There is no doubt that the leisure and retailing businesses on the receiving end of consumer spending are feeling a lot more optimistic than they have for years.

Thorntons, the family-controlled chocolate group, announced a pounds 22m restructuring yesterday that pushed the Derbyshire company pounds 14m into the red and will see its focus shift from manufacturing to retailing.

Helen Jones reports on how the industry persuades us to shell out on eggs

NIGEL COPE

TODAY

RUSSELL HOTTEN

Thorntons warns on melting profits

Robert Ayling, the dapper British Airways chief executive, inadvertently reveals that he is superbly qualified for his role as chairman of Race for Opportunity, the Business in the Community initiative that aims to harness the potential of the UK's ethnic minority population.

Thorntons, the chocolate maker and retailer, said it was ready to appoint a new chief executive after reporting a pounds 1.6m fall in profits to pounds 10.5m for last year. The unnamed candidate will come aboard in January. David Mitchell, the previous UK managing director, has already left. After a disappointing Christmas, the company blamed the hot weather for a reduction in demand for chocolates over the summer.

A 1980s spending spree left St Ives with a nasty bout of indigestion in the early 1990s. But the printer's relative abstinence since then has helped acquisitions to bed down well to create a low-cost, quick-turnaround printing operation with substantial shares of the markets in which it operates.

It's almost a year since the ceasefire, so why should a stroll down the Falls Road make a man sweat?

Thorn gets lead role in Disney takeover talk

Goldman Sachs, the big US securities house, had market-makers shadow-boxing as the stock market attempted to judge the success of its £800m programme trade.

Why are we so scared of Hallowe'en? In America at this time of year there are pumpkins on every porch - real or electric - jack o' lantern leaf bags in every garden and ghostly bits of sheet fluttering in the shrubs.