Next Up Against The Wall
Posted: Tue 23 December, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Thoughts 4 Comments »It’s interesting to see today that supposedly Whittards of Chelsea is apparently also close to going into administration. Following on as it does from yesterday’s news where Woolworths announced the full schedule for the closing of all their shops (come Jan 8th, they’ll all be closed) it’s interesting to see which other chains are apparently due up against the wall.
Personally, I’m not really surprised by Woolworth’s demise – I’m more surprised that they’ve hung on as long as they have, to be honest. They’ve tried for a long time the “stock a bit of everything” approach, and in face of competition from other stores (and particularly online stores for CDs, DVDs and games) well, it just really wasn’t a surprise.
For myself, I wouldn’t be surprised to see WHSmiths go the same route as Woolworths during 2009 – again, they’ve got a huge amount of competition from the online stores for the great majority of their business. In fact, the only thing that you can get in WHSmiths that you can’t get online (for the most part) is magazines – and maybe greetings cards. Even most of the newspapers now carry an online version, which takes away yet more “core business”, although I guess there’ll be people who want to read papers “properly” for a while yet.
I wonder which other retailers will go to the wall in the current economic climate?
Fraudulent
Posted: Sun 7 December, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Travel 1 Comment »It’s going to be one of those months, obviously.
On coming out of the hotel we stayed in on Friday, one of my car tyres was nearly flat. (7psi , to be exact) I’d only checked and inflated the tyres on Thursday – the same one had been a bit flatter than the others, but not so significantly – so we knew it was a slow puncture.
Reinflated the tyre at the conveniently nearby garage, and went to get a replacement.
In the end, both rear tyres needed replacing – yes, it could be a dodgy upselling trick by the tyre place, but I simply don’t know enough about tyres and wear to make an educated judgement, although I did know they were due for replacing in spring anyway, according to the normal servicing garage.
So I went to pay by credit card. And ended up going through to manual authorisation where the people were asked if I was present, and for loads of details which made it obvious that both a) I was there and b) the card was there. Then they got put on hold, and the twat on the other end never came back.
I’ve just tried calling them about it, and apparently the fraud department shuts at 5pm on a Saturday, and won’t be open again ’til Monday. Now yes, I could have called earlier, but I didn’t – we’ve had other things to do, for one thing. But why can’t they be bothered to call and say “we think this card’s being used fraudulently” ? They did last time something like this happened.
I’ll write more when I know what the fuck is going on with the card. That should be another fun task for Monday…
More Memory
Posted: Wed 3 December, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Photography, Thoughts Leave a comment »The other day, I noticed that Amazon had a 4Gb Compact Flash card for the price of £15.
I’ve been using 2Gb cards for a while, and that’s fine – but sometimes it’s nice to have the extra storage, and at that kind of price I just thought “Ah hell, might as well”.
Of course, for twice the price, I could’ve got a 16Gb card, but I don’t really need that much storage.
In fact, the 4Gb will do me fine, particularly with the two 2Gb cards I’ve also got now.
All the same, I do find it amazing the way the prices for digital storage just keeps on dropping.
Ethical Gifts
Posted: Tue 2 December, 2008 Filed under: Animals, Customer Services, Festering Season, Thoughts 1 Comment »
In general, if I am going to be buying people gifts come the Festering Season, I’d rather get them something they actually want. Yes, it means it’s not such a surprise, but personally I don’t see the point of buying something that the recipient will find to be utterly useless.
For that, wishlists are bloody great – they keep the surprise, but at least you can list a number of things that you actually want, rather than “Oh, just buy me anything. You know me, you’ll find something“.
Anyway, for those times where people don’t have a wishlist, and do stick to the “Buy me any old thing” ethos, I now tend to buy an ethical gift (Water supply, chickens, etc. to some remote third-world area) rather than buying something useless. And so I thought I’d bung up a quick list of places with ideas I think are great…
- World Vision‘s “Must Have Gifts” for projects around the world.
- Sponsor A Tree do a number of Trees for Individuals in packs of 5,10, 20 or 30 trees
- Slightly more expensive is WaterAid’s shop where you can buy water supplies etc. for projects around the world
- In the UK, Garden Organic have the ability to Adopt a Vegetable, where £20 pays for the seed handling, propagation and storage in the Heritage Seed Library. There’s a list of the veg varieties available here.
- Still in the UK, you can also support the Cats Protection League or sponsor a dog through Dogs Trust (something Herself does already)
I’m sure there are plenty of others, but these are the ones I tend to support/use. If you know of any other good ones, add them to the comments!