Trolley 746

An unusual trolley stand outside the small Sainsbury's at Chessington North, visited in the margins of en expedition to Hampton Court Palace.

Given that our car was at the other end of the parade and I went to the bother of getting some change with which to unlock the trolley so that I could use it to move my box of Corona, I thought it fair to score it. Hopefully the rules committee will agree with me when they come to review the matter.

A notice pasted to the window of the even smaller Morrisons on the way to the car. How do Alliance Property Holdings fit into the picture?

As far as I can make out it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Morrisons and its business is running the McColls convenience store chain acquired by Morrisons in 2022. A subsidiary which made a loss of around £42mn on sales of around £1bn last year. We get forty pages of accounts - the top of which are snapped above - but I can't see much breakdown of either income or expenditure. I see no large transfers to Morrisons from McColls. No idea if there is more to it than simply keeping the McColls as a separate unit for administrative convenience. More in the form of tax avoidance? But why post the notice on the window?

The trolley being returned to its stand after taking the box of beer to the car.

As it happened, there was an identical stand outside the Tesco's at Horton Retail, where I took a second box of beer. But the car was too near the store to make taking a trolley sensible. So not scored.

Noting in passing that Corona from Sainsbury's was a tenner for ten, while Peroni from Tesco's was much nearer twenty. Perhaps that was why Sainsbury's only had the one box left.

PS: I notice Bayes from time to time, most recently at reference 3, and yachts more frequently. So I was interested to read the account of the 'Bayesian' tragedy at reference 4. More talk of design errors than human errors. Perhaps the super-rich are getting too rich for their own good. Noting that Lynch had bought the yacht second hand - the original owner was a businessman from the Netherlands.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-745.html.

Reference 2: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/636b9033d3bf7f16484798cb/Morrisons_McColls_-_Decision_final_acceptance_of_UILs.pdf. Government worrying about competition or lack of it in the convenience store business.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/beethoven-bayes.html.

Reference 4: What Sank the Tech Tycoon’s ‘Unsinkable’ Yacht - Jeffrey Gettleman, James Glanz, Emma Bubola, Elisabetta Povoledo, Pablo Robles, Josh Holder, Sarah Hurtes, New York Times - 2024. Available to some at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/bayesian-yacht-sinking-italy.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.