A good start to 2009 from my two favourite brands: Dandy outfitter Liberty has stuck two sartorial fingers up at expectations with Christmas sales the best on record thanks to tourists coming over and taking advantage of the pound. Waitrose too saw a 41% surge in trading. Waitrose’s owner, John Lewis (who also saw sales increase), said 23 December was the supermarket chain’s busiest ever trading day. Financial data provider Experian said on Wednesday that visits to UK High Streets in the last week of December were up 12.8% compared with the same seven days in 2007. So there you go: if there’s one thing for certain, its uncertainty. Nobody knows nothing.

Get a job with Tesco and this is the sort of thing you could spend hours in meetings debating: the supermarket is change the wording of signs on its fast-track checkouts from the current “10 items or less” to say “Up to 10 items”. Apparently there has been uncertainty over whether the current notices should use “fewer” instead of “less”. The new wording, to be phased in across it 2,106 stores, was suggested by language watchdog The Plain English Campaign. Tesco said the change would be phased in across its stores.  Here’s the rub: “Fewer” should be used when you are talking about items that can be counted individually, for example, “fewer than 10 apples”. “Less” is correct when quantities cannot be individually counted in that case, e.g. “I would like less water”.  If anyone you meet uses this story as an amusing point of conversation in an social or interview interaction, ask them to lay on the floor and put your knee heavily on their throat until they pass out.

The country’s “greenest” supermarket that has opened: built from wood, it uses rainwater to flush customer toilets, has a wood chip boiler to heat the place, and wind turbines to power its checkouts. The new Sainsbury’s store in Dartmouth will use 50% less energy from the national grid and produce 40% less CO2 than a normal store. The rainwater bog-flush alone will save more than one million litres of mains water every year (that’s a lot of people going to the lavatory at their local supermarket, isn’t it?). Its electricity bill will be a third lower than a normal supermarket, saving Sainsbury’s £200,000 a year. Its pretty hard to label the build with the “greenshit/bullwash” label: Sainsbury’s planted 400 trees to compensate for the 200 used in the timber frame, and 90% of the building waste being recycled. Even the delivery lorry also made its first drop off at the store powered by the gas produced from rotting rubbish. A sizeable doff of my bowler hat to Sainsbury’s. More of the same please.

Tesco is investing £60m large into branching out into India – not stores as such, but a wholesale cash-and-carry business in Mumbai. Tesco also signed a deal to help the Indian equivalent of Virgin, Tata, develop its hypermarket business from 4 to over 50 stores in 5 years. This isn’t the only foreign clime a career with Tesco can take you: it also has businesses in Europe, China, Thailand, and (albeit struggling) in the USA. It’s another thumbs up to the importance of India in the world’s economy, that has already seen the US Tesco rival operate over there alongside Bharti Enterprises. If you’re wondering why all these giants feel the need to snuggle up to a local firm to get work done down there, Indian law bars large overseas brands from operating at a retail level unless through wholesale, licence or franchise arrangements. Enjoy the anonymity of Tesco while you can friends.

With banks firing and crying and moaning and balling, its no wonder that it takes someone from traditionally outside that sector to tear it up: Tesco Personal Finance was a joint venture between the supermercardo and the Royal Bank of Scotland. But the former has bought the latter out now for £950m – giving the RBS a much needed £500m profit to play with. The task for the new team at Tesco Bank is to double annual profits from £450 to over £1bn by offering simple banking products with broad appeal. Let’s face it, you do associate Tesco with consistency and affordability so its not a bad brand to start from. You also associate them with being everywhere and crapping on the competition from a great height – more nice attributes for the people looking after your money. With no exposure to the US mortgage crisis that got the competition into this mess to begin with, £1bn profits don’t seem that far fetched.