For More Food…
September 25, 2009
There’s a bit of news that cropped up today, which for me was fairly unexpected. Apparently Waitrose wants to open 300 convenience stores in partnership with Boots.
The article itself seems a bit deluded and it’s not because I don’t like Waitrose or Boots but they say there are 6.5 million people without easy access to a Waitrose shop.
Hold on a second. Seven million? I’ve added some 500k on my own because there are probably more. Manchester doesn’t even have a Waitrose unless you count Cheadle Hulme, which is technically not Manchester. And they don’t deliver to the area either – or maybe just the post codes that I’ve tried.
I’d be all for a Waitrose of some sort because their food is lovely. What’s strange is that they do advertise in our local edition of the Metro and have been doing it for a while now but you would have to go out of your way to reach one.
What’s worse is that I bumped into an old article from the Manchester Evening News around the time the local Waitrose opened. People were rejecting it saying that there are plenty of shops – a Tesco Metro, a grocerer, some other high street shops in the area that pretty much covered it.
But supermarket giants seem to think otherwise. Even if you don’t want more food places, you should have them. I’d say because someone can check ‘brand presence’ off a list but I’m not allowed to.
Today I am Happy
September 17, 2009
As they usually say, it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to – or a more rude version which you don’t want to know – it’s funny that my blog barely has anything about how I feel. There were a couple of odd posts about it but truth is this blog lacks any kind of feeling.
For a very long while I’ve been unhappy. And I remember when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I nearly failed a maths exam, nearly failed getting into uni along with said disastrous result, my grandfather died a couple of months before exams and my mum got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just a couple of months after my exams. My bubble really burst there and not even gorillas drumming or chocolate factories in their entirety could make me happy. Many other things.
But not today. I’m not exactly where I want to be yet but it feels like I’m getting there slowly.
Recession Hotdog
July 20, 2009
I was reading through Esquire the other day and one of their features was a list of about 58 things that haven’t happened yet but will soon; film releases, anticipated events, the NFL and everything else but among everything else was the ‘recession high-end hotdog’. Apparently this hotdog is going to show up in classy restaurants as a cheap alternative to make people carry on believing there is a recession.
Apart from the obvious (times aren’t good) the psychological effect of the recession hotdog worries me; it was Rory Sutherland who pointed out that we could bring in the kittens..
“At the moment, it doesn’t really matter whether you are paying £20,000 or £10,000 for a full page in a British newspaper. What matters is that 50% of your £10,000 is being spent on paying journalists to write doom-laden articles discouraging consumers from doing anything except to cower inside their homes waiting for redundancy and repossession.”
I won’t go into a waffle about economics as it would be at its best amateur-ish and make me look like an ass. But the recession hotdog made me think of all the other ‘offers’ that never would have appeared had it not been for this downturn. Of course HMV is still having £3 sales and Tesco may have still rolled out some Aldi-like brands in order to become the major discounter but something tells me everyone else would have carried on as if spending £10 for supermarket lunch in one day is perfectly acceptable. Now, you obviously have the choice of spending £2 in M&S if you so wish.
The hotdog, thus, seems like a bit of a forceful push – you must buy it because times are bad, y’know, and they’ll carry on being bad. Hot dog is going to stick with you for a while… But what I don’t like are the excuses that go by these descriptions more or less: “we have launched this in order to help consumers spend less” or my second favourite “because more and more people prefer to stay in”. Drink more at home, watch TV 24/7, eat out less, and what’s worse, a 15-yo with an internship at Morgan Stanley telling us no sane teenager will pay full price for a cinema ticket and they never watch TV. I’d never get a tattoo either if my nerdy brother was asking. I don’t have a nerdy brother. Thankfully.
But what if some people are actually thinking ‘THANK GOD I don’t have to pay £60 so my friends can binge on korma and Foster’s and then forget it was their turn to pay?” At last I don’t have to change my car every year, I don’t have to get a pedicure worth £50 every month to keep up with what my loan friends are doing, and most of all I don’t have to change my hair colour because someone finally finds it acceptable to just, you know, be yourself, rather than think “I have to see what my friends say first”.
Away
June 25, 2009
On rather short notice but in case I die it was probably the heat!
links for 2009-06-10
June 10, 2009
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"In Italy, the fascists, faced by an oppressive state, were seen as martyrs, and that won them popular support. In the UK, they were seen as thugs and marginalised. Mosley's New Party, which sought to work through the democratic system, attracted a large membership, but once he openly became a fascist and his party became virulently antisemitic and anti-immigrant, that support melted away. Don't censor or oppress the BNP. Marginalise and ridicule them. Ridicule is an underestimated weapon."
links for 2009-06-09
June 9, 2009
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"More than a quarter of those questioned in a recent survey of 3,000 said they would rather spend money on their looks than education. "
links for 2009-05-14
May 14, 2009
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"Denomination Effect – people were much more willing to spend the same sum of money if they had smaller denominations instead of one large bill."
links for 2009-05-12
May 12, 2009
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"The current decade, however, has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration. A thought experiment makes the point. Imagine going back 15 years in time to play records from the latest dance genres – dubstep, or funky, for example – to a fan of jungle. One can only conclude that they would have been stunned – not by how much things had changed, but by how little things have moved on. Something like jungle was scarcely imaginable in 1989, but dubstep or funky, while by no means pastiches, sound like extrapolations from the matrix of sounds established a decade and a half ago."
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