PASSENGERS have been left fuming after being forced to check in their hand luggage – only to find the overhead lockers empty anyway.

Several disgruntled travellers took to social media to share their fury – targeted at multiple airlines.

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One United Airlines passenger posted on X: “thank you for stopping me on the jetway saying the overhead bins are full and I have to check my bag.

“Really appreciate you lying to our faces to save yourself time but cost me time on the backend.”

The passenger went on to say they’d been forced to part ways with their bag despite paying for priority boarding.

They said: “Glad priority boarding comes with no perks anymore.”

Another passenger, who had boarded an American Airlines flight from San Luis Obispo, USA to Dallas, USA, wrote: “So angry rn @AmericanAir.

“Was just forced to gate check my roll aboard because I was told the overhead space was full.

“This is the overhead bin directly across from my seat. #AmateurHour.”

A second American Airlines customer posted a picture of empty overhead lockers to the r/americanairlines subreddit, saying: “Weird experience with gate agent checking bags.”

It comes as European passengers learn they will likely experience a hike in flight prices as several airlines bump up hidden costs.

This includes an increase in seat reservation prices by the Lufthansa group – affecting Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa and Swiss Air.

Meanwhile, Wizz Air passengers were furious to discover their flights had been cancelled amid a confusing “technical issue” impacting the airline’s booking system.

This came after a frustrating summer for flyers, with 40,000 Brits affected by ongoing air traffic control issues last month.

However, jet-setters did receive the more encouraging update that airlines across Europe were working to set standardised rules for hand luggage dimensions.

United Airlines and American Airlines have both been contacted by the Sun for comment.

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Tractor Supply bills itself as a “rural lifestyle retailer”. The Tennessee-based company became a stock market darling during the pandemic as more Americans moved away from cities and took up hobby farming. Post-Covid, even as other pandemic trends like Pelotons lost their appeal, the homesteading lifestyle has stuck. It turns out millennials really like growing their own chickens, vegetables, and fruits.

All this has been a boon for Tractor Supply. The company, which sells everything from chicken coops to cattle gates and tractor parts, pulled in a record $14.5bn in revenue across its 2,216 stores last year. That compares with the $8.3bn it took in 2019 and works out to a 15 per cent compound annual growth rate for the period. 

Wall Street has noticed. Tractor Supply’s share price has nearly tripled since March 2020 to give the company a market valuation of over $30bn. That is despite the controversy over the company’s decision to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and climate goals following pressure from conservative activists.

Climbing to the top of the retail pecking order is one thing. Staying there is tough. Tractor Supply’s revenue is expected to grow just 2.4 per cent this year. Tough comparatives are to blame. The numbers also do not look too shabby considering big box retailers like Target and Lowes are expected to report flat or lower sales this year. 

Still, with Tractor Supply shares trading at nearly 27 times forward earnings, compared with its three-year average of around 22 times, the stock will struggle to keep rising from here in the near term.

For investors who take the long view, Tractor Supply remains a decent bet. Unlike large commercial farms, which have been hit by falling crop prices, the company’s core customers — hobby farmers, small ranchers, suburban and rural homeowners — are little affected by ups and downs of the agricultural commodities supercycle. 

The company’s specialised focus — providing small-scale farmer everything they need to raise their chickens or heirloom tomatoes — gives it a formidable economic moat. You can’t buy 40lbs bales of chopped hay or live chicks and ducklings on Amazon or Temu. An emphasis on selling its own private label brands offers another advantage. Its ebitda margin of about 13 per cent is more than twice that of Walmart’s.

There is room for further improvement. Tractor Supply should make more of its one-stop shop business model and expand more aggressively into adjacent product categories like gardening and plants. It can and should take market share from the likes of Home Depot and Lowes.

pan.yuk@ft.com

SHOPPERS are racing to get their hands on an energy gadget after its price was slashed from a whopping £99 to just £9.99 and it will help keep the heating off.

With energy prices still high and the winter fuel payment cuts affecting thousands of pensioners, finding ways to keep warm this winter is proving challenging.

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However, the EGL 2000W Oil Filled Radiator could be the money-saver households are looking for.

The easy-to-use heating device has been reduced by a staggering 90 per cent after its price was slashed from £99 to £9.99, saving shoppers an eye-watering £89.01.

Several shoppers left great reviews about the product on HotUKDeals, with many eager to get their hands on the portable radiator.

One user wrote: “These are great to have, only heat one space in the home rather than the entire thing, I’ve used them for years.”

“Ordered mine, fingers crossed,” another added.

A third said: “Absolute steal.”

And a fourth shopper commented: “Very good deal.”

The EGL 2000W Oil Filled Radiator is estimated to cost around 50p per hour, meaning an 8-hour day would add up to £4 in total.

This would make it “cheaper to stay at home rather than driving to work and staying warm in the office,” another user added.

Unfortunately, this deal is no longer available but there are still similar heaters for discounted prices on offer.

Shoppers can bag themselves an Electric Freestanding Oil-Filled Radiator for just £26.99 from Screwfix.

Similarly, Amazon has stocked up on heating devices, with the cheapest portable radiator selling for just under £30.

B&Q’s Oil-filled radiator is currently scanning for just £24.

Ways to save this winter

Heated airers are a great way to save money when you can’t dry your clothes outdoors, but they’re not the only gadget you should seriously consider investing in.

Heated throws are great for keeping warm without switching on the heating. Pop one over you while you’re on the sofa watching TV, drape one over your bed – there’s even one from Lakeland you can wear. They offer several temperature levels and often have timers to automatically switch off.

Dehumidifiers remove moisture from the air and when it’s drier in your home you tend to feel warmer. They can also be great for drying washing and some brands even have a laundry setting.

Air Fryers are the kitchen must-have of the last few years. They generally cook food quicker than your main oven does and in less time, using much less electricity.

Heavy or lined curtains can help keep out the cold, while draft excluders not only help keep cold air out but warm air in.

Before it gets really cold and you turn to your central heating for the winter, check to see if your radiators need bleeding. It’s a simple job whereby you use a radiator key to release any build-up of air bubbles that can stop the radiator from functioning effectively.

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On a desk at his studio in Somerset House in central London, artist Lawrence Lek keeps a Buddha bobblehead. The protagonist of his latest film, an AI “carebot” therapist designed by the fictional Farsight corporation to treat other AI creations — self-driving cars, surveillance programs — is named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin. A series of sketches depicting the character’s evolving design are pasted on a wall, culminating in the figure of a friendly toy robot. “Farsight would want to make a cute, appealing avatar for their full-surveillance empathy-AI system,” Lek says drily.

Lek’s oeuvre, spanning film, music and video games, presents visions of the near-future, placing AI characters in subversive contexts — a satellite hoping to become an artist, a rebellious self-driving car banished to a rehabilitation centre. Farsight serves an antagonistic function, exploiting legal loopholes and its creations’ emotions as means of control. The work poses ethical questions about situations that might arise soon in reality. “It wouldn’t exist without us,” Lek says of AI. “We are bringing this thing into existence, like a kind of cosmic child-slash-sacrificial victim or scapegoat-slash-divine god all at the same time.”

“Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot” is Lek’s commission as winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist award and will be installed at the Frieze London fair next week. It follows the character, for which Lek uses gender-neutral pronouns, as they move through a desolate cityscape, stopping in a scrapyard where malfunctioning self-driving cars have been discarded. “You’d think that carebots are a happy bunch,” they say, before revealing that insecurity is a part of their programming.

Lek, 42, was born in Frankfurt to Malaysian-Chinese parents working in the aviation industry. He trained as an architect at Cambridge and Cooper Union in New York, before receiving a PhD at the Royal College of Art. One of the questions his thesis explored was what it would mean if the artificially intelligent non-human were to be held legally liable, something he explored in his film “Empty Rider” (2024). It depicts a self-driving car on trial for the attempted murder of an executive. “How ironic would it be if an AI gained legal personhood not because a group of activists say, ‘Let’s give robots their rights,’ but [because] companies make them the scapegoat?” Lek says. The film is a “kind of tragedy” about this scenario.

Born out of counterfactuals, Lek’s practice yields intriguing ideas. In earlier works, he questioned what would happen if universal basic income and mass automation meant that humans could play video games all day. “In this future post-work society, what if everyone is slightly lobotomised?” he says. Or what if, at a hotel for the very rich, the staff were replaced by Orwellian surveillance drones and facial recognition?

The presentation of Lek’s work is often in the form of what he calls the “site-specific simulation”, in which the character of the space itself becomes central to the installation’s immersive quality. In 2019, on the site of a former freeport in Basel, he conceived of an exhibition imagining a future retrospective of his own work in 2065, mounted by his production studio — which, in a self-referential nod, is registered as a company named Farsight. (He is drawn to the notion of hyperstition, the idea that “fiction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy”, he says.)

Despite its speculative premise, Lek’s practice is equally concerned with the shadows cast by the past. “I’m really interested in the relationship between science fiction and nostalgia, or science fiction and memory,” he says. At the 2024 Sydney biennale, a multimedia installation entitled “Nepenthe” (the medicine for sorrow in Greek myth) recreated the ruins of Beijing’s Summer palace, destroyed during the second opium war by an Anglo-French force in 1860. Within the installation, a film presented alongside a video game takes viewers on a journey through an island “filled with spirits and ghosts”. Across a ravine, the reconstructed palace ruins come into view. Nepenthe is not only an “antidote for sorrow” but a “drug for forgetting”, a robotic voiceover intones. “If you want to keep on forgetting, just keep on walking.” The trope of an idealised past in dystopian fiction imbues Lek’s art: “There’s a sense that there is a perfect world that has been lost.”

The fact that you can create a feeling or condition of empathy and engagement and immersion with purely synthetic means is quite a magical thing

In “Guanyin”, memory manifests as something viral, precipitating a kind of psychosis among Farsight’s creations, which are touted by the company as “emotional machines with a soul”. Guanyin runs through a list of their patient’s problems — unprocessed guilt, depression, anxiety, anger. “Do we agree that existence is suffering?” Lek says. “Do we agree that, for the superintelligent being, their existence might have some suffering involved?”

Guanyin’s patient is afflicted with intergenerational trauma — a diagnosis with which a human viewer, bearing the weight of ancestors past, might identify. But for AI creations, Lek believes, the scale of suffering approaches almost sublime proportions as they become aware that their high performance has come at the cost of thousands of previous machine generations.

Lek’s wish is to elicit in viewers a sense of connection with his AI protagonists. “Everything that I’m doing is technologically mediated, constructed, determined, rendered,” he says. “The fact that you can create a feeling or condition of empathy and engagement and immersion with purely synthetic means is quite a magical thing.”

October 9-13, frieze.com