Business Diary: 26/09/2009

One way to describe your target customer

Good news and bad at Luminar, the nightclubs operator. The less happy tidings are that the company is struggling because rising unemployment has hit the spending power of its core customers, aged 18 to 24. On a more positive note, the chief executive Stephen Thomas has found a replacement clientele – older, richer clubbers who Mr Thomas describes as "divorced, single and dumped".

Advice from Ryanair Jet2 could do without

Never one to miss a trick, Ryanair's boss Michael O'Leary issued a statement yesterday advising the Jet2 executive Philip Meeson – who got into trouble after publicly berating staff for allowing long check-in queues to develop – to fly with his airline instead. "Ryanair allows passengers to check in before they leave home," said Mr O'Leary. He naturally neglected to mention he charges them for doing so and has, in any case, banned his customers from checking in at the airport.

Russian publican drinks to Twitter

The latest fund-raising by Twitter values the social networking site at more than £1bn. It's certainly worth a few quid to Oleg Tinkov – the Russian businessman has just sold his chain of pub restaurants after tweeting to followers that he was minded to get rid of him. The Scandinavian private equity firm Mint Capital got in touch and the deal was signed in days.

ITV misses out on its own story

The news yesterday that ITV had given up on hiring Tony Ball as its new chief executive prompted a string of stories from broadcasters, with the BBC's Robert Peston and Sky News's Mark Kleinman both blogging with claims to have broken different elements of the tale. Sadly, ITV itself couldn't even manage this scoop – its news site is being rebuilt and simply says "coming soon".

Number of the day: 8.8%

The sales rise at John Lewis last week compared to the same week in 2008, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers