I never know when companies are in trouble. After all, all we tend to see is the store fronts, the television adverts and the smiling faces in the shops greeting us. Boots, it seems, has been struggling behind that happy veneer for a long while. While on my way into Nottingham, as it turns out the home of Boots’ head office, I discovered that the company was set to shed about seven hundred jobs, many of them from their head offices in the region.

Many of these companies are often extremely top heavy; with management and middle management’s wages filling up an enormous wage bill while stores at ground level are being closed and minimum wage jobs are being cut in an effort to save costs; costs that are a fraction of the overall overheads. Boots are just the latest in a long line of companies too slow to adjust to modern requirements, too slow to streamline their management structures.