Richard Locke, a political scientist at M.I.T. who is an expert on global supply chains and the author of the new book "The Promise and Limits of Private Power," told me, "Instead of buying lots of inventory with long lead times, brands wait as long as possible before ordering".
Larry Siems: how the manuscript became a book By now the chains on my ankles were cutting off the blood to my feet.
In the summer of 2004, a young jihadist in shackles and chains was walked by his captors slowly into the Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq.
"The independent coffee shops offer consumers a more unique experience than one of the chains," she says.
The report said sales at the big coffee chains rose 10% to £2.1bn last year with around 11m cups of coffee drunk in, or carried out, each week.
With more than one in seven high street stores already lying empty, property experts do not expect the rapacious growth of food chains to fill that void.
The exhibition community – namely the theatre chains and smaller independent venues – clings to triumphs such as The Lorax and will get a lot of play out of its performance at next month's CinemaCon event in Las Vegas.
"I'd like to try and work with the [other] crown representatives to work with some of those suppliers to find the most effective ways for voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations to be a really important part of their supply chains," he explains.
The proposal is supposed to encourage transparency, but neither sets out how companies should monitor their supply chains nor puts forward a credible penalty for failing to do so.
I visited a selection of chains in west London, and one independent, buying a cappuccino in each of them.
The name comes from the early days when the Normandie featured a lot of French films; these days it focuses more on Latin American cinema and the thriving national film industry, with a clear emphasis on providing an outlet for films ignored by the multiplex chains.
