Tomorrow is Super Thursday, perhaps the biggest retail reporting day of the year, certainly of the post-Christmas period.
Flaks want to tell us who won, or who at least held their own, hacks want to know who lost and how badly and why.
The last question, the why, is the most important and the one hardest to address, at least with conviction.
There will be updates tomorrow from, among others, Tesco, M&S, Waitrose, B&M, DFS, Card Factory and Debenhams.
We can sort of hazard a good guess now which of those will be ok, which of them really struggling.
What would help is someone smart to pick out trends and offer some accessible analysis that breaks down the obfuscated numbers from the shops.
Most retail companies, Next honourably excepted, don’t make it easy for us to see exactly how they are doing. Most City analysts are content to stick with the jargon. And too many hacks, myself not excluded, report the like-for-like sales figures and pretend that will do.
It would be good to see some new, smart voices offering retail analysis instead of the usual faces.
