Ethical Companies – The Blog

I recently got myself a new(ish) Peugeot 107.  The experience was fairly good on the whole, the salesman wasn’t a total upselling pushy tosser, and the car was ready earlier than planned as I had requested etc.  Then I had the “7 days free insurance” saga.  I had to ring Peugeot Car Insurance and give them various details so I could “claim” my free 7 days insurance.

Well I think is a neat idea, it’s a nice little touch and it makes the whole process of a getting a car more pleasant.  But, the woman on the end of the phone was such an obnoxious jobsworth git insisting on asking inane questions and repeating them twice and so on and so on ….  So I hung up on the cow, hoping that if I rung back the experience would be better.  It was better, but not much.

Anyway, to top it all they won’t give you the free insurance without giving you a quote for your year’s insurance as well, grrr.  I just wanted my “free” insurance, I don’t want an f’in quote, sod off.  Took me nearly an hour on the phone to go through all this bullshit.

Well Peugeot did a good job, I’m pleased with the sales team, but as for the Peugeot Car Insurance people:

SCREW YOU.

Steve

Sales gloom as Tesco reveals its worst Christmas for decades.

Tesco is this week set to announce its worst Christmas performance for decades. The supermarket giant, which accounts for £1 in every £7 spent in the shops, is expected to say sales over the past six weeks worsened despite the launch of a major price-cutting initiative less than four months ago. Broker JP Morgan Cazenove has forecast a 1.5 per cent drop in sales from the chain’s British stores that have been open for at least a year. That marks a sharp deterioration compared with the Christmas period a year ago.

Tesco’s share of food spending fell to 28.9 per cent in the 12 weeks to December 24, down from 29.3 per cent in the same period a year ago, said market researcher Nielsen. Meanwhile, Asda increased its market share from 16.7 per cent to 17.1 per cent, while Sainsbury’s and Morrisons maintained theirs.

Oh dear, what a shame, too bad, never mind. Nothing lasts forever, every empire has its downfall ….

Steve

Jean and I recently decided to take a couple of days of leisure, nothing too extravagant, so we decided to go to Brighton.  Whilst contemplating what we were going to eat once we got there we decided on “French”.  So I Googled for a French Restaurant Brighton, and tried to pick one that was suitable.  Not as easy as it sounds ….  Anyway, we picked The House Restaurant, which doesn’t sound particularly French but looked ok.

I started with a “Boat of King Prawns in chilli and coriander” and Jean had the Pear, Date and Walnut salad.  The prawns were nice but 4 prawns does not a “boat” make.  There was also, somewhat oddly, no bread provided so I couldn’t “mop up” the chilli and coriander butter, so whilst tasting nice I found the starter disappointing.  The salad was apparently ok, in a Stilton dressing, however, there seemed to be something aniseed added to the dressing which is not mentioned on the dressing, Jean liked it but it would put some people off, it’s not everybody’s taste after all.

We both had steaks for the main course, myself a Tournedo Rossini and Jean a “fragrant fillet steak”.  The Rossini was a nice steak but the sauce was somewhat overpowering and highly reduced (same with Jean’s steak) and the chicken liver pate part of the rossini wasn’t the best; there was also an odd selection of shredded vegetables on the top.

We didn’t have a pudding as we didn’t feel the need.

This wasn’t a desperately bad meal, the food was reasonably pleasant.  However, we have here yet another chef who can’t cook steaks to the customer’s requirements, and doesn’t know the difference between medium and medium rare.  The food also wasn’t worth the price, in my opinion.  2 starters, 2 mains 1 large glass of wine and a large Pepsi is waaay too expensive at £71.  Guess I should read the menu more carefully before going in ….

So overall I find it hard to recommend unless money is of no object to you.

Steve

I asked my fiance to take a lie detector test to show he didn’t murder his wife… but it proved he was the killer

It was the nauseating moment Debbie Garlick realised the man she planned to marry, the father of her baby daughter, was a cold and calculating murderer. Sitting in the overheated visitors’ room at Rye Hill Prison in Warwickshire, Debbie tentatively posed the one question she hadn’t dare ask in the four years since meeting him. She looked across the table at her fiance Adrian Prout and, heart palpitating, said: ‘If you have done something to her we need to know, so that her family can give her a proper burial.’

“Realised”? Or should that be “assumed” or even “decided”?

Despite his constant denials and no body ever being found, Prout was serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife Kate. Debbie dreaded the answer because, until that moment, she’d had total faith in the man she had grown to love and had campaigned ferociously to have released.  Prout, a 49-year-old businessman, stared at her coolly and answered quietly: ‘She’s had one.’  In that short, callous statement, just two months ago, Debbie’s hopes and dreams for the future came crashing down around her.  ‘My stomach turned over,’ she says. ‘I felt hot and started shaking uncontrollably. I realised then that everything we had been building together was a lie, along with every word he had ever told me.’

Strange thing for him to say, considering the “constant denials”.  Maybe he didn’t kill her but believes she was killed by someone else and buried (otherwise she would have been found sooner)?

Debbie, 41, went straight to the police and within eight days they had discovered Kate’s body in a shallow grave where the calculating Prout had buried the attractive retired school teacher under the cover of darkness.  For four years, Prout had never changed his sob story. He claimed that Kate had stormed out of the marital home on Bonfire Night in 2007 to ‘wind him up’ after a series of rows and just disappeared. A jury, however, found him guilty of murder in 2010, after the prosecution read out damning passages from her diary.

Debbie, who met Prout a month after Kate’s disappearance, stubbornly refused to believe he was responsible for such a heinous crime, insisting he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. But suddenly, the horrific truth was there and she had to face it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not “sticking up” for this guy, but “horrific truth”?  Lie detector results are not “truth”, they are inadmissible as evidence for a reason ….  Eg they are not infallible (or even close to it).  They are at best a “guideline”.

‘At first, I could not believe this person I had fallen in love with had killed and buried someone. He looked – was – so normal; so believable. Yet it was as if, in the blink of an eye, he became a different person. I looked at him and thought, “You disgust me.” ’  Prout began his chilling confession there and then. He told Debbie there had been an argument and in a fit of rage he had strangled his wife. He then went to the local pub, had several drinks and went back to their 276-acre farm in Redmarley, a village outside Gloucester, and buried her.  Today, Debbie still finds it hard to express the feelings that swamped her when Prout confessed – her emotions were ‘all over the place’.

Again why would he suddenly confess when he had been making constant denials?  Something doesn’t ring right here.  There’s a lot to this story we’re not hearing I reckon.

Steve

“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Steve

Touts strip supermarkets of Heston Blumenthal’s orange-filled Christmas puddings to sell online for £200

Sold-out toys are already changing hands on eBay at hugely inflated prices as Christmas approaches. But children’s pester power can’t be blamed for the latest internet frenzy – Heston Blumenthal’s orange-filled Christmas puddings. Touts are stripping shelves of stock to cash in on the popularity of the experimental chef’s dessert and reselling it online for more than 15 times its retail price.

Nothing new there, high demand items have been changing hands for high prices at Christmas for years.  I remember the days of selling Xbox 360s and Nintendo Wiis for around the £500 mark.  Simple economics, supply and demand again.  If you’re prepared to pay those prices then that’s your prerogative.  If someone wants to sell at those prices then yet again that’s their prerogative.

The opportunists swooped to buy in bulk as soon as the £13.99 puddings went on sale in Waitrose and online through Ocado in September. They are now being sold for as much as £250 on eBay.

I’d do the same if I had a Waitrose near me with any stock.  But on another note £250 for a Christmas pudding?  In my opinion you need your head looking at if you’re prepared to pay that for one ….

One seller told a store in East London his daughter’s wedding would be ruined if they didn’t allow him to buy 50 – almost its entire supply. He is now charging £99.99 for the puddings online. Steve Evans, 55, from Chelmsford, Essex, said: ‘The staff had been told not to sell them in bulk but I told them I needed them for my daughter’s wedding.’ And a couple who are selling 25 on eBay for £199.99 each said they planned to use the profits to pay for their wedding in April. Yesterday the highest ‘buy-now’ price for a 1.2kg pudding on the auction site was £250.

Well that’s one way of funding your wedding.  I funded my wedding in a rather “inventive” way myself, nothing illegal but certainly a bit “iffy”.

A Waitrose spokesman said another 75,000 have been ordered to re-stock stores. ‘We’ve done everything we can to make them available but they fly off the shelf as they’re a very popular product,’ she said. They are likely to go fast, however – and some touts are even paying for tip-offs about where extra puddings have gone on sale.

Hmm where is my nearest Waitrose?

The Daily Mail is “obsessed” with the idea of “touts”.  Anything they can pick up on which smells of “touts” and they will.  But like I said in my earlier post about exhibition tickets, once you’ve bought a product it should be yours to do what you like with because it’s YOURS.  Ok some exceptions like medicines and alcohol etc but this is just a damn Christmas pudding.  I still firmly believe that when you purchase something it becomes your property and you are free to sell your property, end of story, simple as that. So if I had 500 of these Christmas puddings then choose to sell them at £150 each then that is my prerogative.

If you don’t like “touts” then don’t buy from them, and if enough people don’t buy from them the “problem” will just fade away.

Thus ends supply and demand 102.

Steve

PS the Daily Mail is “full of it”, sure there’s some on eBay for £200 but most on there are a lot cheaper. Just because somebody lists a Christmas pudding on eBay for £200 doesn’t mean it’ll sell does it?

So much for the season of goodwill! Postmen told Christmas tips could mean jail on bribery charges.

Postmen who accept traditional Christmas tips have been warned they could face bribery charges. Royal Mail bosses have posted guidance on an official website stating that even in the ’season of goodwill’, staff should not accept gifts greater than £30. The warnings follow the introduction earlier this year of the Bribery Act, widely described as the most stringent anti-corruption legislation in the world.

I think that receiving more than £30 as a tip if you’re a postie is a little unlikely, but what do I know?  In the Retrowarez.com  days when they collected umpteen sacks of mail from us each day we used to give the regular guys a fairly big tip but we were a business not just a residential customer ….

Having said that do you really think that if a postie gets given £31 for Christmas as a tip he/she is going to refuse it?  Course not.

Steve

Have you heard about the new 007 Viagra?  Apparently it makes you Roger More ….

Having said that I tried those fast acting Viagra tablets the other day.  All I got was a stiff neck

Steve

£16 tickets for Leonardo da Vinci exhibition are selling on the net… for £250

Tickets for the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery are changing hands on the internet for 15 times their value.
Art lovers are so desperate to see the show they are now paying up to £250 to unauthorised online touts after official advance tickets, priced at £16, sold out. Demand has rocketed after critics hailed the exhibition as a ‘once in a lifetime show’.

There are now three-hour queues for the 500 tickets which go on sale each morning – but many people arrive too late. Those with less patience have turned to website touts, who are breaking National Gallery regulations because re-sales are not permitted.

I know I’m going to get some flak for this but basically “so blinkin’ what?”  I still firmly believe that when you purchase something it becomes your property and you are free to sell your property, end of story, simple as that.  So if I had 500 tickets for this show (I don’t) then choose to sell them at £250 then that is my prerogative.  It is, in my opinion, unrealistic and downright wrong to try and sell products with terms such as “no resale” or “non transferable” and the like.

You might not like the fact that you can’t get a ticket for an event at a price you are prepared to pay but at the end of the day whoever buys those tickets should have the right to do what they like with them.  If you don’t like “touts” then don’t buy from them, and if enough people don’t buy from them the “problem” will just fade away.

Thus ends supply and demand 101.

Steve

“My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can’t decide whether to ruin our carpets or ruin our lives” – Rita Rudner

Steve