'Tis the season to go bust

It is now considered very un-British not to go bankrupt during the Christmas season. Everything is for sale and everything must be bought, no matter what it is.

To the nation at large however, all this giving of gifts, all this wrapping up, this secrecy, seems rather childish and we have to be whipped into doing it.

Every year retailers claim their business will be in ruins unless we rush to the stores and this year they’ve recommended a cut in bank interest rates to help us on our way to financial doom (they got it too). All media run endless pages of suggestions to save us from our impoverished imaginations.

Despite it all, some people go through their whole lives giving and receiving socks at Christmas, in a kind of minimalist ritual, a barely discernible nod in the direction of Goodwill to All Men. They’ll also take a small glass of sweet sherry and a half-pound box of chocolates but draw the line at a grope under the mistletoe. The word “humbug” creeps into their vocabulary.

However, at least our gift exchange systems are more subtle than the classic Polynesian examples which all social anthropology students have to learn about before going to the pub. While the hierarchical distribution of pieces of a butchered animal survives with the dismemberment of the Christmas turkey, we adopt a broad range of approaches and our gifts can be divided into four major categories:

Useful: Power tools, whisky, fly-tying equipment. We’re not terribly good at understanding what counts as useful to other people, which is where our vast “nearly new” industry (particularly in power tools) comes from. It’s also why we drink so much whisky.

Useless: Power tools, things shaped like fish, actual Gifts – things which have no other purpose than to be given to someone else (ie about 75 per cent of all manufactured objects). These gifts cycle through social networks over time, and it can be comforting to find the same one cropping up every few years. When you pass it on again you sometimes paint it first, brush out the dead flies or take the handles off.

Egocentric: Jars of home made jam for instance or a ghastly photograph of your dog made into a jigsaw puzzle.

Deliberately provocative: Socks, for instance, or aggressive lingerie. A great-uncle of mine once gave his wife a ton of horse manure for her Christmas present. She responded with matching bed-linen, something no man has ever consciously bought.

So, anyway, if everything goes according to plan the only people with any cash by 25 December will be retailers, their advertising agencies and PR firms. The rest of us will have to rely on finding a silver threepenny piece in our Christmas Pudding.

Growth for the grosser grocers

Supermarkets are always in the news, and in the UK they're everywhere else too.

It's more than 10 years since Sainsbury's lost the"UK's biggest" title to Tesco which is currently three times its size and counting. Now in third place, they're making headlines again as a clutch of private equity firms consider a bid of around £9.0 billion.

Of course I'm not engaged to advise any of the parties, so I can offer a completely unbiased (and indeed thoroughly ignorant) opinion. The question is "How will they make money out of this?" and the answers focus on the property portfolio and operating margins.

Well, all supermarket groups like to keep great chunks of real estate on their books to prevent the competition building stores there if nothing else - but they'll need to retain that - while the advantages of sale and lease-back would probably be over-diluted by the new debt.

Margins? To get near Tesco they'd need to quadruple their performance without reducing the shopping experience to North Korean levels, but they must know that the Pyongyang strategy is already working brilliantly for Aldi and Lidl. And anyway, if they try to be just like Tesco and succeed, they'll become, well, just like Tesco, thereby removing any serious differentiation and destroying the brand.

But there is a way: with price, range and presence as given, they should concentrate on service. Currently, customer service consists largely of packing your bags at the checkout, but why stop there?

Why don't they go the whole hog and drive you home, stack your fridge, pour you a beer, make dinner and give you a full body massage? Why not send people round to mow the lawn, redecorate the dining room, clean the pool, wash the dishes and walk the dog? I'd shop there, wouldn't you?

Of course this is only the beginning: retail groups should stop offering loyalty points and start awarding their best customers free servants instead. The more you spend, the more (and better) servants you get. They live in your attic, call you Sir and Madam, wear uniforms, get up before dawn, clean things, make tea and spread malicious gossip about you - all the traditional stuff. All you have to do is buy everything from their store group.

Start saving the coupons.