If this article is correct then online food shopping is set to double within the next five years. That’s according to new estimates from the Institute of Grocery Distribution. Their research shows that customers will spend nearly £7.2bn on grocery shopping online by 2014, that’s nearly double the figure spent last year. Personally I do most of food shopping online. It allows me to shop for the whole month without worrying about getting it in my small car and I find I budget better and am less likely to overspend.

According to this article the number of people advertising for a lodger has risen by 27% in the first two weeks of the year. According to Spareroom.co.uk the rise is down to people looking to raise extra income because they have over stretched financially after the Christmas period. The group have said that they saw a record number of people advertising for lodgers during 2009 and that it expects the trend to continue this year. With the average weekly rent costing £87 it seems like a good way to bring in some extra cash if you have a big enough house to be able to do it.

According to this article women’s handbags are getting lighter. The average weight of a woman’s handbag is now 1.5kg, that’s down 57% from last year when the average weight was 3.5kg. The research carried out by Debenhams  in order to help them to design suitable bags. It seems the change is not down to the fact that we are carrying less in our handbags but more the fact  that popular gadgets such as mobile phones and PDAs are simply getting smaller and lighter.

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.