as “mean” and “disrespectful” womanizers, sometimes to his face.

“It’s not about the stereotypes people put on us,” he said. “We try to carry ourselves like true gentlemen.”

The University of Tennessee enacted its civility campaign in 2011. There had been a cotton ball incident at the Knoxville school’s black cultural center after President Barack Obama‘s election and, in 2010, bananas were thrown at a group of more than 100 black high school students from Memphis during a campus visit.

“We want to be a campus that’s welcoming to all, and hostile to none,” said Chancellor Jimmy Cheek, who now outlines the school’s 10 “principles of civility and community” at freshman orientation. The shared values range from inclusivity and collegiality to respect and integrity.

In some cases, the campus civility campaigns are being challenged by First Amendment advocates who fear that such programs muzzle unpopular speech in the name of tolerance and diversity.

That was the complaint at North Carolina State University, which revised a residence hall policy that, among other stipulations, prohibited dorm dwellers from wearing T-shirts or hanging posters “disrespectful and hurtful to others” while also requiring students to “confront behavior or report to staff incidents of incivility and intolerance.”

The new policy now includes a written caveat calling the civility effort a set of “voluntary expectations” while emphasizing that the school is “strongly committed to freedom of expression.”

“Civility is an important value,” said Robert Shibley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which protested the Raleigh university’s civility policy. “But at the same time, it can’t be made the paramount issue in a free society, because there has to be space for people who have intense feelings about things to express those feelings in a way that really communicates the urgency and the depths of feeling that lies behind their opinions.”

When campuses attempt to compel civil behavior, Shibley said, they become “so committed to civility that if you say something uncivil, you are going to be penalized In some way, that’s going too far. It starts to infringe on the very expressions that are protected by the First Amendment.”

Many credit Pier Forni, a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University, as the dean of the campus civility movement. He started the Hopkins Civility Project 15 years ago, wrote the 2002 book “Choosing Civility” and is a frequent guest speaker on other campuses, including at Missouri earlier this year.

For Forni, the culprits behind contemporary incivility are numerous, from what he called “the crisis of civil engagement” in this country to eroding workplace manners to “radical informality” heightened by Facebook and related social media. Yet he has no interest in making civil behavior a campus requirement.

“Civility should be promoted, not believed in,” he said. “Civility is not something to enforce. “

Among the schools embracing those beliefs is the University of Arizona, which last year opened the National Institute for Civil Discourse after the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six people and injured 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

In 2010, Rutgers University launched its “Project Civility” just before freshman Tyler Clementi killed himself when a roommate secretly recorded the teen’s sexual encounter with another man. English, the Missouri campaign leader, said the New Jersey student’s suicide helped influence her decision to start a program on campus.

She, too, favors the voluntary approach, though her initial instincts said otherwise.

“My first thought was, ‘I’m a lawyer, we need a rule or a policy,’ but then my thinking was, ‘That’s not really necessary,’” she said. “We can have all the policies in the world, but what we want to do is raise awareness and get people thinking … We want to change the culture so it just becomes embedded.”

Or, as Noor Azizan-Gardner, Missouri’s chief diversity officer, put it: “I’m hoping when they graduate they will know what it means to be civil, kind and compassionate.”

___

Online:

Show Me Respect: http://civility.missouri.edu/

University of Tennessee Principles of Civility and Community: http://civility.utk.edu/

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: http://thefire.org/

___ Alan Scher Zagier can be reached at http://twitter.com/azagier

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NBC to hold a benefit concert for Sandy victims

NEW YORK (AP) — NBC will hold a benefit concert Friday for victims of Hurricane Sandy featuring some artists native to the areas hardest hit.

Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi of New Jersey and Billy Joel of Long Island are scheduled to appear at the concert, hosted by “Today” show co-host Matt Lauer.

Other performers include Christina Aguilera, Sting and Jimmy Fallon.

The telecast will benefit the American Red Cross and will be shown on NBC and its cable stations including Bravo, CNBC, USA, MSNBC and E! Other networks are invited to join in.

“Hurricane Sandy: Coming Together” will air at 8 p.m. EDT and will be taped-delayed in the West.

The telethon will be broadcast from NBC facilities in Rockefeller Center in New York City.

___

NBC is controlled by Comcast Corp.

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La desvenlafaxina actúa contra los sofocos: estudio

NUEVA YORK (Reuters Health) – El antidepresivo

desvenlafaxina (Pristiq, de Pfizer) reduce los sofocos en las

mujeres postmenopáusicas, según señala un equipo médico.

A pesar de este resultado, que surge de un subestudio de un

ensayo aleatorio, la Administración de Alimentos y Medicamentos

de Estados Unidos (FDA, por su sigla en inglés) rechazó la

solicitud de Pfizer de aprobación de desvenlafaxina para el

tratamiento de los síntomas vasomotores de la menopausia, como

los sofocos, moderados a graves.

“El único tratamiento que aprobó la FDA para los sofocos de

la menopausia es la terapia con estrógeno”, dijo por e-mail la

autora principal, doctora JoAnn V. Pinkerton. “Las mujeres

necesitan alternativas no hormonales. Necesitan opciones”.

En Menopause, el equipo de Pinkerton, del Sistema de Salud

de University of Virginia, Charlottesville, publica los

resultados de un subestudio de efectividad de 12 semanas de

duración durante un estudio de un año con desvenlafaxina.

El grupo a tratar incluía 365 mujeres que, al azar, tomaron

100 mg/día de desvenlafaxina o placebo. Comparado con el

placebo, el fármaco redujo significativamente la cantidad y la

gravedad de los sofocos a la cuarta y la decimosegunda semanas.

A la semana número 12, desvenlafaxina redujo un 62 por

ciento la cantidad diaria de sofocos moderados y graves,

mientras que el placebo lo hizo un 38 por ciento, mientras que

la gravedad de los síntomas disminuyó, respectivamente un 25 y

12 por ciento.

Los autores analizaron también “una diferencia clínicamente

poco significativa”, es decir, una reducción de 5,35 sofocos

moderados y graves por día. Este resultado se obtuvo en el 64

por ciento de las mujeres tratadas con desvenlafaxina y en el 41

por ciento del grupo control.

“La desvenlafaxina es un tratamiento no hormonal seguro,

bien tolerado y efectivo, con reducciones estadísticamente y

clínicamente significativas de la frecuencia y la gravedad de

los sofocos en las mujeres postmenopáusicas con sofocos de

rápida aparición”, afirmó el equipo.

Pfizer retiró su solicitud de la FDA en febrero, pero el

producto sigue disponible para tratar el trastorno depresivo

mayor.

Pinkerton agregó por e-mail: “Es importante desarrollar

alternativas porque hasta el 75 por ciento de las mujeres padece

sofocos en la menopausia y el 25 por ciento de ellas necesita un

tratamiento”.

La autora comentó también que existen otros remedios no

hormonales. Dijo a Reuters Health que con su equipo evaluó la

gabapentina de liberación extendida (Serada, de Depomed) versus

placebo en un ensayo durante 24 semanas con 600 mujeres

postmenopáusicas.

La frecuencia y la intensidad de los sofocos disminuyeron

con gabapentina a las 12 y 24 semanas, y los sofocos “mejoraron

mucho” o “mejoraron” a las 24 semanas.

Los resultados fueron presentados este mes en la reunión

anual de la Sociedad Norteamericana de Menopausia. También este

mes, la FDA aceptó una nueva solicitud de aprobación para

Serada.

FUENTE: Menopause, online 25 de octubre del 2012

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Comet to go into administration

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Dan Wagner, Powa Technologies: “They failed to leverage their physical presence… ten years ago”

About 6,500 retail jobs are at risk after electrical chain Comet confirmed that it would be put into administration next week.

Private equity firm OpCapita, which owns the 240-store business, has lined up restructuring specialist Deloitte to act as administrator.

OpCapita bought Comet last year for £2, but the business has struggled from the downturn in consumer spending.

Comet’s demise is one of the biggest High Street casualties of recent years.

Two weeks ago, OpCapita said it was examining a number of potential bids for the retailer.

The administrator will run the business as a going concern while it assesses options for sales, closures and liquidation.

Comet said it was “urgently working” on plans to secure the company’s future. Customers with outstanding orders are being told it is “business as usual until further notice” and that the group intends to fulfil deliveries of products that have been paid for.

Comet’s customer care team is handling customer inquiries on 0844 8009595.

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• Any customers with Comet vouchers or gift cards can use them in stores at present


• Administrators would decide whether they would be honoured were the business to enter administration


• Generally, gift card holders are fairly low on a list of creditors when a business folds


• Extended warranties are overseen by a separate business. If it ceased trading, then a trust fund would be set up to meet obligations to customers who hold extended warranties


• The Comet website is currently out of action


• Customer enquiries are being answered by its customer card team on 0844 8009595

Shares of Comet’s rivals rose on news of the planned administration, with Dixons Retail, which owns PC World and Currys, jumping 15% as investors speculated that a major competitor could be removed from the market.

OpCapita bought Comet last February from Kesa Electricals, which had itself struggled to turn around the business. Comet is thought to have had operational losses of about £35m last year.

‘Market failure’

The economic downturn and pressure on consumer spending has led many people to put off purchases of big-ticket items such as TVs and large appliances. But sales of such items have also moved increasingly online.

Dan Wagner, a technology entrepreneur who has backed several internet businesses, told the BBC that Comet “was an accident waiting to happen” because successive managements had failed to understand the online world.

Retailers must now offer multi-channel options – shops, a website, purchases via mobile phones – to be successful, he said. “Comet failed to understand the importance of this for driving business.”

Jon Copestake, retail analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, also felt that Comet’s problems “come as little surprise”.

He said: “Not only has Comet faced deflationary pressures thanks to stiff competition and cheaper production costs, but core audio visual products are being undermined by combined platforms on smartphones and tablet computers.”

Comet is one of the biggest retail casualties since the demise of Woolworths in 2008. Other recent High Street collapses have included JJB Sports, Clinton Cards, Blacks Leisure, Game, and Peacocks.

America’s Best Buy recently pulled the plug on 11 giant electrical stores after failing to make inroads into the UK market.

Comet was founded in 1933 as a business charging batteries for wireless sets. It opened its first store in 1968, in Hull, and was bought by Kingfisher in 1984, which expanded the Comet brand into one of the most familiar names on the High Street.

BBC News – Business

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