News roundup—25th April 2008

• No slowdown here: That’s what the managing director of Amazon UK said, according to The Times. “We opened an 800,000-sq-ft fulfilment centre in Swansea last week,” said Brian McBride, “and you wouldn’t do that unless you have a lot of confidence.”
• Now that US-based medical and dental supplier Henry Schein has acquired another UK business, Cardiff-based Minerva Dental, staff at Schein’s UK healthcare equipment headquarters in Bradford are waiting to see if any redundancies will result, reports the Telegraph & Argus.
• Taking a glass-half-full point of view, The Scotsman titled its article about the latest Office for National Statistics report on retail sales “Death of the consumer? Not yet”. Although retail sales fell 0.4 percent in March, sales for the first quarter overall were actually up 2 percent.
• The economic slump may be good news for gardening cataloguers: According to The Guardian, sales of vegetable seeds are soaring, due in part to consumers’ desire to reduce their food bills. At multichannel marketer Thompson & Morgan, for instance, sales of veggie seeds had climbed 40 percent from two years ago.