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The Wiki Man

What makes Argos worth £1.4 billion? I reckon I know

Every trend has a counter-trend. And Argos might just be the counter-trend to Amazon

9 April 2016

9:00 AM

9 April 2016

9:00 AM

When I was at school in the 1970s, some of the richer kids would come back from their summer holidays with jaw-dropping tales about the wondrous places they had visited. Chief among them, as I remember, was Schiphol airport. ‘It was amazing,’ they would say. ‘There were shops and restaurants and stuff,’ and you could buy a Walkman for some insanely low price.

A few others vainly tried to trump the Schiphol crowd by fancifully claiming to have been to Frankfurt airport and seen an actual sex shop there — an assertion widely disbelieved, certainly by me, until I used the...

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Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.

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