I almost choked on my cornflakes when I opened the Scottish Daily Record and read that the manager of an electrical store had been awarded £41,641 after being demoted and transferred for changing his day off and arriving at work late.

James Kilcolm, 44, of Blantyre, Lanarkshire, resigned from Comet when faced with a £17,000 pay cut and disciplinary action.

He took his case to a tribunal, which ruled he had been entitled to quit and deserved compensation.

I think it would be best if I made no further comment on this tribunal ruling, but I would love to know what Hugh Harvey, the chief executive of Comet, thought when he read this.

As Richard Littlejohn regularly says in his Daily Mail column, you couldn’t make it up.

I got caught up in the delays at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 last week. I tend to be a bit grumpy at 5.30am at the best of times, but when flights are delayed for hours and hours, I get even grumpier.

However, the delays seem to be really helping the retailers who have set up plush outlets at T5 and I had plenty of time to wander round them.

It can get boring trying to decide whether to buy the £10,000 diamond-encrusted spectacle frames – are they really a bargain? I managed to avoid the glare from these blinged-out glasses and was on much more familiar territory when I entered the PC World shop.

Although Dixons Tax Free stores are well established at airports all over the UK, this is the first airside PC World.

As you would expect, this is a well-designed and perfectly fitted store packed with everything for the world traveller. The prices did truly reflect the fact that there was no VAT and the store was even busy at 6am.

The staff were very helpful and I am sure that this PC World and the two new Dixons outlets that are also located at T5 will be very successful.

The UK is due to ratify the new Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading regulations next month.

The legislation can be read at the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s website
www.berr.gov.uk, but I must warn that the mass of documentation is heavy going. Fine if you are stuck in an airport. At least the Wi-Fi was working at T5.

The new rules ban more than 30 different kinds of unfair sales practices, including long-running closing down sales and the notes on BERR’s site includes examples that relate to selling DVDs and Freeview boxes.

The new directive bans the use of the word “free” if the consumer has to pay anything other than the charge for collecting or delivering the item. It appears to place severe limitations on the use of the word “free”.

Is the nonsense of “buy one get one free” offers about to end?

The price on HDTV flat panel sets still seems to be falling and the fact that Philips has stopped manufacturing for the American market is perhaps a portent for the future.

Is the long-awaited shakeout of the manufacturers about to take place?

Even the most expensive, top-selling brands all seem to be positioning themselves to cut themselves a slice of the “value” end of the market.

We dealers, of course, know when a famous brand has outsourced some models to a cheaper manufacturer, but should we really be duty bound to tell our customers?