The Grumpy Old Blog

The supermarkets have been at it now for a long time. Once one of the big ones diversified away from their core grocery business, the rest followed. We seem to have long-since accepted that the big supermarkets sell clothes, white goods, brown goods, magazines, greeting cards, crockery, gifts, in fact you name it, they sell it. Originally, and to a degree still representing a good deal for the consumer - apart from their fake special offers that they always claim when exposed on the TV consumer programmes as an “error” – it would be more acceptable if they didn’t kill the local high streets and suburbs with their total unethical, and at times, dishonest attitude to the small local business. But this can be partially explained by lack of reality and short-sighted councils who just see these metro supermarkets as reliable businesses that can and will stump up premium business rates, month-in, month-out, without question. Despite it being we the residents who pay these...

If I sent you this graphic in an email to promote my business, you’d possibly think I was either mad, or of extremely low intelligence. What’s more, with some of the acknowledged great cities of the world not having the letter “A” in their name – London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Hong Kong, Beijing, Delhi, Mexico City, Toronto, Moscow, Edinburgh, Berlin, Rome, Boston  - I could go on – you really would question the use of this at all, apart from irritation that I sent it to your in-box in the first place. At the time I wrote this, it had been doing the rounds on facebook courtesy of Power 95.3 Radio, with the statement “ This one is hard ” (I'd hate to see something they class as easy) added by the social network manager at the station. It had received no fewer than 260,000 ‘comments’ and, believe it or not, 30,000 ‘likes’ – that’s over a quarter of a million people reached, many presumably of average or better intelligence, who thought it worthy of sharing this nonsense...

The opening chorus lines of the first song the pop group I was in played in public when I was at college. A one-hit wonder by a group called Jigsaw I believe, if memory serves me right. But I digress. Being chased and nagged by a company to buy their goods or services really is irritating. It’s similar to when you open your email to find a “Dear Beneficiary” scam email from one of the tens of thousands of sons or daughters of the Nigerian Oil Ambassador who has picked you, from one of 65 million Britons, as fitting to receive $12million absolutely free. I receive a physical piece of mail from Sky once a fortnight. Not to mention the pieces that fall out of the supplements and into the bin (recycle of course) from the Sunday Times every week. While I have their phone and broadband services (please note that other suppliers are available, not that I would touch some of them with a barge pole), I elected not to bother with their TV. I felt that it was more cost effective to wat...