Even Sports Direct will have to start caring if the share prices keeps falling

Outlook

(PA)

Sports Direct has been wrapping up its ads on cable TV channels with a mock football chant. “Sportsdirect.com – UK’s No 1,” the “fans” sing after a voiceover actor has finished breathlessly extolling the virtues of its latest “price crash”. If the retailer was being honest, it might adapt an actual football chant for its next set of commercials. The one favoured by Millwall fans. You’d have to abbreviate sportsdirect.com a bit to make it work, but how about this: “We are SD, super SD, no one likes us, we don’t care.”

That (in)famous chant neatly sums up the company’s attitude. Dogged by scandal, Sports Direct and its bosses seemed not to care, perhaps because there was little sign that it put off customers – until now. The latest results were a disappointment, with flat sales and lacklustre profits flattered by flogging shares in JD Sports. This suggests Sports Direct’s attitude might be changing.

The discounter’s growth has been fuelled by austerity Britain. It remains the fact that no other sporting goods store offers quite the same combination of convenience and price. Even if there is, shall we say, a certain amount of scepticism about the discounts it claims, Sports Direct sells cheap clobber. This is catnip to customers whose incomes have only recently started to recover from the blow delivered by the financial crisis.

An improving economy doesn’t seem to have affected some of the other big names that have majored on price. But Aldi and Lidl want to be loved. It’s true that they operate in a very different sector. But they seem to recognise that being nice makes commercial sense, particularly if happy customers tell their friends about Lidl’s surprises, or their Aldi equivalents.

With Sports Direct, however, they may be too embarrassed to do that. We are getting to the stage where you might just hide your Sports Direct purchase in an Aldi bag as you leave the shop (P.S Aldi sometimes sells sportswear.)

The City is also getting restive. It’s quite an achievement to have prompted an institutional shareholder to launch a volley of criticism, not so much of your financial performance but of your behaviour, as Royal London did on the back of Sports Direct’s results. This was a set of results that paid lip service to recent controveries, and claimed that modest improvements had been made to the security searches that, according to reports, can add an unpaid 15 minutes to the working day of staff on the minimum wage. Sports Direct also came over all defensive about its zero-hours contracts.

The juggernaut is still rolling: over the high street, over those workers and, perhaps, over the unfortunate online sports and gifts retailer Findel after its investors foolishly opened the door to Sports Direct’s driving force Mike Ashley, as I wrote on Tuesday. There was sufficient institutional support to get his board re-elected at the last AGM despite a substantial rebellion. But the rebels will grow in number if Sports Direct’s behaviour leads to a prolonged “price crash” offer on the shares.

Dear Santa, please deliver some festive cheer to Ocado

Dear Santa, please can we find someone to partner with us for a foreign adventure? It’s all we really want for Christmas this year. You see, things are tough at home. We’re still the newest arrivals on the estate, and that means we have a small car that can go much faster than any of the other families are managing. It’s just not going as fast as it once was. That German couple up the road are whizzing around the neighbourhood and making things really tough for everyone. And we’d really like to take some of the attention away from them by teaming up with someone from across the sea, so we could show them just how great our internet service can be for delivering people’s Christmas dinners, and more besides.

But even though we’ve tried really hard to make new friends, no one wants to play with us. The problem is that we promised all the people who supported us that someone would invite us over for the holidays before New Year’s Day to help us decorate our numbers. It’s now looking as if we might have to disappoint them. So please, Santa, can you fix it for us? We so want a happy Christmas. Lots of love, Ocado.

P.S. We’ve left out one of our mince pies for you. We still get them from Waitrose, so you know it’ll be good.

Unions get a nice Christmas present at EDF Energy

What’s this? A guaranteed pension scheme still available to new joiners in the private sector, including part-time workers in contact centres? No, I haven’t overindulged at the office party. Such a thing still exists, thanks in part to the efforts of union negotiators at EDF Energy.

The French outfit wanted to scrap its final-salary scheme for new staff (a step already taken by most of corporate Britain) and introduce an earnings cap for existing workers to save money. But, after long and painstaking, talks, a deal was agreed that will see the earnings cap imposed only on those earning above £65,000 (a small minority of its 13,000 workers).

New staff, meanwhile, will be offered a scheme with benefits based on their career-average earnings. It’s a remarkable result on the part of Unison, Unite, the GMB and Prospect. But EDF will benefit, too, and not just from the savings it will make. In a tight labour market, it can tempt prospective staff with something that is all but unique.