Rachael McKelvey

• Cash is trying to be king once more
• Shrinkflation & skimpflation
• Brewing Habits have become Tea-dious
• 16 jobs for 3 years & never showed up for work
• Girls are sad in record numbers

Cash is trying to be King once more
Industry body UK Finance this week revealed that for the first time in the last decade the use of cash has risen 7% which equates to 400,000 more transactions rising to 6.4 billion cash payments since 2021. For a long time, cash has been a declining payment method, compounded by the pandemic where tapping a machine became the norm over passing around notes and coins, so why such a significant return in usage?

The increase is thought to be because more people are relying on cash to manage their finances, it’s an easy tangible way to budget in a cost-of-living crisis, with an increase in smaller limited shops it makes sense to have that physical stop in cash value as it is the mental want to reduce your spending. A spokesperson for UK Finance acknowledges, “It’s something we do tend to see in times of falling consumer confidence and economic uncertainty”.

The stats from the report are fascinating, 13% of all payments made in the UK in 2022 were by businesses but this accounted for 82% of the total value of payments made with the flipside in consumer spending, with debit card payments accounting for over half of all consumer payments made.

Shrinkflation & skimpflation
Oh I don’t want to talk about inflation anymore, yet here we are. The Bank of England is expecting inflation to stabilise during August which comes at a crucial time for the BoE whose policymakers really need to ensure that inflation doesn’t become baked into publics minds, but that’s easier said then done, even if interest rates do fall and inflation reduces that doesn’t mean the prices are right.

Inflation is rise in all prices without a distinctive reason, everyone needs more money to buy the same amount of things, remember when Chomps cost 10p? They now retail at 25p per unit. Freddos are also a great example of how inflation gets baked into items, but there are other kinds of flation that consumers need to consider when looking at their spending power.

French supermarket Carrefour has started to warn customers about “shrinkflation” with stickers on shelves that point out where there is essentially less stuff in packets for the same price. Some big brands have been. named and shamed but arguably shrinkflation is practical way for suppliers to raise prices without having to calculate an entire new pricing strategy when nothing is certain. Another way of continuing to maintain margins is skimpflation which also seems rife across the market with reduced quality of ingredients in food, or a decrease in quality in service standards. It really has never been harder as a consumer to make informed purchasing decisions.

Brewing Habits have become Tea-dious
It’s been a rough week for PG tips, who this week revealed they had spent an eye watering £50 million on teabag innovation that will now yield the perfect brew in a mere 60 seconds. Everyone knows it takes 3 minutes to brew the perfect cup of tea but apparently times have changed, PG tips commissioned some research and found that people typically leave their teabag to brew for less than a minute so they are launching a new teabag, where the particles are now the perfect size to brew much faster and the purists are FURIOUS.

Jane Pettigrew, course director at the UK Tea Academy said “I really abhor this kind of ‘innovation’. It is not progress but a massive retrograde step backwards in what tea should be.” PG Tips account for 5 billion cups of tea a year and obviously want to meet their customers changing needs, but I can’t be the only person who thinks this is kind of a sorry state of affairs – who doesn’t have three minutes to properly brew a cup of tea please? This is also a big contributing factor in why I don’t drink tea…the only person I’d trust to make me a cup of tea is Neil (hi Neil I really love your cups of tea & even though you’re not a big coffee drinker that you heat the machine before you make one is EVERYTHING)

16 jobs for 3 years & never showed up for work
Sometimes I worry that I am committing wage fraud when my brain isn’t working and I’ve stared that the screen wondering why my formula won’t work only to realise it’s because I can’t spell but it was reported this month that a Chinese women, known only by her alias Guan Yue, held 16 separate jobs for 3 years and never showed up for a single days work allegedly netting herself a whopping $7million.

My tiny mind cannot comprehend the effort required to commit this level of fraud, except the only two qualities of an individual required to commit fraud are for them to be crooked and stupid, because apparently Yue co-ordinated this massive effort entirely on a piece of paper with 53 other fake employees. When she got too much work she would pass work off to friends and take a commission, she would take pictures of the interviews and put them in companies chat channels as proof of client meetings.

It all started to unravel when one of the fake employees shared a screenshot that looked like they worked for someone else in a work chat. In total 53 people have been arrested, apparently labour fraud isn’t uncommon in China with an estimated 700-800 groups taking on multiple jobs.

Girls are sad in record numbers
Girlguiding released their 15^th ‘Girls’ Attitudes Survey’ this week exploring how girls feel about their lives, their aspirations, the pressures they face and the things they care about. This years findings revealed that girls happiness has significantly declined over the past 15 years with only 17% of girls aged 7-21 saying they feel very happy compared to 40% in 2009, which seems a lot especially coupled with the statistic that over the same time span there has been an 11% increase in feelings of anxiousness and worry around their appearance, online harm and sexual harassment.

The report is well worth a read, but is quite a depressing read, they believe finding a job when they leave education will be harder than ever, they are placing greater value on owning their own home over having a partner or being married or having a worthwhile job…which seems understandable given the current climate, but well…a little sad.

Current watch: Daisy Maskell: Insomnia and Me – KISS FMs breakfast presenter Daisy Maskell examines the prevalence of insomnia in young people, she has suffered herself since early childhood. As you can imagine still being up at 3am when you’re a early morning radio DJ is not the one and she is concerned about the long term impacts on her health but she is not alone. The stats in the documentary are quite something, apparently almost half of 16-24-year-olds stated that they sleep significantly fewer hours than they did before the pandemic compared to a third of those aged 35 years and older.

Daisy speaks to friends she’s met through her insomnia diaries and experts to get advice and support to see if she can get a better nights sleep. Sleep is such a big thing, I don’t think I’ve spoken to many regular people in my life this week without talking about sleep. The emotional impact and the links to other mental health conditions in this documentary is really important.

Current read: Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights by Helen Lewis – Oof, this book. Well-behave women don’t make history, difficult women do but so rarely are the remembered in history, all too often erased for being difficult. Helen Lewis beautifully articulates the complexities of feminism, through some truly imperfect women who have all but been erased from the stories of the feminist movement from the start of the movement right up to the present day.

I couldn’t put this book down, I wanted to know who was coming next, the perfect blend of narrative, interviews and archival research from some of the dustiest and mustiest places and while I’ve made this sound probably rather depressing, the book does highlight the successes of the movement and what it should do next with the words “The battle is difficult, and we must be difficult too” ringing in your ears.

Most Impactful Listen: Lego Overboard – This was fascinating, you can’t have missed that a significant amount of Lego is found by beach combers on the south coast, back in 1997 a cargo ship called Tokyo Express lost 62 containers in severe weather, only one of which contained Lego but even today, there are still some remnants to be found. The inventory of the container has been made available and the hunt is on to find it all, the real impact of how something that happened nearly two decades ago is still being washed up on the beaches and hidden by sand and sea. This episode is just fantastic, it speaks to a number of breach combers about their favourite finds, the dragons, the octopuses, the tiny flowers, the pirates cutlass. I am absolutely obsessed with Lego Lost At Sea on Twitter for exactly this reason, they share their finds. A lovely bit of escapism

• Happy 25^th Birthday Google
• Why are so many councils going bust?
• Can B&M save enough of Wilkos
• New words coming this autumn
• How much a day?

Happy 25^th Birthday Google
Born in 1998 this year Google turns 25 years old this week which is quite a significant milestone and what a ride it has been! Starting life as the brainchild of Larry Page and Seregey Brin while students at Stanford University just hoping to better organise web pages online.

It went on to hit the big time in the early 2000s with rapid growth and significant investment, along came Gmail in 2004 which is still the best of all the mails, in 2005 they launched Maps & bought Android, the following year they acquired YouTube and become an actual verb in the actual Oxford English Dictionary! 2007 saw them launch Street View, 2008 was Chrome, they launched their own phones in 2010, launched the Play Store and Google Glass – remember Google Glass? In 2012. They underwent their current facelift in 2015 and massive fines aside have been pretty steady since working hard in areas like driverless cars and AI in the intervening years.

Sudar Pirchai, current CEO of Google and Alphabet has reflected on the last 25 years in an open letter to all those who’ve made Google great which includes you and I.

Why are Councils going bust?
Birmingham City Council is the latest local council to issue a Section 114 notice effectively declaring bankruptcy, in the case of Europe’s largest local authority, serving over a million people across 69 wards, Birmingham City Councils bills from a Supreme Court ruling from 2012 relating to (un)equal pay seem to have been the real driver of their financial downfall. The second received by the council, requiring it to back pay bonuses to largely female employees who had missed out unfairly, but what about the broader crisis going on across Britian’s Local Authorities?

There are a number of local authorities also facing similar fines and fees relating to equal pay disputes, but the finances across the board have stopped adding up. Many local authorities have issued Section 114 notices this year, with slashes to budgets as a result of continued cuts in Government funding and the impact of reduced spending power of that money. Most councils are experiencing a significant increase in demand for high cost council services in social care, coupled with a reduction in business revenues and crippling interest rates on borrowed funds to survive. Many local councils took on significant debt to furnish their commitments but every time interest rates go up, so does the money required to service those debts.

Can B&M save enough of Wilkos
B&M an odd favourite (we all have that colleague who is obsessed) in the British discount retail sector on Tuesday announced its intention to buy up to 51 Wilko stores from the collapsed chain for around £13m, a nifty little fit with their current expansion plans with “The consideration is fully funded from existing cash reserves and the acquisition is not expected to be conditional on any regulatory clearances.”

Nearly a month after Wilco went into administration, the clock is running down for the homeware and household goods discount retailer on finding ways to secure 1000’s of jobs with the Administrators at PwC also in talks to with the other big discount retailers, Poundland, Home Bargains and The Range about saving some of the other stores.

It’s a tough time for Wilko, a significant deal ran into problems as a result of their big suppliers wanting their debts settled ahead of further deliveries, with many shipments cancelled on announcement of their intention to file for Administration & the significant delays across the sector to get product on the shelf.

New words coming this Autumn
Dictionary.com have given a sneak peak into the new words they will be adding to their dictionary this autumn and you don’t need to be a lexicographer to be intrigued by the way language is evolving and how we make words, borrow words and change or update existing words.

Dictionary.com are revising 2,256 existing definitions, adding 346 new definitions and adding 566 entirely new entries. The art of language is never solely new words, but the capture of that evolution through the generations of how we play with language.

I think my favourite pop culture addition has to be Blursday, an informal noun to describe a day not easily distinguished from other days, or the phenomenon of days running together – this week was entirely made up of Blursdays, happy year end to one and all!

For any language fans out there, I highly recommend The Allusionist podcast by podcasting royalty Helen Zaltzman, it’s a podcast all about language and there isn’t a bad episode, the one about all the swears is obviously my favourite.

How much a day?
Technically not this week’s news but I cannot stop thinking about it. We might have all at some point made a joke about wishing setting up an OnlyFans account was a credible alternative to the task at hand, but we definitely need to be aiming higher. Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of OnlyFans took a $338 million in dividends for the financial year 2022 according to the parent companies (Fenex Internation Ltd if you’re wondering) financial statements. There are only 260 working days in a year, that’s over $1m a day. A DAY. On top of his actual salary. ON TOP OF HIS ACTUAL SALARY.

Apart from that being an obscene amount of money that no one actually needs, it just goes to show how good a year OnlyFans had in 2022, with revenue soaring to $1.09 BILLION for a platform whose original intention was never built around not safe for work content.  So next time you’ve a high functioning low dopamine task at work and think there has to be an easier way to earn a living, this is your sign.

Current watch: The Lovers – Forgive me, it was year end this week and I just wanted something easy to watch I didn’t have to care about. Well, picking The Lovers was a mistake. Johnny Flynn and Roisin Gallagher are so wonderfully suited to the dynamics of the characters they play in this show. Political TV broadcaster Seamus instantly clashes when he meets supermarket worker Janet but they are inexplicably drawn to each other despite having very little in common. The series moves through their false starts, their arguments and their biggest fears.

Current read: Dirty Laundry: Why adults with ADHD are so ashamed and what we can do to help by Richard Pink & Roxanne Emery – Written by the couple behind the brilliant ADHD_Love on Tiktok this book is a duel perspective on living with and loving someone with ADHD. Rox is very honest in sharing her experience of the most common traits of a neurodivergent brain and Rich shares his insights from a neurotypical perspective on how they can meet in the middle. There is no science here, this is a real life first person account really written as a conversation you’d have if you were lucky enough to be their friends and asked them both the same question, it was heartwarming, illuminating and really positive.

If there is anyone in your life, or you think you might have some neurodivergent tendencies, then this book is a wonderful book to help you understand the what’s and the whys and how you can support your neurodivergent friend or yourself in a world very much not set up to accommodate anything less than neurotypical.

Most Impactful Listen: Today in Focus: How safe are the priceless treasures in our museums? – This was fascinating, you can’t have missed that a significant amount of historical items are thought to have gone missing from the British Museum care and it turns out when it comes to historical artifacts it’s not as uncommon as you’d like to think. They speak with Art Crime investigator Arthur Brand on how it happens, why it happens and more important how restoring items to their last known address isn’t even half as easy as you think it should be.

• Apparently we’re all really angry at work
• Our lousy summer is 5th hottest in recent years
• Waitrose launches £5 meal deal
• How not to resign (if she even has)
• Hot week for Science

Apparently we’re all really angry at work
Gallups State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report has reported that 1 in 5 British employees say they “feel angry at work” which is a big increase from last year, and unsurprisingly significantly higher than our European colleagues.

The report has some quite interesting, but probably not surprising, findings off the back of more of certainly uncertain year for the global workforce. Also has no great surprise it turns out the UK employees are also some of the most disengaged and dissatisfied workers in Europe, ranking 33/38 technically tied with Luxembourg and Spain and just head of France and Italy. It would appear the mood bleak amongst the UK workforce which is fuelling suspicions that the job market is preparing to the UK to enter recession with employees choosing to put up and shut up (or not) than make a risky move to pastures new.

Our lousy summer is 5^th hottest in recent years
With every week that passes it feels like we’ve been cheated out of a summer. I need my lights on to drive back from swimming now at 8:30pm and every time I’ve committed to summer clothes and bare legs it has RAINED, the inverse has also been true and if I’ve committed to a jumper the sun has gone HARD.

But all this being said there was a beautiful moment on twitter this week where Duncan Robinson of The Economist tweeted and article from The Times about how this week’s hot spell was probably the last of the year with the comment about how “the shittest summer I can remember is now over”, to which Lewis Goodall replied that “2021 was worse” and then John Burn-Murdoch entered the chat – with a graph, now hear me out, he is the FT’s chief data reporter so knows how to chart and he replied with “Sorry to bring data to a vibes fight” (love) but in turns out Lewis was right, 2023 ranks as the 5^th hottest summer in recent history, with June and August being the hottest ever recorded (based on cumulative days at or above 24 degrees in London) so all this lovely weather we’re having? Record breaking.

Waitrose launches £5 meal deal
Every employee loves a meal deal, some people make it their entire personality, who doesn’t love the classic sandwich, crisps, and a drink combo? Over the years it’s gone a little mad with salads and wraps and extra snacks and drinks and now the world has gone bonkers because Waitrose has launched its first ever meal deal.

Great you may say, but err why has the poshest supermarket had to appeal to blue collar workers? Waitrose lunch was always a Friday treat, because it was just down the alley from the little Italian deli where I could get just enough for 1 of all my most favourite Italian things and well if you’ve spent a fortune what’s a lunch from Waitrose on top of that?

I’ve no doubt it will be incredibly successful, but it does make me slightly suspicious if the cost-of-living crisis is now impacting the rich (yes, I consider Waitrose the choice of the top end of soft middle and the anywhere outside London end of rich), why do those at Waitrose even think this is a market for its customers and why now?

How not to resign (if she even has)
Nadine, are you okay hun? Have you even sent it in, or just published it instead of writing your column this week? Some points to note, it’s about two thirds longer than it needs to be and basically reads like you started writing it with a bottle of wine and didn’t finish it before you’d finished the first bottle. Am I correct? Nadine Dorries has been missing in action for the good people of Mid Bedfordshire for well over a year and despite claiming she was going to resign in July in anticipation of receiving a peerage in Boris Johnsons exit honours list, she did not as it was blocked by the current Prime Minister.

The letter, which is well worth a read is now freely available without having to accidentally click on the rag that shall not be names. A bold move to tell Sunak that “history will not judge you kindly” which is quite a line from a women for whom the same could be said. That resignation is quite some unself aware, state conspiracy, self-flatulating fluff. Credit where credit was due, Dorries is not cut from the same Tory cloth as the rest of them and there was a time where regardless of her politics you could say she acted to meet her own integrity, but honestly right now…I am not sure you could say the same.

So when is the nonfiction book you’re clearly now lining up to eventually plug coming out Nadine? Me, cynical? No that’s you.

Hot week for Science
There has been a lot of amazing things this week that really deserve a call out and a read if you have time from Scientist Figures Out How We Might Finally Find Missing Flight MH370: Barnacles which is just insane. This week has also seen The human Y chromosome has been fully sequenced for the first time which is also just wild and not only did India become the 4^th country to land on the moon, they did it for less than it cost to make Intersteller, which is also absolutely bonkers. In amongst all the rubbish news, it’s so nice to see some genuine human endeavours.

Current watch: London Zoo annual weigh-in 2023 – In amongst ALL The Hundred this week, I have devoured the whole live coverage from BBC News on the annual weigh-in at London Zoo. I do not condone fat shaming of any kind and but want to know how you weigh a penguin? Covered it. Meerkats, on it. Sumatran tigers? Done. Gorillas? Let me get the big ruler out. Did the squirrel monkeys even want to be weighed? You can find out for yourself. With over 2 hours of footage available for the next 26 days, please do have this on in the background when it’s raining outside, and you have a high executive function task on a low dopamine day. Instant serotonin. I promise.

Current read: Investing with Keynes; How the World’s Greatest Economist Overturned Conventional Wisdom and Made a Fortune on the Stock Market by Justyn Walsh – This is probably quite a niche recommendation, you’ve probably either heard of John Maynard Keynes or you’re a normal person and you haven’t. Keynes is one of the 20^th centuries greatest economic minds and there wasn’t much he didn’t do architect of international monetary system, writer, Baron in the House of Lords and prominent member of the Bloomsbury group. He made a lot of money on the stock market and died an incredibly rich man.

This book is a journey through Keynes life, picking out his observations of stock market behaviour that are still relevant today, it’s well written and interesting and really shows how much of todays thinking is still leveraged from his investment style.

Most Impactful Listen: BFFs: A Life built on Friendship – One of those random BBC sounds recommendations that did not disappoint. Host of the podcast Emily lives with 5 housemates, 1 is her partner the other are a beautiful blend of friends and would be friends. In this podcast Emily explores a life built on Friendship and whether in the modern world those traditional things we do with a romantic partner we can actually do with our friendships instead, from buying houses, to raising children and avoiding loneliness. Emily meets others basing their lives around friendships, young and old. This was such a lovely listen and really got me thinking about whether the world is ready to start thinking differently about milestones in life.

• Please don’t run out of coffee on my watch
• A-Level results deflation day
• China halts youth unemployment data
• The Hundred
• Are falling birth rates…a good thing?

Please don’t run out of coffee on my watch
Coffee is life and consumption around the globe has doubled in the past 30 years and shows little signs of stopping, but we may now have a real problem with estimates predicting global consumption to be 6 BILLION cups of coffee a day by 2050, a figure I could well be contributing significantly to if the rest of life doesn’t significantly improve in the next 27 years.

The current supply chain isn’t fit for purpose, consumption is already outstripping production with climate change adversely impacting growers ability to produce, before even factoring in El Niño and the fact that once again, growing and producing coffee doesn’t sustain a living for many of the farmers in the coffee belt countries, the majority of the additional value added to coffee all happens after the production of the bean.

With coffee in high street chains already looking overpriced, it’s a conversation I have regularly with friends, there isn’t much I don’t enjoy about coffee, this absolutely stunning article from the FT on this exact topic may be the exception to that.

A-Level results deflation day
A-Level results day saw results drop back to that of “pre Covid” with the Guardian advising students to be “braced for disappointment”, which is a tough gig for the generation that got bolstered GCSE results after their exams were cancelled for Covid. The impact of the expected grade deflation will no doubt fall on the most disadvantaged students, a gap which also widened significantly due to Covid, with many students unable to catch up or access additional help to bridge the lost learning gap.

The impact also quite visible in all the nations across A-Levels, T-levels and BTec results, leaving students now desperate to find university places through clearing (I went through clearing, my deepest sympathies) with UCAS confirming the largest number of students in England ever are going into clearing to secure University places. Universities will no doubt be desperate to fill their vacancies because the current funding model doesn’t keep the lights on. For a process that so clearly doesn’t work it’s almost bonkers we keep perpetuating the myth that university is the be all and end all really.

China halts youth unemployment stats
Chartr this week have reported that after 6 months of rising youth unemployment Chinas National Bureau of Statistics is just going to stop reporting the figure for the 16-24 year old age bracket. With the unemployment rate doubling in 5 years from 11.2% in 2018 to 21.3% at last reporting in June. You can understand their reluctance to want to continue publishing a rather gloomy number, but also at the same time it doesn’t just get better if you ignore it either.

The reason behind the suspension in reporting is to give a chance for “further research” into data collecting methods, you know to see if they can find some more 16–24-year-olds who are employed to buck the trend a little or maybe they finally want to include the rates from rural areas in a hope that the outlook might be a little more optimistic. When the news hit Chinese social media it was also met with a quizzical look, the economic outlook in China is not currently the most optimistic, but nowhere in the world is, and comes with the usual scepticism about how true even the currently 21.3% rate really is.

The Hundred
We really need to talk about The Hundred, because I will really only now have one conversation about The Hundred, which is how great it is. All other opinions are dead to me and dealt with by stating the simple statement “that The Hundred is not aimed at you, so you opinion doesn’t matter”. The Hundred was arguably the best thing about summer 2021 when it started, a back to back double header with a run time of less than three hours? Excellent. Sign the scrolling generation up.

Cricket does not have the best reputation, generally from afar, nor up close and in the detail, it’s fusty, old and pale. I used to play on a mixed team as a kid and our Business Studies teacher would always let us have the cricket on in lessons via the medium of Ceefax (yes, I am that old) so trust me when I say Cricket is also sometimes really boring and really long sometimes, when play is great it’s good, but when it’s not it’s hard going. I used to play on a mixed team as a kid and our Business Studies teacher would always let us have the cricket on in lessons via the medium of Ceefax (yes, I am that old).

What I love about The Hundred is what the people who hate The Hundred really hate, it threatens their perception of their power over the game. Let it be fun, let it be quick, accessible, snappy and bright. Cricket it’s the most profitable sporting enterprise and anything it can do to cultivate a more diverse fan base to keep it alive the better.

Are Falling birth rates…a good thing?
With the population due to peak in 2080’s and start to decline by the 2100’s, good luck to those alive then, there are already a number of big nations around the world reporting declining birth rates, including the US and China but this week Professor Sarah Harper CBE direct of the Oxford Institute of Population Aging said that this was a “good thing” for the planet.  ONS data points to slowing birth rates in England and Wales last year, the lowest number since 2002.

The pandemic significantly reduced birth rates, which seemed a little odd amongst the middle classes as it seemed for a while there all my friends TVs were broken, but apparently in the UK the birth rate in 2020 fell to 1.58 children per woman, but given poor economic outlook and current cost of living and childcare, it’s not great surprise people aren’t rushing to have dependants when barely able have a nice life themselves.

A slowing birth rate in any nation will have significant economic impact, with aging populations there will be fewer younger workers bolstering state pension pots, more strain on public services that are less likely to be adequately staffed and that’s not even considering the impact on politics, is it a bigger risk that global warming as one unpopular billionaire thinks? At this point who knows.

Current watch: Heartstopper – With Season 2 all ready to go, I had to go back and watch season 1, a beautifully British coming-of-age romantic, comedy-esk drama based on the webcomic come graphic novel by Alice Oseman. The series received critical acclaim for its sweet nature and tone around the portrayal of LGBT people and the more you find out about how it all came together the more there is to love in the casting and it has Olivia Coleman in. What is not to love. It’s such sweet, kind, heart breaking but easy watching and sometimes just what you need. My heart forever with Tory Spring and that slurp.

Current read:
Equal Power: Gender Equality and How to Achieve It by Jo Swinson – Released in 2018 and very little has changed, Jo asks the evergreen question of why does so much power remain concentrated in the hands of men and why does the problem always seem to big to solve? This is a practical how to and a call to arms to everyone, regardless of gender, about the steps we can all take towards gender equality. Jo doesn’t back away from the harsh realities and doesn’t sugar coat pointing out the inequality all around us. This book is well written, considered and really engaging and is a must read.

Most Impactful Listen: Nudge Emergency Pod: Harvard Fake Data Scandal – My heart ached for Phill at the start of this podcast, picking up quite beautifully on the current state of play of the Harvard fake data scandal from the data anomalies highlighted by the guys at DataColada. With Francesco Gino, Italian-American behavioural scientist who officially as of this month is on unpaid administrative leave and barred from the Harvard campus due to the accusations of academic fraud, Phill quickly and most wonderfully put together an emergency podcast on what had happened,  what it means for behavioural science industry and how it will impact marketing and the future of his very show.