Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

Shop talk

After last week’s lacklustre figures from Tesco, Europe’s biggest retailer Carrefour has weighed into the retail malaise with a profit warning – its fourth in as many months. Carrefour last year said it planned to revamp the hypermarket model (which it claims to have invented in 1963). Its new “Carrefour Planet” stores are designed with a stores-within-stores ambience, housing nurseries, snacking areas and cookery classes.

But as it announced a 4.6 per cent drop in like-for-like sales, Carrefour did not give an update on how the planets were performing, raising suspicions that the atmospheric conditions have proven hostile.

Pay day

Warren Buffett, one of the few billionaires who likes to complain that his tax rate is too low, earned $62.8 million last year, or so he revealed in a letter to Republican congressman Tim Huelskamp. He paid $6.9 million in federal income taxes, or 17.4 per cent of his $39.8 million in taxable income – a percentage that he says is too low compared to what his own staff pays.

Buffett’s suggestion in August that the rich should pay more tax inspired Washington’s proposed “Buffett Rule”, which would raise taxes for the mega-rich, but it didn’t go down to well with Republicans like Huelskamp, who demanded Buffett release his tax information. Having now done so, Huelskamp has criticised it as “incomplete”.

Is Ben Jerry's support for the Occupy Wall Street movement for real?

The unbranded tubs of ice-cream circulated by Ben Jerry’s to camped-out protesters in Manhattan were not exactly illusory. But can a company that plays by the rules of capitalism – and sweetly profits from them – ever be free of ulterior motives when it lends its voice to a grass-roots movement like Occupy Wall Street? Or, to put it bluntly, is Ben Jerry’s support for the protesters merely another component of its ethics-trumping brand?

In a statement, Ben Jerry’s board of directors said they were “compelled” by their personal convictions and their company’s values to express “deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity”.

The first-name favouring board of directors, identified as “Jostein”, “Jeff”, “Helen”, “Pierre” and the gang, all look very friendly on its website, with their own cow-shaped avatars and cheery personal bios. It seems reasonable that they, like anyone else, might consider “the inequity that exists between classes” in the US to be “simply immoral”.

Co-founders “Ben” and “Jerry”, incidentally, are no longer on the board of directors, having left shortly after they sold the company to the Anglo- Dutch food conglomerate Unilever way back in 1999. Therein lies another reason why Ben Jerry’s endorsement has left Wall Street protesters cold – however genuine the company’s original ethical intentions, they are now a small subsidiary within a greater corporate concern.

1.6 million

They say smoking on television glamorises nicotine addiction. A smoking TV is another hazard entirely, as Sony has discovered after a fault that causes overheating meant it had to recall this many Bravia sets.

STATUS UPDATE

BlackBerry crumble: Research in Motion blamed BlackBerry outages on an e-mails "backlog". "I just don't get it," complained Alan Sugar (right). "Servers are always conking out, you have contingency plans."

Conditional love:Mothercare has parted company with its chief executive Ben Gordon "by mutual consent" a week after the retailer issued a loud wail of a profit warning.

Samsung delay:Samsung says postponing the launch of its Nexus Prime smartphone is a "tribute" to the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (left). It's what he would have wanted.

5,792

– The weight in kilograms of a four square metre bar of Thornton’s milk chocolate poured into its mould by 50 people in Derbyshire as the company celebrated its centenary by breaking the record for the world’s largest chocolate bar.