Clinton Cards is to buy 196 stores from Birthdays, the loss-making subsidiary it put into administration last month. The £3.5m deal is expected to save almost 1,500 jobs.

Detectives launched a murder inquiry today after a Polish man was found beaten to death behind a supermarket.

Budget food store Aldi has been crowned the best supermarket in Britain by the consumer organisation Which?.

The group behind the off-licence chain Threshers has issued a "going concern" warning, citing a "material uncertainty" that casts significant doubt on its ability to continue trading.

The news for Sir Stuart Rose, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, just gets more and more miserable. In a new mystery-shopping survey, Prophet, the brand strategists, found that shoppers put Middle England's once-favourite shop firmly at the bottom of a list of 11 supermarket groups. Based on mystery-shopping research over the past two months and published tomorrow, Prophet's shoppers put Waitrose as the top supermarket in terms of customer expectations. They were asked to grade the shops – Waitrose was 4.5, Asda, 3.3, Aldi made 3.2 but M&S was 2.5, below the expected level of 3. Prophet's Vanessa Cohen said: "The research is not saying that the customer experience at M&S is below average, but that the customer experience is not as good as it should be."

Sainsbury supermarket chief executive, Justin King, is this week expected to say that profits at the group jumped by 10 per cent over the last year as the renaissance in the company's fortunes continued.

Tesco will kick off a drive to wrest back customers from its big three grocery rivals during the recession with a £150m relaunch of its Clubcard next week, the biggest change to its loyalty card scheme since it launched 15 years ago.

Tesco and Asda have attacked the Competition Commission’s plans to crack down on supermarkets’ relationships with suppliers, arguing it will lead to higher prices for consumers as grocers are burdened with a further deluge of red tape.

Tesco is to roll out a new “pay day” discount strategy to consumers struggling with the effects of the credit crunch.

Buying your food and groceries at the supermarket is one of the biggest regular outgoings for most families in Britain. But with a bit of forward planning – and by following a few easy rules – it's very easy to knock thousands of pounds off your shopping bills every year.

Thank God it's all over for another year. I do enjoy Christmas, it's just that the lead-up to the event is so stressful. We decided on a dawn raid on Waitrose the day before Christmas Eve... unfortunately our plans were discovered and the secret was out. We arrived to find that everyone in Cirencester was trying to do the same – it was a shambles.

Morrisons, Britain's fourth-largest supermarket chain, trounced its rivals yesterday as it reported booming sales and claimed it was winning over bargain-hunting shoppers from rival stores such as Tesco.