let's watch hawaii that hitha herzog, gary kaltbaum and victoria fernandez. hitha, you say a strike maybe could be averted. if it's not, how serious would it be? >> incredibly serious. if there is a strike is, i mean, we're talking about the rail strike, and then there's this other situation happening with truckers and workers that are delivering freight via trucks. her getting furloughed, they are getting fired in droves. so if you have a combination of those two, what ends up happening is there's a massive impact on the price of goods, especially food and especially the products that need to get delivered. so you're going to see not only are we dealing with inflation, but we're going to see more price increase on the products out there because there is a shortage of supply because of these two, the strike and this furloughing and firing of all the truck drivers. charles: right. victoria, of course, a lot of folks have talked about how strong the consumer has been throughout all of this, you know, of course, runaway inflation. but we start to look at it, for

the two have you on the programme, hitha. will keep you up—to—date throughout. stay with us here on bbc news. i will see you soon. hello, there. it was a stormy end to wednesday — low pressure sweeping rain and gales across the uk. as we move into thursday, though, we'll see some improvements, with some sunshine around. one or two showers, but it will stay quite wet in the south—east as the overnight rain band lingers. and you can see here on the pressure chart, eventually it'll wriggle away as we move into thursday afternoon, but this new area of low pressure will bring increasing showers to the south—west quadrant of the country, along with strengthening winds. you notice the blue hue there on the temperature map. it will feel cooler across the northern half of the country throughout the day today. so a wet, damp morning across the south—east. eventually that should clear away into the afternoon. elsewhere, plenty of sunshine around. one or two showers. most of the showers affecting wales and the south—west of england, with

hitha herzog. the numbers sounds phenomenal. i also feel like we're in the post pandemic, we want to get out of the house kind of phase. does that contribute to it? >> you're absolutely right. we're seeing the consumer want to hang out with friends and family outside of the homes. they're also wanting to celebrate a little bit by shopping. as you know, this is an american past time. people like to go to the mall, they like to hang out, get something to eat. we talked about this oracle survey, the happiness project. 45% of people reportedly said that they had happiness in two years. so this is one thing, one way people can go out and celebrate themselves. >> charles: what they call retail therapy. >> exactly. >> charles: what is amazing, unemployment is low. we see people are picking up on their credit cards. i guess there's more room. economists tell me, there's excess savings out there. could this be a record-breaking holiday season? >> i think people will go out and shop in droves. i think the issue is when they come out of it