Woollies has actually done pretty well to build two businesses, its EUK wholesale operation which supplies music and DVDs to other retailers and the 2 Entertain DVD joint venture with the BBC.
The trouble is that the stores, despite their prime high street sites, lose most of the money
Baugur, which seems to have endless resources to invest in UK retail businesses, backed Walker when he returned three years ago to the Iceland frozen food business he founded.
Iceland could certainly make good use of many Woollies sites and Walker would find a ready stream of buyers for any he didn't want.
As things stand he's made a low-ball offer for the retail business and wants the rest of Woolworths, the DVD operations, to take on the company's debt and pension fund liabilities.
Former Focus DIY CEO Steve Johnson is due to join Woollies as CEO in September but, just like Fru Hazlitt at Capital Radio, he could find that the company is snatched away before he has time to get his feet under the desk.
But, like Hazlitt, he'll find himself richer and possibly wiser.
It's the energy market, stupid
2008 began as the year of the credit crunch but, although lending problems around the world remain, it now looks as though the banks are succeeding in finding buyers for the toxic debt they took on from the US housing market.
One sign of this is the growing belief that Royal Bank of Scotland, which raised £12bn in extra capital from its shareholders earlier this year, won't be selling its insurance businesses Direct Line and Churchill after all.
These were put on the auction block at the same time as the rights issue to mollify shareholders but some observers, including this column, always doubted that RBS CEO Sir Fred Goodwin really wanted to sell them.
Now it looks as though he doesn't have to, although if anyone offered the asking price of £7bn cash Fred would be put on the spot.
But the real story of 2008 is the energy market. The price of oil may be tumbling (down to around $113 a barrel from a peak of $147) but the question of energy supply is exercising governments and businesses around the world.
The firm line taken by EU leaders over Russia's invasion of Georgia (although you have to acknowledge that the Georgians were asking for it, tweaking the bear's ears in such a rash manner) is mostly to do with the oil and gas pipelines that run through Georgia from Central Asia to Europe.
The last thing anyone in Europe wants is the energy-rich Russians getting their paws on even more energy supplies.
The energy issue is also stimulating what amounts to another industrial revolution: high prices and political need prompting oil companies to find ways of extracting oil and gas from fields, particularly in North America, that were previously regarded as either too expensive or politically incorrect (or both) to exploit.
Moves like these, and the sharp slowdown in the world economy, have certainly put the wind up the OPEC oil producing cartel, which is already making veiled threats about restricting supply to maintain high prices.
It will be years before these fields come on stream but the US, which may well revert to one of its periodic phases of isolationism after the forthcoming Presidential election, seems to be serious about kicking its habit of oil dependency on unreliable allies and political opponents.
It's a pity the UK didn't learn the same lessons when the North Sea oil and gas bonanza was at its peak.
Does inflation really matter so much?
UK inflation is currently running at 4.4% and everyone expects it to hit or even exceed 5% in the near future.
But with oil prices falling and food inflation coming off the boil there seems to be a consensus that it will fall sharply next year as these big increases drop out of the index.
Logically, therefore, there is no reason why the Bank of England can't cut interest rates now.
Inflation has benefits as well as disadvantages. For a start it cuts personal indebtedness, one of the big problems for the UK economy.
It also allows some companies to push up prices, thereby restoring their profits and balance sheets.
Cuts in interest rates take several months to have an effect anyway so, if Mervyn King at the Bank of England was so minded, he could cut now, safe in the knowledge that nothing much would happen until inflation was coming off the boil anyway.
He probably won't, of course, preferring to take the view that the market got us into this fix (aided and abetted by the bankers) so the market can get us out.
As the unemployment figures begin to rise such inactivity is looking anything but masterly.
Online ad boom slowing for newspapers
Well, it is for a number of the mid-sized US papers anyway.
Three publishers, Tribune, Lee Enterprises and E.W.Scripps, have recently reported declines in web advertising although US papers as a whole are seeing online revenue growth.
Even theinternet, it would appear, is subject to the old laws of supply and demand and there are so many advertising opportunities out there that prices and yields are under permanent pressure.
This may cause a shiver or two in the UK newspaper sector, with online investment just about the only strategy in town for embattled publishers such as Trinity Mirror.
The trouble is that, as the readership of tabloid titles drifts away, the pulling power of the brand online reduces too.
As ever, it's the brands with the deepest pockets -- like Associated and News International -- which will succeed.