If you work for Kellogg’s I’d guess that the last thing you’d want more of is Tony the Tiger, Snap, Crackle, Pop or the unimaginatively named Cocoa the Cocoa Pop Monkey, but apparently I’m wrong.  Kellogg’s have decided to reinvent their staff reward system, abandoning jargon and buzzwords and instead use their ‘popular’ mascots to make their staff reward statements easier to understand and beautiful.  Within the staff reward scheme is the company’s pension system, so if you managed to land yourself a job at Kellogg’s you to could open up a pension statement delivered by Tony the Tiger with Snap Crackle and Pop sat in the background.  There is a serious reason behind their choice (although it’s completely lost on me!), which my good friend David Lowe will attempt to explain: “Now, more than ever, we want our people to know they matter to us so we made a conscious decision to ‘sell’ our reward offering a lot more proactively than we have done in the past.  Our trademark characters are fun, and features such as our ‘Corn-flex’ section are backed up with a serious agenda. The statements are a new way of talking about reward for us - they do more than communicate the facts and figures relating to an employee’s pay and benefits; they embed our company culture, inspire employees and demonstrate we value them enough to put serious consideration into communicating their reward.”

So here’s the nub of it: Oil prices close at a record high. Home energy bills are set to rise 20%. But BP and Shell record a monster £7.2 billion profit just for the first quarter of the year. BP has earned a one-off trading profit of £200 million by correctly betting on the direction of oil and gas prices (how could they know?!). The rising profits were driven by spiralling oil prices, which the companies have passed on to consumers in the form of higher petrol and diesel prices. The price of petrol is continuing to rise this week because of supply concerns in Scotland, where the Grangemouth refinery was shut down for two days because of industrial action over pensions. The workers have now returned but it will take about three weeks to get the refinery, which produces 10 per cent of Britain’s petrol, back to full capacity. Next to report profits this week is  Exxon Mobil. Its safe rto assume they too will be the biggest in the company’s history. I’ll let you know if they’re not!