History (recent)

Do you remember the baked-bean price war of the 1990's? Whenever I see beans these days priced around 50p a tin, I look back with nostalgia to a time when 5p was expensive!

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!