If you need another excuse to go shopping then you might find this article interesting. It claims that the average woman burns off around 48,000 calories a year just by shopping. According to the article most women burn off around 385 calories walking around the shops every week. In fact this amounts to around 154 a miles a year, the same as walking from London to Nottingham. The figures are based on the assumption that the average woman covers 2.96 miles on a shopping trip and spends about 2.5 hours browsing in stores every week. So next time you don’t feel like heading down the gym you might be justified in hitting the shops instead.

If you have put on a few extra pounds over Christmas then you might be interested in this new dress from Asda. It is designed to hide all of those lumps and bumps that you would rather you didn’t have. It works in a similar way to hold it in pants, having built in control panels in all the right places. At £28 for the dress and £16 for a skirt it claims it can take as much as inch and half off the waist. It certainly looks interesting but I feel the article would be better illustrated by using a model who has some lumps and bumps herself, that way it would be easier to see the effects of the garment.

According to this article you could soon be paying a bit more for your pint. Many of the country’s biggest brewers are likely to increase their prices in a move that will mean an increase of around 10p on popular beers. Guinness are putting up the recommend retail price to £3.03 per pint from February 1st. InBev who make Stella Artois, Becks and Budweiser are increasing the wholesale price of all its drinks by 4p a pint from the same date. Heineken UK have also announced a price rise and Carlsberg and Moulson Coors are yet to make an announcement.

If you want to pop the question but don’t have a very big budget, then Asda might have the answer. They are selling engagement rings for just £397. The average amount spent on an engagement ring is £1,800 according to the wedding site Confetti.co.uk but it is traditional to spend at least one month’s salary on the ring. The Asda ring, then seems something of a bargain. The ring is the best selling one on offer at the store and is an 18ct gold ring with 1 caret 7 stone diamonds and looks quite good for the price.

If this article is correct we could soon expect to pay a little more for a carton of orange juice. According to the article cold weather and disease have hit the citrus groves in Florida which produce much of the world’s orange juice. This has already led to the price of concentrated juice doubling in the past year. As yet this has not affected the prices we pay in the supermarket because stores usually fix their prices a long time in advance, however, we should expect prices to rise by between 10 and 30 per cent when contracts are renegotiated.

According to this article some British sausages are made up of as much as a third fat and only 32 per cent meat. The rest of the sausage is usually made up of ground wheat rusk which is used as a bulking agent to cut costs and improve the texture of the sausage. A study has been carried out on 36 brands of sausages including the country’s biggest sellers to find out exactly what goes into them. Researchers for the journal Meat Science looked at the packaging for information on meat fat and salt content. On average the sausages contained 62 per cent meat but four of the sausages that were looked at had less than 50 per cent and the worst one had less than a third pork. The study did not identify the different brands but did reveal that the two sausages with the lowest meat content were Asda Smart Price with 34% pork and Sainsbury’s Chipolatas with 32% pork.

According to this article online retailer Amazon is considering a move into the high street. The move comes as Amazon has started to stock larger products which can be problematic and expensive to deliver. If it goes ahead Amazon would have outlets where customers could pick up purchases that they have ordered online. The article suggests that Amazon is currently looking for high profile sites across the UK to pilot the scheme. The move would not only allow Amazon to supply those larger items but also allow customers to pick up their purchases at a time to suit them rather than relying on being in to sign for a delivery.

Kit Kat has recently achieved Fairtrade certification for its four finger Kit Kats. They are now able to display the blue and green logo of the Fairtrade Foundation on their wrappers. The logo is likely to start appearing on Kit Kats from January. The certification will later also be extended to include the smaller bars.