This is reminding me of the heady days of the early 2010s when Byres Road in Glasgow had three branches of Santander within about 50m of each other. Looking at Street View, the former Bradford & Bingley was gone by 2012, but the ex-Alliance & Leicester lasted until 2019. (The Abbey branch re...

MUJI Europe are to enter administration
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... hops-staff

West London is something of an Aldi desert - Lidl have stores in Acton, Hammersmith and She Bu (and have for ages).

Leytonstone's Matalan closed recently and seems like it's going to be half M&S Food; half Aldi, though the council have longer-term ambitions to turn it into housing.

This 2018 document (linked from the Visa Electron Wikipedia page) says that Electron will be entirely phased out by April 13th this year.

They've not made a fuss about it (as they don't seem to be rolling it out to everyone at once), but Monzo now support cheque imaging.

ah - I've only had exposure to VM's current account and ISA platform and didn't realise they had more!

Nationwide is, as you say, unified - it's just very retro. It could probably survive a reskin, but a ground-up rebuild would be the more sensible option.

I wonder how much of this is Nationwide trying to get a better online banking platform? Their current IT is well in need of an overhaul, whereas much of Virgin Money is quite modern - I have a feeling it's based on Clydesdale's short-lived B brand. That said, I recently opened an ISA with them and i...

Despite my initial misgivings, I've quickly come to love my wireless earphones - admittedly it's partly driven by my change in commuting habits, but the case takes up very little space in my pocket, so I'm far more likely to stick them in and listen to something when out and about or even doing odd-...

Having gigabit broadband would certainly have been a lot more useful to me during Covid times when I was working from home a lot more (in a job that required quite a bit of streaming video). It's less of an issue now and I reckon a few hundred meg would do me fine, though having a symmetrical upload...

Buying lunch from Pret has definitely joined the 'once in a while' thing rather than being once a week or so - I understand their economics, but I can't really justify a fiver for a sarnie anymore. I'm also less likely to buy a fancy coffee on the way to work - though that's partly because I'm now g...

The last time I saw a The Body Shop and it actually registered in my consciousness was when I was in Seoul a few years back - but it was in Myeong-dong, which is home of many a flagship cosmetics shop, so it was a particularly big and swanky one. I guess Lush has supplanted it as a home-grown eco-co...