Things... can only get better...

Bath's Christmas Market has now opened and the streets are packed with visitors. In the Summer the visitors are 99% foreign, but now they seem to be 99% Brits.

This year the market is situated in Bath's traditional high-end shopping street, now closed to traffic. Those concrete blocks have been plonked down again.

Each year, John Lewis's Christmas video advert gets a little more desperate and a lot more crass. When huge companies start to go downhill due to poor planning by incompetent management, they go downhill very rapidly. The exception to the rule is Marks and Spencer, which began its downhill slide years ago and still has not hit the bottom.

Waitrose - my nearest John Lewis owned supermarket - goes from bad to worse. A handful of managers have obviously sat down in a room and asked themselves how to make more money, then decided that putting the prices up would do the job.

Then they asked themselves how to make people buy more of their goods, and decided to stop selling things like vegetables loose and bag them up so you are forced to buy 2 kilos of shallots when you only wanted 2 bulbs.

One of the latest desperate acts was to rebrand themselves as Waitrose - and Partners. They have always been a partnership, giving their employees a percentage of profits in the form of Christmas bonuses etc, but they now want to make us feel guilty about taking away the checkout girl's little bit extra by not spending enough money in the shop. They froze the bonuses  ages ago in any case. That was our fault as bad customers.

A few years ago, most Waitrose regulars would not be seen dead shopping in Lidl, but now they cannot afford not to. Nobody wants to be a hungry snob, and the quality of Lidl is as good - in some cases better - than Waitrose, at literally half the price on many items.

I would say that Morrisons - one of Waitrose's rivals - is about 20% cheaper than the John Lewis owned equivalent. They both have bins for donations to local Food Banks.

The Waitrose food bank bin usually has the odd tin of beans or packet of pasta lying at the bottom, but the Morrisons bin is always full to overflowing.

I think this says a lot about the customers.