Latest news with #ColinTheCaterpillar
The Sun
12-07-2025
- Business
- The Sun
How you could pay 25% more for Colin the Caterpillar cake in M&S cafe than from store just yards away
THE cost of Colin the Caterpillar is creeping up in M&S cafes – as The Sun on Sunday reveals you pay up to 25 per cent more for the cake than when it's bought in store. In Maidstone, Kent, the price of the mini-roll was £1.80 in the food aisles — but just a few feet away in the cafe, they sell for £2.25. 4 4 4 It was the same story in Durham, Wilmslow, Cheshire and Pudsey, West Yorks, where the 52g cake cost 45p more to sit down and eat. And if you pick up a small Colin with your petrol, you can fork out ten per cent more than in the shop. At Leeds Central and London Bridge stations, they also cost £2.25. Consumer expert Martyn James said: 'In challenging times, we all need a little consistency. So why is the iconic Colin the Caterpillar costing more depending on where you find him? 'It's bonkers to see such a price hike for the pleasure of dining with Colin in the same building where he's much cheaper to take home. 'So come on M&S, keep Colin consistently priced so we can all enjoy him.' We investigated the cost of Colin across the country and found that prices varied in supermarkets, cafes and petrol stations. And while there was little difference in price between locations, you pay a premium for the cake in London's Lewisham, where the price of a 52g mini Colin was £1.90 — 10p more than in other M&S stores. In the M&S superstore in Durham's Arnison Centre, shoppers were surprised to find out they were being charged more for Colin in the cafe. The tiny sweet treat is £2.25 if you want to eat it at a table upstairs, but just £1.80 in the shop downstairs. Courier Mario Condurache, 27, is dad to three-year-old Andrei. Mario said: 'It's very greedy of M&S to charge so much more in the cafe. It's all about the profit. I have a little one and you are forced to fork out more money. It's a rip-off. 'This would definitely stop me from going to the cafe.' Grandmother Maureen Waugh, 69, said: 'I think it's greedy, especially when M&S markets itself as family-friendly. I have grandkids, and it would put me off buying mini Colins. It makes you wonder what else is more expensive in the cafe. I'm shocked.' Launched by M&S in 1990, Colin soon became a national favourite. The store typically sells more than 450,000 of the chocolate roll treats each year, with 15million sold since 1990. An M&S spokesman said: 'There are additional costs when it comes to dining in at cafes and coffee shops across the UK, including legislated 20 per cent VAT, which plays a part in why some prices may vary to those in store.'
Telegraph
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Olivia Rodrigo: A superstar (with an English public school boyfriend) is born
It is an unwritten rule in Britain that any crowd, regardless of creed or colour, and no matter how tricksy, hostile or numerous, can be won over with the introduction of Colin the Caterpillar cake. Mere mention of the Marks & Spencer larval icon is irresistible. All good birthday party hosts and office drones know this, but so, it turns out, does the 22-year-old Californian pop star Olivia Rodrigo. 'One thing you should know about me is I f------- love England, I love England so much,' Rodrigo told the masses from the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival on Sunday night. That was clear already, long before she performed two songs with one of her great (and unlikely) heroes, an astonishingly smiley Robert Smith of The Cure. After all, her boyfriend, the actor Louis Partridge, who was educated at the artsy Alleyn's School in Dulwich, South London, was watching from side of stage. Still, Rodrigo took it upon herself to elaborate anyway. 'I have so many things I love about England. I love pop culture, I love that nobody judges you for having a pint at noon, it's the best. I love English sweets from M&S and Colin the Caterpillar...' The faithful gathered at Worthy Farm roared their approval. Rodrigo, though undoubtedly sincere in her Anglophilia, knew exactly what she was doing. As it was, the Colin Card needn't have been deployed. They were already lapping Rodrigo up, won over from the moment she appeared on stage in a white lace corset dress, fishnets and knee-high Dr Martens bovver boots before launching into Obsessed, from her 2023 album Guts. Obsessed is exactly what Rodrigo's Gen Z fans have felt about their idol for years; by the end of her set on Sunday, though, everybody else watching felt that way too. Here was a young musician – indeed, the second-youngest headliner in Glastonbury history after her friend, Billie Eilish – offered the biggest stage of them all, and the chance to launch herself to a level of superstardom occupied by a vanishingly small group. The reviews give you some idea of how that went. Rodrigo has arrived in an era when popular music is dominated by solo female artists. Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Lorde and Eilish are six of the most in-demand acts in the world, and all make brilliant – and brilliantly distinct – work while (mostly) supporting one another. Several other women float around that group, desperate to break in. All the while, looming above them is a different generation in Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, the long-dormant Rihanna and, arguably in another realm of fame and success again, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. For a moment, quite where Rodrigo fitted in that younger group was unclear. She certainly had the numbers – despite just two albums, she has a staggering eight songs with over a billion streams – and a devoted army of 'Livvies', but compared to some of her contemporaries, her sound is varied, her performances deliberately imperfect and her references unusual. Besides, she has spent much of the last two years on tour, promoting her 2023 album Guts (it continues in Manchester this week). Before that, she enrolled in music and poetry courses at the University of Southern California, where she was slyly photographed dressed down, taking notes, and listening intently to her lecturer. As a result, Rodrigo seemed mildly aloof from her peers despite, to all intents and purposes, appearing so like a pop star. An only child raised in Temecula, Southern California, by a school teacher mother and therapist father, she made it to Disney at the age of 12, eventually securing the lead in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a spin-off from the film franchise. A musical nut, raised on a diet of everything from The Cure, Depeche Mode and Talking Heads to the White Stripes, Alanis Morissette, Green Day and, latterly, Lorde and Taylor Swift (she once boldly described herself as the 'biggest Swiftie in the whole world'), Rodrigo had always written songs, and could play the guitar and piano. At Disney, she contributed an original song, All I Want, which soon went viral, prompting Rodrigo to seek a record deal. Savvily, or perhaps having learned from the struggles of her antecedents, she elected to jump off Disney's pop star conveyor belt and instead join a label, Interscope Geffen, which would treat her as a songwriter. Rodrigo's early songwriting is by pure Gen-Z: angry, anxious and romantic. As she detailed in her song Ballad Of A Homeschooled Girl, her adolescence was spent either in the public eye or snatching moments to study at home, which didn't exactly make her a natural at parties, but a shrewd observer of normal teenage life. As it happens, she was a straight-A student. Rodrigo was 17 in 2021 when she released Drivers License, a song ostensibly about celebrating passing her practical test with few enough minors, but which was really a gargantuan heartbreak epic. 'You said forever, now I drive alone past your street', she sings, before the typically unexpected and effective endnote 'I still f------- love you'. The song became inescapable for most of that year, and made her the youngest artist to ever debut at the top of the US chart (as well as going number one in the UK and most other countries), broke a Spotify record for the most single-day streams for a non-holiday song, and entered Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. 'I literally wrote breakup songs before I ever held a boy's hand,' Rodrigo has said, but this one was allegedly about her old Disney boyfriend, Joshua Bassett, who may or may not have cheated on her with Sabrina Carpenter. As the press and social media battered Bassett in its usual way, he was hospitalised with heart failure and septic shock, which he has said was partly triggered by the stress caused by such scrutiny. Rodrigo left social media for a while afterwards. Success, and a place at the very heart of culture, was instant: her debut album, Sour, broke the global Spotify record for the biggest opening week for an album by a female artist, and won three Grammys. The following year, in 2022, she appeared at Glastonbury, where she drew an eye-catchingly large crowd and invited Lily Allen on stage to sing the latter's 2009 hit F--- You, which the pair dedicated to the US Supreme Court after Roe v Wade was overturned the previous day. Music, Rodrigo has said, is for 'expressing your rage and dissatisfaction', and she has never kept quiet, posting online about Donald Trump, supporting protest causes and ignoring any flack she has received. 'I didn't really pay attention to it or let it affect me,' she said two years ago. Being a puppet 'doesn't work any more'. Nor is Rodrigo shy of politics – in 2021 she worked with the Biden administration to promote vaccine uptake among young people. By the time Guts, her purple-themed second album, came around, Rodrigo's sound had grown. She has a voice that lends itself equally well to frantic pop punk as it does to monster stadium anthems and swooning ballads, while her admiration for Jack White comes through in the occasional shrieking guitar solo. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Olivia Rodrigo (@oliviarodrigo) Her confidence had expanded, too. After Sour was released, it was noted that Rodrigo's song Deja Vu had some similarities with Taylor Swift's Cruel Summer. Rodrigo ended up giving Swift 50 per cent of the credits and royalties for the song. It was speculated that Swift, previously a vocal supporter of Rodrigo, had been unnecessarily rapacious in insisting on payment, though neither party has ever quite clarified what happened. (Elvis Costello, for his part, was more reasonable when he was alerted to her song Brutal reminding people of his Pump It Up. 'It's how rock and roll works,' he posted on X in response to criticism of her. 'You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy.') Rodrigo, at the time, said it was 'disappointing to see people take things out of context and discredit any young woman's work'. She then had a song on Guts called Vampire, about a 'bloodsucker, fame f------, bleedin' me dry like a goddamn vampire!' Was it about Swift? She will not say. 'It's a unique experience,' Rodrigo has said. 'There's no rulebook. That's the beauty and the anxiety of this job. You forge your own path.' It's what she's done, becoming one of the biggest pop stars in the world with a sound, talent and attitude that is at once entirely at home in 2025 and quaintly deferential to her forebears. A month before her set at Glastonbury, Rodrigo performed with David Byrne, even matching his dance moves during a rendition of Burning Down the House. On Saturday, she sat on Partridge's shoulders and sang along to Pulp. And then, as the final act on the Pyramid Stage before Glastonbury takes a well-needed break, she announced herself as a new superstar. Taylor Swift's rumoured Glastonbury moment got kiboshed by Covid; Rodrigo grabbed her first chance at headlining the festival and made it clear who's next in line to reach rock aristocracy. That calls for a celebration, surely. Now, who can run out and get her a Colin?
Daily Mail
28-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
M&S shoppers fury as many of their favourite products including Colin the Caterpillar are STILL unavailable on the website after cyber attack
Shoppers have been furious after they are still unable to buy items like sports bras, jeans and even Colin the Caterpillar. Some items such as Clinique foundation and Wrangler jeans as well some Reebok sports bras and Colin the Caterpillar birthday cake are among the thousands of products yet to be available more than two months after a cyberattack crippled the major retailer's website. Although the retailer has recently brought back a limited selection of third-party brands like Adidas, Columbia, and Lilybod, many ranges are still missing or offering only limited stock. Delivery times for customers in England, Scotland, and Wales have now been cut from ten days to five, but click-and-collect and next-day delivery remain unavailable. Meanwhile, shoppers in Northern Ireland still can't get home delivery at all, according to The Times. The sluggish recovery has left customers questioning the delay. The website was down for 51 days, and although it is now back online, service remains far from normal. Before the cyberattack, the average recovery time following a cyberattack was just 22 days, according to research published last year, making this incident one of the most prolonged online outages in recent retail memory. M&S have said that its full range of products as well as normal delivery times will be returning 'over the coming weeks' did not elaborate on how many of those are back online. A source told the newspaper that it is more than a half. An expert has said 'an abundance of caution' may be behind the delay, with the retail likely to be rebuilding its systems from scratch rather than trying to save its existing software. Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said: 'They probably did this because the criminals are very good at building malware that can persist and hide in little nooks and crannies on your network.' He suggests that the tech team working with the retail giant is probably going 'the extra mile' as the brand's reputation is on the line. When approached, a source told the newspaper: 'The last thing we want to do is let customers down, promising to fulfil an order in a specific timescale and then not do it.' The retailer continues to insist that its recovery is ahead of schedule, although Prof Woodward said he is surprised at the delay. Since relaunching the site, the retailer's main focus appears to be restocking summer clothing, likely in a bid to clear a backlog of unsold seasonal stock before the sunshine disappears.
The Sun
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
The secret M&S factory shop hiding down a back-alley where you can get a £9.50 Colin the Caterpillar cake for £3
WHO doesn't love Colin the Caterpillar cake? But what if you could get the cult favourite sweet treat for just £3? That's right, now bargain-mad Brits can get their hands on the beloved dessert without having to fork out for the hefty £9.50 price tag. 4 4 4 4 The hidden cake factory shop offers massive cut-price bargains on treats made for Marks & Spencer and other popular retailers. The Park Cakes Company Shop in Oldham is so secret that there are now signs banning thrifty shoppers from taking photos or videos inside. The factory shop is open to the public, and the store is where baked goods that don't quite make the quality standards in the factory head to. So shoppers are getting a slightly wonky layer or not the required amount of topping - but the taste is just as good. At this time of year, bargain-mad Brits are going to be getting a whole host of seasonal offcuts made at the factory, such fruit cakes, yule logs and larger desserts. According Manchester Evening News, who paid the store a visit on the weekend, the queue wait was no more than ten minutes. Once inside there was then another queue snaking right around the shop to the till. For those not in the know, the factory shop doesn't reveal which supermarkets these cake offcuts are intended for - they are simply packaged and labelled with all the ingredients, best before date and a price. Although it's known that this Oldham factory is the official cake maker for M&S, and they've been making its "Best Ever" Yule Log this year, a cream and ganache dessert take on the classic Christmas cake, which has sold out online and is flying out of shelves for a whopping £15. Even giant rainbow cakes and cookies and cream cakes that you're looking at forking out £25 for in stores are priced at a mere fiver here. I DIY-ed a 'professional' level kids' birthday cake for less than £25 using Amazon & eBay buys - I didn't bake a thing Another cult favourite treat is, of course, the giant Colin the Caterpillar, which costs £50 when ordering online - and here, it's just £10. However, it's worth mentioning that he's got no face attached. According to the publication, there are also massive bags of mini crispy cakes and flapjacks for just £2.50, and tubs of mini rolls for £1. Shoppers can also go for a beautiful iced and decorated Christmas cake for £3, and a quirky "Doug the Dog" cake (like a caterpillar cake) priced at £2.50 that's is perfect for kids' to tuck into. Bargain hunters can also check out the fridge section where they can find a cream Victoria sponge which goes for £1, as well as a tub of mini rolls that can be used for treats for just £1. Due to the nature of the place, stock changes daily so you never know what you're going to get there. Also, customers need to be aware there's a strict policy of no under-17s allowed inside.
Times
21-05-2025
- Business
- Times
This was not just any cyberattack …
Theories have run riot as to how exactly the Marks & Spencer cyberattackers got in. Was it up the leg of Stuart Machin's Dobby Pleat Front chinos? Or down the front of one of his favourite frocks, the V-neck strappy Midaxi Swing affair. Or did Colin the Caterpillar have something to do with it? Who'd put it past him to know the Scattered Spider hacking gang? So, at least the full-year results were a chance for the M&S boss to narrow down the suspects, while 'fessing up to a £300 million bill for the whole palaver. His big revelation? That the hackers used 'social engineering' techniques, apparently via a third party, such as a supplier or contractor. Yeah, Machin said they were 'heavily sophisticated'. Even
