Philippa Kaur

IF A POLE runs out of milk on a Sunday morning, they will probably head to Zabka, a convenience store. It is rarely a long walk. Roughly 17m people, nearly half of Poland’s population, live within 500 metres of one of its more than 10,500 outlets. Some may now buy a slice of the retailer itself: on October 17th its owner, CVC, a European private-equity firm, listed a third of Zabka’s shares on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) at a valuation of 21.5bn zlotys ($5.5bn). The deal has brought a boost to Poland’s beleaguered bourse. More

A giant BIRDCAGE held models wearing Chanel’s latest clothes at its show for Paris fashion week on October 1st. The exhibit in the Grand Palais had all the hallmarks of the 114-year-old fashion house: sophistication, skirt suits and even a little black dress. Yet at the end there was no designer to take the applause. In June Virginie Viard, Chanel’s creative director since 2019, stepped down. Ms Viard was only the third person to hold the role. She took over from Karl Lagerfeld, a sharp-tongued German who held the role for 36 years and once called sweatpants “a sign of defeat”. Mr Lagerfeld’s predecessor was Coco Chanel. The front rows of runway shows are now rife with gossip about who will bag fashion’s most prestigious job. An announcement is expected this month. More

It’s not easy being a customer-service agent—particularly when those customers are so angry with a product that they want to yell at you down the phone. That’s the sort of rage that Sonos, a maker of home-audio systems, encountered in May when it released an app update so full of glitches it caused its share price to plunge. More

For many, Microsoft Excel is the epitome of corporate drudgery. Its dreaded #VALUE! error has driven an incalculable number of users to despair. Yet among financial analysts, management consultants and even the odd business journalist, the spreadsheet program, which this month entered its 40th year, is a handy tool for everything from interrogating company financials to pricing assets. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, the software giant that created the program, has called it the “best consumer product” the company ever made. It even has its own world championship in Las Vegas, where spreadsheet wizards pivot, concatenate and VLOOKUP their way to victory. More

Elon Musk’s choice of Warner Bros Studios for the long-anticipated launch of his robotaxi on October 10th is entirely appropriate. Hollywood’s film studios are as much a dream factory as Tesla, his electric-car company. The vision he served up, accompanied by whoops of delight from the superfans in the audience, is an autonomous Cybercab so cheap that it will serve as “individualised mass transit”. But Mr Musk’s promises were, like many Hollywood movies, long on bombast and short on reality. The road to self-driving taxis will be long, and Tesla will have tough competition along the way. More

ONE OF BRITAIN’S richest men, Sir Jim Ratcliffe was long considered a magnate who kept a low profile. Not any more. He and INEOS, a chemicals firm he founded in 1998, have stepped into the limelight—by expanding into the sports business, first by buying FC Lausanne-Sport, a Swiss football club, in 2017. Now, INEOS sponsors the All Blacks, the world’s most famous rugby side; its boss holds a stake in Mercedes, a leading Formula One outfit; the company owns INEOS Grenadiers, an elite cycling team. And INEOS Britannia, the group’s sailing venture, is the first British team since 1964 to reach the final of the America’s Cup, the world’s oldest sailing competition. Its 13 races against the holders, from New Zealand, start on Saturday. More

Not long ago, as consumers emerged from pandemic lockdowns, it seemed the moment for luxury e-commerce had arrived. Cashed-up shoppers, now accustomed to buying almost anything online, were hunting for new outfits to parade in. Online purchases of luxury goods hit €73bn ($80bn) globally in 2022, up from €33bn in 2019, outpacing the already rapid growth of in-store luxury sales, according to Bain, a consultancy (see chart). More

MASAYOSHI SON is a man of contrasting superlatives. At the height of the dotcom bubble in early 2000 the Japanese technology mogul was briefly the world’s richest person, before losing $77bn in paper wealth, more than anyone before. In 2021 SoftBank Group, his telecoms-and-software conglomerate turned investment powerhouse, reported the biggest annual net profit in the history of Japan Inc, followed a year later by the second-biggest loss. His $20m wager in 2000 on Alibaba, a tatty online marketplace that grew into China’s mightiest e-emporium, counts as one of the best in the annals of venture capital (VC); his later $16bn punt on WeWork, an office-rental startup with tech pretensions, is an all-time dud. He has been called a “genius” and “dumb money”. More