The first full week of 2015 sees a spate of trading updates from retailers, with none more keenly awaited than the one from Tesco.
The update covers the run-up to Christmas plus the New Year holiday period, but just as importantly the company plans to share more detail about the measures it plans to take to improve the competitiveness of its UK stores and to strengthen the balance sheet.
Assuming we can trust the figures from Tesco (LON:TSCO) - not necessarily a safe bet in the light of events last year - the company said on December 9 that it expects full-year profits will not exceed £1.4bn.
That came as a shock to the market as, disastrous though trading was last year for the UK's biggest supermarket, analysts who cover the stock had expected it to post trading profit for the year to the end of February 2014 of between £1.7bn and £2.2bn.
It therefore goes without saying that another profit warning would not go down well with the City, and while the supermarket chain has become more accident prone than Frank Spencer, there was a little bit of encouragement last month for Tesco from consumer research firm Kantar Worldpanel, which said Tesco saw a 2.7% year-on-year fall in sales in the 12 weeks to 7 December - its least bad trading performance since June.
The relatively recent phenomenon of "national discount day" - otherwise known as Black Friday - helped put a bit of spark into sales figures durign the period.
Nonetheless, Tesco's market share has tumbled to 29.1% from 29.9% at the start of 2014; that's still an amazingly strong position but the trend is worrying, as the company flounders in its attempts to fend off the hard discounters below and the posh nosh peddlers from above.
The view in the City is that the company will need cash to see it through a prolonged period of regeneration.
New boss "Drastic" Dave Lewis is expected to sell off parts of the business, such as Tesco Bank and its analytics business Dunnhumby.
Others are bracing themselves for a rights issue of around £3bn or so, to cut its debt mountain which, at the time of the last results, was £7.5bn.
In common with the other supermarkets, Tesco is seeing the resale value of its property assets plunge in value as consumers abandon the "big box" edge of town outlets, and some City pundits think the company could write down the value of its retail estate by more than £1bn, following on from last year's £800mln write down.
Tesco's big day is 8 January, which is the same day as Morrisons (LON:MRW) and Marks & Spencer (LON:MKS) update the market and one day after Sainsbury's (LON:SBRY) tries to convince the market the future is orange.
We already know the general thrust of Morrisons' plans to restore its fortunes; on one level it is returning to its roots as a low price retailer - it is based in Yorkshire, after all - and taking the German discount chains Aldi and Lidl head on, while on another level it is adjusting to the digital shopping age, as it belatedly rolls out its online offering.
December's numbers from Kantar Worldpanel were not encouraging as Morrisons was the worst performer of the big chains, with sales falling by 3.2% in the three months to 7 December against 2.5% in the three months to 9 November.
Morrisons wrote down the value of its retail estate by around £700mln last March and more pain could be set to come.
Sainsbury (J), meanwhile, wrote down the value of its property portfolio by £628mln in 2014, and sooner or later the supermarkets must bite the bullet and start closing some of their bigger stores.
Big hitting US investment bank has speculated that one in five stores must go dark in order to protect profits.
Mike Coupe, the new chief executive of Sainsbury's has, in football parlance, been given a "hospital pass" by his predecessor, Justin King, who checked out just as sales went ex-growth.
Coupe admitted only 75% of its supermarkets were in the "right locations and are of the right size for our food and non-food offer".
The remaining 25% will have "under-utilised space" he said and Sainsbury's would consider concessions for 100 stores.
That is just one of Coupe's problems; in November Coupe revealed a revival plan based on £150mln of price cuts and £500mln of cost savings, and warned that like-for-like sales growth in the sector is likely to be negative for the next few years.
That just about sums up the picture for the grocery chains. No one is expecting the Christmas and New Year trading period to have magically cured all of the sector's ills, but it seems the best that can be hoped for by shareholders is that the lifeboats are not taking on water at quite the rate they once were.