Sainsbury’s hopes of offloading its retail business Argos to one of China’s biggest retailers have collapsed as talks ended on Sunday.

The supermarket giant confirmed it was no longer in discussions with JD.com to sell Argos, the general merchandise arm it bought for more than £1bn less than a decade ago.

On Saturday it had announced talks with JD.com for a sale that it said would speed up the transformation of Argos, whose business has gone increasingly online and within larger Sainsbury’s branches.

But 24 hours later, Sainsbury’s said the deal was off. It said: “JD.com has communicated that it would now only be prepared to engage on a materially revised set of terms and commitments which are not in the best interests of Sainsbury’s shareholders, colleagues and broader stakeholders. Accordingly, Sainsbury’s confirms that it has now terminated discussions with JD.com.”

JD.com, which is unrelated to JD Sports, is one of China’s biggest retailers and also provides its supply chain-based technology and services across other sectors. Last year, JD.com walked away from a deal to buy the UK white goods and electronics retailer Curry’s.

Argos is the UK’s second largest general merchandise retailer, behind Tesco, with the third most visited retail website in the UK, according to Sainsbury’s. It retains almost 200 standalone stores – with kiosks where customers used to peruse its famous catalogue – and more than 1,100 collection points, mostly in Sainsbury’s stores.

Before the collapse, Sainsbury’s had talked up the potential deal as accelerating its turnaround of Argos, saying: “JD.com would bring world-class retail, technology and logistics expertise and invest to drive Argos’s growth and further transform the customer experience.”

A sale would almost certainly have commanded a far lower figure than the £1.1bn Sainsbury’s paid in 2016 for Home Retail, the then owner of Argos. Sainsbury’s latest accounts valued the chain at £344m, and the group said growth at the main supermarket business was weighed down by falling Argos profits.

Some retail analysts have questioned the supermarket’s transplanting of the Argos operation into its stores. Hundreds of standalone Argos stores were closed as the business restructured and moved more to online shopping.

In 2023, Sainsbury’s closed down two Argos distribution centres and the business’s head office in Milton Keynes in a further attempt to cut costs.

I’m here in Las Vegas for a conference where I just paid $7 for a cup of coffee and then was shamed into tipping another $1 to the server for pouring the coffee and handing it to me. Welcome to America. I feel like I’m tipping for everything, everywhere. And now it’s only going to get worse. And for that I blame President Trump.

Of course, our tipping culture was in place long before Trump took office. But now that his “no tax on tips” promise became law, our government is officially enabling it. That’s good news for tipped workers and for small-business owners who may feel less pressure to pay higher wages if their workers are getting enough gratuities. But at the same time, it’s bad news for the rest of us who will likely feel even more obligated than ever to tip.

What’s frustrating is that the tax benefits for tipped workers are not only over-hyped, they’re also temporary. Yes, workers can avoid getting taxed on their tips – but not all workers (see below) and not all their tips. If you’re eligible, you can deduct up to $25,000 of tip income each year and there are income limitations. Also, you won’t see that benefit until you file your year-end tax returns. You also still have to pay in to social security and Medicare taxes. And it’s estimated that as many as one-third of those employees eligible for this deduction will never use it because their income is so low they don’t pay any federal taxes anyway. Oh, and by the way, the deduction expires in 2028. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Also irritating is who’s eligible. The treasury department recently published a list of about 50 types of workers who can claim the tipped-wages deduction. Unfortunately, I wasn’t consulted. But if I were, then I would have been a little more particular.

For example, I would never include “digital content creators” as eligible tipped workers. Really? Now we’re tipping influencers? Like MrBeast needs more money? Given all the harm that social media has wrought on this world, it’s probably better not to encourage these people with tax incentives.

I was also surprised to see that electricians, plumbers and locksmiths who work in people’s homes are eligible for tips. These are licensed professionals performing a service. Many are independent contractors or freelancers who are quite capable of coming up with their own fees. And those who are employed aren’t cheap either. I’m not sure where the line is drawn. Should I also be tipping the staff of my accounting firm? My life insurance agent?

What exactly are “gambling and sports book writers and runners”? Who tips these people? I’m not a prude, but should we be enabling this industry in particular? Can the casinos not afford to pay these people enough?

I can’t imagine who would tip a private event planner, either. Event planners work for people who have enough money to pay for event planners. It seems silly to give these people a tax benefit for any tips on top of that.

Finally, why in the world would anyone want to encourage “self-enrichment teachers” with a tax-free tip? I would think the best way to enrich oneself is to pocket your extra money and not further enrich the self-enrichment teacher. What’s next, tipping the guy who mansplains how the infield fly rule works?

Now that I’ve listed some people who should be dropped from this benefit, it’s only fair to share a few who were unfairly left off. For example:

Postal workers. Every year we tip our postal worker. She provides a friendly, cheerful, daily service in rain, snow, sleet … well, you know the rest. Most of my friends do the same.

Flight attendants. They load bags. They carry babies. They walk around cabins during turbulence. They deal with jerks. And many don’t even start getting paid until the plane leaves the gate!

School teachers. I don’t understand why everyone wrings their hands over how to improve compensation for our teachers and yet there are no tax incentives for parents to tip them.

School bus drivers. Them, too.

Grocery store cashiers. All during Covid, while the rest of us stayed safely at home, watching Netflix and receiving our Amazon packages, the guy who ran the cash register at our local grocery store came in to work every day and did his job. His name is Emilio. Add him to the list, please.

If it were up to me, we’d be like the rest of the world and ban tips altogether. Instead of incentivizing people to tip, I’d tax tip income higher so employers would be forced to step up and just pay a fair wage. But that’s not reality in 21st-century America. So let’s just make this benefit permanent already instead of playing budgetary games and setting an expiration date near (surprise!) the next presidential election, so it can be a populist rallying point. Let’s also re-visit who is and isn’t eligible.

My final tip: when in Vegas, make your coffee in your room.

“If you love cider, this is cider to the power of 10,” says Barny Butterfield, speaking about the flavours packed by some of this year’s “special” apples.

Indeed Butterfield, the owner of Sandford Orchards, near Exeter, is buying extra tanks to increase cider production after the UK’s hottest summer on record resulted in an abundance of fruit.

“I think God’s a cider maker,” he joked. To thrive, fruit trees need heat and light and this year “we had lots of both”.

“I’ve had boughs breaking on trees under the weight of fruit,” Butterfield continued. “It’s probably going to be the best vintage since 2018.”

With more than 20 years in the business, he declared: “It might even be the best in my cider-making lifetime. We’re looking at an incredibly special year.”

The National Association of Cider Makers (NACM) says the warm spring and summer have produced apples “full of rich flavours and natural sweetness”, despite the fact that the reduced rainfall means the fruit is slightly smaller than average.

“I’ve heard from cider makers and growers that the sugar and tannin levels are very high, which means the quality of the fruit will be outstanding,” said the NACM chair, David Sheppy, who is also the managing director of Sheppy’s Cider. “It is going to be a good year for quality.”

The record-breaking summer temperatures this year that contributed to the abundance of apples was made about 70 times more likely because of human-induced climate change, the Met Office concluded in an analysis published earlier this month. The mean temperature across June, July and August was 16.1C (70F), significantly above the current record of 15.8C set in 2018, with the country also seeing four heatwaves across a single season.

Sheppy, whose family has 36 hectares (90 acres) of orchards in Somerset, said the trees had “suffered a little bit”. Mature trees “don’t mind a dry spell”, he said, but the stress of the dry weather meant he had observed a small number that had split and lost their branches.

Cider-producers have moved to make the most of this year’s bumper crop. Sandford Orchards, which makes Devon Red cider, has installed eight new 50,000-litre (11,000-gallon) tanks and Butterfield is particularly excited to have lots of Tremlett’s Bitter apples, meaning Sandford Orchards can bottle a single variety for the first time in seven years.

He describes their “leathery and marmaladey” notes and “rich natural sweetness”.

There is also good news for perry drinkers after last year’s disaster. Albert Johnson, director of Ross-on-Wye Cider & Perry Company bills it as a “bounceback year”.

“Last year was so bad for perry pears, probably over half the crop was wiped out by the bad conditions in the growing season,” he said.

It is a different story this year. “If anything, the pear sugars are up even more than the apples, and there’s plenty of them. So it’s a really exciting year for perry.”

Industry figures show that while UK cider sales edged up slightly to £3.1bn in 2024, the overall amount drunk declined by about 3% to 676m litres. Sheppy, the sixth generation of his family to work in cider-making, said the industry “had been in decline, but it’s picking up again”.

“It’s coming back,” he said of the sector, which supports about 65,000 jobs. “There’s a lot of innovation and new ideas, both around reducing alcohol content but also at the higher end … to appeal to the modern drinker.

“Like a lot of industries, cider goes through phases. But there’s a strong passion for the industry in this country. It’s a close connection with the land and farmers.”

Sheppy’s harvest started at the end of last week. “We grow 40 different varieties of apples,” he said. “The earliest ones are ripening now but the main cider apple varieties, like Dabinett, Harry Masters and Yarlington Mill, are ready mid- to late October, early November. That’s the key time.”

But even if this year is one to remember, Sheppy is keen to point out that the industry doesn’t have “bad years”, only “bad harvests”.

“It’s not like when you get a wetter harvest, the quality is not as good, because that’s all in the blending process. We can blend a good year with a bad year and maintain the quality, that is part of the art of being a cider maker.”