Why does everybody try to sell everything? Is it because they can, or is it just out of sheer greed?

The supermarkets have been at it now for a long time. Once one of the big ones diversified away from their core grocery business, the rest followed.

We seem to have long-since accepted that the big supermarkets sell clothes, white goods, brown goods, magazines, greeting cards, crockery, gifts, in fact you name it, they sell it.

Originally, and to a degree still representing a good deal for the consumer - apart from their fake special offers that they always claim when exposed on the TV consumer programmes as an “error” – it would be more acceptable if they didn’t kill the local high streets and suburbs with their total unethical, and at times, dishonest attitude to the small local business.

But this can be partially explained by lack of reality and short-sighted councils who just see these metro supermarkets as reliable businesses that can and will stump up premium business rates, month-in, month-out, without question. Despite it being we the residents who pay these councils their wages.

And the National lottery is not much better, often granting these metros a lottery terminal even though they may open within 100 yards of a local newsagent who already has a terminal, yet who faces ruin by the metro supermarket’s unwanted presence.

It was interesting to see an organisation from the most untrustworthy sector in the UK as I write this, a bank, (this particular one being the one with three scandals behind it and another one on the boil) running a campaign offering one of their 7,000 digital eagles to “help Roy set up a facebook page, post a video and collect subs for walking football”.

This, at a time when there is a huge campaign to get this particular bank to stop promoting tax havens in Africa!

And bearing in mind the heartache and trouble all the banks landed the UK and its residents with as a result of their cavalier actions since 2007-08 - the repercussions from which are still being felt today - should banks perhaps concentrate more on cleaning up their act and just provide core banking services?

PPI, interest swops, LIBOR rigging, currency rigging are all still rumbling on in the industry. Perhaps cutting bonuses and to cease pretending they need to pay the outrageous salaries they continue to do under the falsehood of “paying to attract the best”.  

Just look where banks “paying for the best” has got the UK over the past seven years! Nowhere fast.

Banks should stop twee, unbelievable advertising that attempts to infer they are squeaky clean and forthright, because they are not. Very far from it.

Banks are foul, dishonest, untrustworthy pirates, and a key target for nationalisation if ever there was one. They are so plainly incapable of running their own sector, either honestly or properly.