This law is actually part of a bigger one which outlaws, among other dubious commercial practices, the habit some retailers have of announcing that they are closing down and then forgetting to expire. As it happens I had a rich uncle who liked to predict his imminent demise, but leaving time for him to change his will if his assorted nephews and nieces did not do what he wanted them to.

In the end he did close down leaving a fake Rolex and some shares in a company which had long pre-deceased him, but it didn't matter because we had all stopped believing him, like no-one trusts a shop which is always just about to close down.

It is like the perpetual sale which some trades, like electrical retailers and cruise lines, indulge in. Perhaps there is someone out there who believes them, but I would not put money on it.

What the lawyers have not realised is that serial closers-down will do exactly what serial bankrupts do. The shop will close and open up a week later, its yellow facia replaced by a red one and the name changed utterly, as will be the (nominal) ownership, but the stock, staff and everything else will be the same.  

And what happens if the enterprise is genuinely on its last legs and a white knight comes galloping to the rescue, as white knights tend to do, at the last moment? Will the white knight and his horse be slung into jail?

There is no end to the naivety of clever lawyers.

The other bit of progress is even more intriguing. Some bright spark has had a bright idea. Title in goods will only pass when they are sold to the retail customer at the till, thus shortening and making more efficient the supply chain, and more to the point, improving the shop's cash flow. What it does to the suppliers' cash flow we can easily guess at. 

The argument is not new; it goes something like this:

Mr. Manufacturer - why do you keep your products in your warehouse gathering dust when they could be on our shelves, where there is a much better chance of their getting sold? They would still be your property, but just

be in a different place, and you would not have to look after them, pay to insure them, etc. etc.

The supplier will still have to worry about the goods, since they are still his, even though they are not where he can keep an eye on them. If they are pilfered, damaged, or mishandled he will only know if and when he finally gets them back. And he will get them back in dribs and drabs making a mess of his inventory, leading to some pleasant discussions with his customer.

In one way this is nothing new. Our order form states that title only passes on payment, and the buyer has a duty to look after the shoes as if they were his own. O.K. in theory, but a couple of times we have had a customer who could not pay and invited us to take the goods back. It was always a disaster, as the shoes came back in broken boxes, mixed up, sizes broken and certainly not worth what they were when they left us. In theory we could have sued, but what would have been the point?

There is another worry about this idea. I am sure most customers can be relied upon to play the game and no doubt the computers will transfer the money the moment the goods leave the shop, but can everyone be trusted?  Sometime, somewhere, a finance director will realise that a delay of just one day in relaying the payment will save his company thousands of pounds which will increase his bonus. Again, not a new tactic.

The gentleman who has had this bright idea thinks his initiative will shift the balance in favour of the chains. I don't know what planet he is on, but anyone who has done business with a chain knows only too well where the balance of power lies already

It might work when it comes to baked beans but I can't see it working in the case of a complicated item like shoes. Baked beans hardly ever fail in wear. They don't come in different colours. They do indeed come in different sizes, but if you run out of the 500 gram tin you can at least offer two 250 gram tins. Somehow I can't see a customer who takes a size 7 being persuaded to accept two pairs of size 3?.

And most important, baked beans don't suddenly go out of fashion and become almost unsaleable. In theory the supplier should have enough confidence in his products to back them all the way down the supply chain, but there has to be a point where the buyer, who is supposed to know the public's taste, takes a risk and the responsibility hat is his job and if he is going to let the supplier do it, then who needs him?

In fact the whole idea ignores one of the things money does, which a lot of people who should know better, forget.  It talks.

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