Tesco redux

Tesco must've done something right in order to grow so big, but they aren't perfect by any means. Lured by a £10 coupon, my wife decided to order the groceries online from them. She wasn't impressed, much preferring the Sainsbury's website. An example of one thing we noticed that's worse on the Tesco site is that special offers that run out before the delivery date aren't honoured. Considering that, given the chance, we'd be perfectly happy to pay for the items today, that policy seems ridiculous.

I regularly spot shelf labelling howlers in Tesco. For example:

Don't take orders from children...

For the second time in as many weeks, I've had to tell the staff off in a fast-food place for entering into the till the requests that our 6-year-old daughter has made. Today it was in McDonald's, where my wife was surprised that her order was so expensive, and then noticed that extra items were being loaded onto the tray. When this was queried, the assistant said that my wife had ordered X and our daughter had ordered Y, to which I said "You take the order from the adult, not from the child," and after I repeated this, the extra items were removed from the tray and we were refunded the difference.

Pimms and Eton Mess at the Co-op

Good news for people shopping at their Midlands Co-op branch in Fleckney, Eccleshall, Chellaston or Kingstanding: a posh picnic (cucumber sandwiches extra) for a very reasonable price.

Don't bid 99p

It's irritating, though not surprising, that many buyers on Ebay don't realise that "price ending" (that's giving a price as £9.99 instead of £10) is something that sellers do to attract buyers, and it doesn't work if buyers do it. The latest example I've seen is an idiot bidding £24.99 for a lawnmower, only to be outbid ten seconds later by a non-idiot who bid £25.

The clever way to bid on Ebay is to bid slightly over, e.g. £10.10, so that if someone bids £10 you're still in the lead.

Some discount

At Lloyds (the chemist), this rather remarkable offer: one ultraviolet toothbrush cleaning system for £31.99, two ultraviolet toothbrush cleaning systems for £20! (Not that I feel I need anything high-tech to help me clean my toothbrush...)

Free Flowers?

Via Twitter I've just come across www.freeplant.net - a website that claims it will deliver a free bouquet of flowers to anyone anywhere. Weird. I've put in an order, so we'll see!

eBay madness

When are eBay going to undo their stupid zero-postage policy on book lots? How are sellers supposed to get the books to the buyers if they can't charge for postage? I don't know about other people, but it's a massive disincentive for me to list any books on the site.

AND I notice that many sellers are circumventing this stupid policy by (a) listing their books in categories that allow postage to be added or (b) just adding postage anyway. If eBay want to continue with this stupid policy they need to stop ALL these breaches, but I don't see them doing it. Ergo: scrap this stupid policy.

Idiots.

Improved :(

We had Aldi's frozen lamb shanks for tea tonight. A good product, but somehow not as good as I remembered it. Putting the box into the recycling bin, I spotted the words "Improved Recipe" and I understood. In the shopping context, eight times out of ten "improved" means exactly the opposite. People who buy products buy them because they like them, not because they nearly like them. About the only decent Johnsons baby product was their baby-bath but then they went and changed it and we had to go back to Infacare.

My wife gets more upset about this than I do: she really resents it when her favourite household and toiletry products are suddenly changed. If only there'd been a warning, we could've bought in a couple of years' supply of the original product...