An Ipswich Shopper

Blinds direct -- pulling the wool

2011-06-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

DirectBlinds have quite a nice website. But something is wrong with the website. I use Amazon all the time; I have never used that site before.

I ordered a blind a few weeks ago. I entered 106 cm width, or 3 feet+ in real money, expecting made to measure. So I was rather surprised to get a blind just over a foot wide.

Naturally I wondered whether I had had a "senior moment" and entered the wrong value. I did not think I could have done; but of course you doubt yourself under such circumstances.

But then I went to the site last week, entered those measurements again, pressed "Get price", then "Add item to shopping cart" and found that the site then altered the width down, silently, on the next page by a number of centimetres, although not to the same extent as in my first go!

This made me suppose that they must in fact be selling standard sizes. So I wrote to them asking for a refund (why not, if it is a standard size blind?)

They wrote back today, refusing, on the grounds that it was made to measure. So I tried again -- and today the widths remain exactly as I input them at 106 cm.

Indeed if I fiddle change "recess size" to "exact size", the width still remains exactly at 106cms (which sounds a little odd - aren't these supposed to change to allow some headroom in the former case?)

But I'm not barmy here. There's no way that I can use this site three times and get three different results, if the site is working correctly. I may not be quite certain about what I did a couple of weeks ago; but I am very certain that the site did one thing last week and a different thing today. I would imagine that the code that adjusts width for "recess size" and "exact size" is defective in some way.

Of course I can't prove any of this, and the sum of money is too small for me to spend a lot more time on it. They sent me a very nice blind, it is true. But because it is the wrong size -- and not, I am now sure, because of any error by me -- I shall have to consign it to landfill. Not a good experience.

Avoid these people. And if you do use them, check and recheck the measurements on the order after each click. Because sometimes ... they silently change them. I would never have bought a blind 43 cm wide -- but the order did say that was the width. Be alert ... or lose money.

Plumb Center -- the place to go

2011-03-21T06:06:00.001-07:00

I've got a bath tap that's playing up. Taking it apart, I find the brass core of the tap seems to have a problem. I go up, carrying the duff item, to B&Q, and what's on sale isn't really what I need.

Foolishly I go to Plumbase next, of whom I have written before. I show the brass widget to the man on duty, and ask him if he has a replacement. He walks off and returns carrying replacement tap units. He doesn't even examine the brass widget. Then he tells me that spares are not made for this part. And then he then tries to tell me, with a "let's see if I can kid this guy along" look on his face, that the taps on my bath operate in different directions. Fortunately I know better and realise what is going on.

Out I go, and up to Plumb Center in Derby Road. The assistant takes the widget and tries to fit it to a tap they have there on the counter for the purpose. It doesn't fit, and he tells me that it is clearly an unusual size. He then gives me advice to try B&Q, as having the widest range, and some info on what to look for. In short he does his best to help me.

Well done Plumb Center.

No returns at the Asda Carphone warehouse?

2011-02-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

Funny experience today. I went and bought a smartphone at the Carphone Warehouse near Asda. Once I'd got it home and charged it up, I made a first call ... and found I got buzzing when I spoke. It's the old "short-circuit" bug that some phones have.

I take it back, and they demand I prove to them that there is a problem. This is a bit weird -- if I haven't got a problem then why am I there? -- but I do my best. Of course it's nearly impossible in the noisy showroom to hear yourself, never mind a buzz. I do produce the effect eventually -- but am told that since I'm calling an ansaphone, it might be the ansaphone (!).

I get refused a return or exchange! I ask for the manager and am told he is in tomorrow.

I recommend we avoid these people. Who needs an argument when returning defective goods?

Good service at XL Windows

2011-02-26T11:10:00.000-08:00

Don't you just hate dealing with double-glazing people? I've seen them all. There's the majors (people like Anglian Windows) who won't give you any idea on price until a salesman comes "to measure up", and promptly sits there for hour after hour beating your ear until -- in desperation -- you fling him out, quoteless. Or there's the small players who aren't that much good. And one and all seem to be out to cheat you.

Of course you can go to B&Q and look at the windows on offer there. That will give you a pretty good idea of what costs what. It is not actually very difficult to fit these things -- but if you are not very handy, you'd really rather have someone do it for you.

For years I've rather hopelessly tried to get my house done, and always been put off by the sheer difficulty of dealing with the shysters and swindlers. But I'm finally getting there.

If you want plastic windows, tho, XL Windows seem to be OK. They have an online calculator, which means you can work out precisely what it will cost. The prices are not very sensitive to size, which is natural (and casts an interesting light on the demand of major companies to "send someone to measure up").

The prices charged are about double what the frame alone would cost to buy from B&Q, although no doubt they get them wholesale. Then there is the glazing and the fitting and, of course, a reasonable profit. Standard retail mark-up on anything is 50%, and that seems to be about what they're charging.

I've had a set of sliding doors, a door and three windows done so far, in two chunks. It takes 6-8 weeks to get the items made, and they then fit them fairly quickly. They don't ask for any money up front. The quality of the fitting is good, and it took a morning to fit the door plus three windows.

They're also responsive to what customers want, and easy to deal with. They even will deal with you by email. Once you agree a price, someone does come round to measure, which just takes minutes.

So ... consider them recommended. My experiences so far have been pretty good.

Ipswich Electrician

2010-11-12T01:08:00.000-08:00

I needed an electrician to stick a light in the loft and a switch on the landing. I found ipswichelectrician.com online, and it looked impressive, although there was no postal address -- which I believe is not allowed these days. There's a Facebook page here. He also came out on a Saturday, which was useful. His name is J. Stanojevic, although he's clearly lived in Suffolk a long time and there was no language issue. He seemed to know what he was doing. When he had to go off for parts, he was only gone 15 minutes. He did work rather slowly, but it was a fixed price job.

But it wasn't that good an experience. He did put the light in the loft, but then left it with one bulb not functioning. It was necessary for me to point this out. He also put the switch on a surface-mounted box on the wall, sticking out an inch, which he said was unavoidable. Yet ... it's a plasterboard stud-wall. He also drilled through that wall into the next room by accident, leaving a half-inch hold. He said that he couldn't fix that. He gave no receipt either.

He seemed a genuine enough guy, but no good at plasterwork sort of stuff. But surely this which must be an essential part of doing domestic electrics? And ... looking at the bottom line, he did leave me with a problem that I didn't have before. So ... not really that pleased.

Avoid Voyages Jules Verne insurance

2010-03-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

I booked a holiday with Voyages Jules Verne. I took "their" insurance because I felt that, if I had to cancel, at least I would be dealing with just the one firm. Even though it was clearly overpriced.

Today I had to cancel the holiday, because of a medical problem that won't go away in time for the holiday.

So I ring up Voyages Jules Verne. They told me to send them an email. I asked about the insurance. "Oh you have to call the insurance company separately," they tell me. I point out that I bought insurance from them, but it cuts no ice. I enquire whether the insurance company are any good. There is perceptible hesitation.

I start reading the fine print. It looks as if you are prevented from cancelling under nearly all circumstances. I'm going to have to talk to a doctor, and he is going to have to recommend that I don't go. Well, I think he will -- he saw me last week about it -- but he will have to take my word for how bad it is right now. But ... what sort of person cancels their holiday fraudulently? I can't imagine that.

Worse still, I see a presumption on the form that you've talked to the doctor before you cancel. But of course most of us know when we are too sick to travel! We'd get a sick note if we had to.

And what would happen, pray, if we had to cancel our annual holiday -- our one, precious, annual holiday -- under pressure from work? No-one wants to cancel a holiday. In these days of cutbacks and recession, if your boss was a beast, you might have no choice. But I am pretty sure that the Voyages Jules Verne policy would ensure you couldn't get your money back.

So here I am. I'm fed up, because I've had to cancel a long-awaited holiday. And the insurance I bought, far from reassuring me, is causing me stress and worry. Nice, hmm?

And the firm that has this nice policy? Europ-Assistance. Of course I have no contractual relationship with them that I know about -- I paid Voyages Jules Verne, not Europ-Assistance. So if I have to sue, who do I sue?

Don't buy travel insurance from Voyages Jules Verne. There is no advantage to doing so, the price is silly, the policy looks customer-hostile, and the company looks and smells really bad at this point.

UPDATE: Sure enough, the insurer bilked me. They deducted £220 under one pretext or another from the claim. They had the impudence to tell me that their conditions for paying out were "very strict". Unlike their conditions for taking our money, of course.

Suicidal Hotel-keeping in Sproughton

2010-02-20T03:18:00.000-08:00

Out for a drive in the sun, and I drove from Tescos Copdock towards town, down to the dilapidated hotel -- is it still a Holiday Inn? -- at the lights. On a whim, I turned left and headed into Sproughton. A right turn, and ... what's that? That can't be a Premier Inn sprung up there, can it? Well, it turned out it could. It's got a nice view over Chantry valley. It might be a little close to the bypass for quiet nights, tho -- I'm not sure.

In to ask about room rates. And a shock -- the receptionist murmurs that they don't do the "old way" of having a standard room rate Monday-Thursday and a cheaper one Friday-Sunday "any more". Instead they have "dynamic pricing". "What's that?" I ask.

She tells me that they charge a lower price when the hotel is empty, and as the hotel fills up, they increase the price, until the last few are at a high price. (I could almost hear the computer algorithm ticking under the desk). What is the "low price", I asked. The answer was £60, which in a recession for a place hard to get to seemed steep. And the "high price"? It could be in the mid-£80's. I thanked her and left.

I remember when the British hotel industry died, back in the 80's. Booking a hotel room was an exercise in pain and stress. Every hotel had a rate which it quoted, which was incredibly high. This was known in the trade as the "rack rate". If you turned up, weary, one evening, this was what they would do to you.

But if you were in a position to negotiate, they might -- or might not -- offer you a cheaper rate. So you had to haggle. You had to book in advance.

Corporates didn't bother with all this. They outsourced the job to agencies, who obtained 50% or more discounts and fixed rates for their staff. Staff were told to ask for "the BT rate". Sometimes hotels would ask for staff ID!

The result was that most people felt overcharged (except the business customers, who weren't paying anyway -- the company paid). Even if you weren't, you could not be sure. Most people hate haggling; but this was what you were forced to do. So most people were ripped off.

Organisations that rip off their customers cultivate a culture of hate towards them. It was no surprise, therefore, that the British hotel was notorious for the poor quality, the "couldn't care less" attitude of the staff, the appalling food. By dehumanising the tired elderly couple at the desk into "two rack rate customers, full price", the hotel staff dehumanised everyone.

The result was that no-one stayed in a hotel if they could avoid it. The only people who did were commercial travellers, who were avoiding all this, but even so suffered from the poor quality endemic in consequence. And the hotel trade died. No-one, even now, will stay in most British hotels without gritting their teeth.

Then Travelodge came along. They imported the US concept of the motel. They were convenient, they were well-built, they were at a fixed price, and they were all identical. You knew exactly what you were going to get, and at exactly what price, anywhere in the country.

And they boomed. People loved them. They could be more expensive than some "discount deals" in the rotten old hotels, but few were tempted; none tempted twice.

Travelodge were soon joined by Premier Inn. The build quality was not so good, but the room quality was generally better.

Time passed. Travelodge were part of Little Chef, and that organisation was passed round and round, getting more and more run down and shabby. Eventually the hotels were bought by some venture capitalists, who have started opening new ones.

But the recession hit, and bookings dried up. Every year the prices had increased. So the fixed price had to go, and weekday and weekend rates came in. This was still acceptable, because you still knew that you were getting the same price for the same room.

Then Travelodge introduced discounts, bookable in advance on the website, where you could not cancel if you couldn't come. Suddenly you were back in the old atmosphere. You had to gamble; book 4 weeks in advance at a high price, when you might have to cancel; or 4 weeks at a lower price, when you could not. Stress! Stress! Stress!

Today I learn that Premier Inn have abandoned the fixed price altogether. Instead they will charge a high price when the place is empty, but gouge people who book later. We're now so close to the old hateful system.

Now watch these chains die.

The "new" Premier Inn was apparently taken over from a Holiday Inn Express. It ought to have said something, to the dipsticks clearly in charge now, that Holiday Inn couldn't make it work under the system they are now implementing. What idiots!

What it means, of course, is that once again we cannot travel in Britain.

Still silly at Sainsburys Warren Heath

2010-02-20T03:14:00.001-08:00

I was running low on laser printer paper, so I popped down to Sainsburys Warren Heath to get some. I know they do this at £2 a ... well, whatever you call one of those slabs of wrapped copier paper.

Oh dear. None in stock. A large shelf, completely empty on a Friday night, peak shopping time. I call over a shop assistant who goes off to see if there is any "out the back". Back she comes, and there is none. There's been none since Thursday.

Over to Tesco at Copdock this morning. Loads of £2 chunks of paper there. I bought two. That epitomises the difference between the two places.

As I have remarked before, the management of Sainsburys Warren Heath is atrocious. To allow empty shelves at the start of the weekend ... hey, the idea, guys, is to SELL stuff. If you don't have stock, you go out of business. Even if you don't allow your store to become a cold, smelly shed, as they have chosen to do.

123-reg - avoid like the plague

2010-02-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

I have a domain name for my company website. I decided I wanted to transfer it from my existing provider to a UK provider. I chose 123-reg.co.uk. But I had problems, and I don't feel very happy any more. In fact I would recommend avoiding them.

When you sign on with them, they demand you create an account before anything else. When you try to log in, so you can do the transfer, they demand your credit card details before you can see anything -- despite the fact the fact that you haven't bought anything yet. And they make clear that this is so they can store it -- remember you have done no business with them yet -- and automatically debit stuff without your permission, unless you unsubscribe from auto-renew.

This is scary stuff. None of this rubbish about "opting out"; I don't want to pay for anything unless I explicitly say so. There's no way I want to have my credit card details stored anyway.

But it gets worse. You request a transfer, and are taken to a screen where you have to put in a lot of personal data. You're asked somewhere to check a box to say you have read their terms and conditions -- but if you click on the link, you're taken to a page full of links to other articles, some obviously irrelevant. It's hard to know what you are supposed to read. If you click on the first one, it spews legal definitionese at you -- I couldn't follow what I was agreeing to.

And worse again. I entered my domain, and the website said "add to basket", so I presumed that was what I did. When I did, they added half-a-dozen other domains automatically to my "order". It turns out that further down the screen was a long list of other possible domains, and they had "helpfully" checked some for me in advance, where I wouldn't see them.

All this makes you nervous. These are loan-shark tactics; force you to hand over your details, force you to consciously opt-out of paying, make it unclear what is happening.

Fortunately for me their website then crashed when I requested the transfer. In fact it did so twice. At that point I decided I wanted out. In particular, I wanted my credit card details removed.

But ... they don't want emails from you. The website is set up to make it impossible for you to contact them. There's an 0871 number (10p a minute, and you can be sure it will be many, many minutes of obfustication) or a postal address. There is an electronic form... but when you fill it in, you're told that they thank you for your "suggestion" but won't necessarily reply.

It is crap like this which has always caused me to avoid using UK domain name providers. Some are sharks. One extorted money from me, years ago, to transfer out -- probably illegally. US ones seem better regulated, and that is what I will now seek.

123-reg? Avoid them. Instead consider Network Solutions, or PairNIC, both of whom seem reputable.

Oh Brother! No printer cable at PC World?

2009-12-26T07:46:00.000-08:00

I've just been to PC World over at Copdock. I bought a Brother HL 2035 laser printer, and lugged it home through the ice and snow.

Getting home, I opened the box with excitement. Out came the power lead. Out came the manual. Out came the drum cartridge. But... where's the printer lead?

I open the manual. It says "not supplied". It says "make sure you get a USB2 printer cable". Eventually I find a picture of the item, so I know what I need to get.

Only... it's Boxing Day. I can't get a printer cable. I can't go back to PC World now! So I'm buggered. I've spent £80 on this lump of electronics, and I can't use it. I can't use it until I can get a cable, which won't be until Monday now.

Nor will it be cheap. It would probably cost Brother, doing bulk buy, about 50p to supply a cable. It will cost me at least 10 times that, plus the cost of petrol to and fro. You bastards!

It's pretty bad that the first emotion you get on buying something is to find that it isn't all there. It sort of ruins the moment. Excitement is replaced by frustration and rage. Why would anyone do this?

Of course all businesses face cost cutting. But to cut a small cost that will really annoy your customer? Only an accountant could have proposed that. Indeed some suit probably got a bonus for proposing it. In the mean time... I'm stuck.

Oh, and PC World? Why the HELL don't you indicate on the box, on the display, somewhere, that it isn't supplied?

Taking Sainsburys down-market in Warren Heath

2009-12-05T03:15:00.000-08:00

I frequently shop at Sainsburys in Warren Heath, and have done for years. But today I needed some stuff, and I deliberately went to Tesco at Copdock instead. Why?

Sainsburys at Warren Heath used to be rather like a Waitrose; good quality surroundings and goods, and quite upmarket. Over the last 10 years it has slipped, and slipped. Today you go into a large, cold, smelly warehouse-like building, with dirty flooring, and look at rows of own-brand goods. It's getting to be like a caricature of Aldi or Lidl. Often there are shortages of basic goods; or items just vanish. The shelves are frequently allowed to become unstocked over the weekend, at least for things I look at.

The other day I wanted some sliced pineapple. I always buy Del Monte; but Sainsburys had removed these! Not sold any more. Instead all I could buy was own-brand, or some unknown brand with a bright blue tin named "DOLE!" Reluctantly I bought the latter, ate it; and got a stomach upset. No more dole for me, thanks. Today I wanted some sliced pineapple again -- so I went to Tescos, and got the Del Monte. It's only 50p a tin. So why on earth would Sainsburys remove it?

I wanted some peas. I want Birdseye, as I can taste the difference between this and own-brand. Sainsbury feel that I shouldn't have the choice. So... off to Tescos for these.

Sainsburys bread has long been rubbish. I have no idea why Tesco can do bread, and Sainsburys cannot, but this is not a new phenomenon. When I want a loaf, again I go to Tesco.

I'm not glad at any of this. Sainsburys Warren Heath is my local grocer. I don't want to drive to Tesco. But increasingly it seems that I must.

Marks and Spencers - trimming the fat or shorting the change?

2009-12-05T03:06:00.001-08:00

To Marks and Spencers in Ipswich today, to purchase my customary granny smith apples. But zounds! What is this?

M&S apples come packed in fours in a foam base, thereby reducing bruising. Except that this week M&S has removed the base. There's now just four apples in a shrink-wrap bit of clear plastic. Funnily enough, most of the apples are damaged, and I have some difficulty getting what I want. I notice that less popular apples are still available in the proper packaging.

I'm sure some fool will whimper that damaged apples saves the planet. But this is about cost cutting, surely? The price is the same; but the goods are inferior.

But onwards. On my way to the checkout I saw a box of sweeties in bags of string. Well, I'm quite partial to their chocolate money, so I pick up one of the little yellow bags full of "coins". But egad!?! The bag is about a third empty! Instead of the usual stack of thick coins, there's a miserable three big ones and a few small ones.

I look at the price; it's £2. It's the same as a big bar of Cadburys milk chocolate, and contains about a third of the amount. It's a rip-off, frankly.

Clearly Mr. Marks (or Mr. Spencer) has been at the accounts again. Instead of raising the already absurd price, he's decided to give short weight. At least, what else can I think that this is? So I throw the bag back. I can get a good big bar of chocolate at Tesco for 27p, after all.

I am depressed. I don't go to M&S to get cheap. I go there to get quality.

Years ago, people used to buy M&S clothes. An M&S suit was the standard interview suit. You paid a bit more, but you got rather better quality. Then the market started to be flooded with cheap chinese imports - rubbish quality, but bottom-dollar price. And M&S gradually reduced... their quality. The prices did come down a little, but suddenly you were getting much poorer quality clothes.

I still buy M&S shirts; just try buying a Tesco shirt and you can feel the difference! But I don't buy M&S as I did, and neither does anyone else, as their sales figures show. And it seems that the food department is now treading the same disastrous route.

BT doing a scam?

2009-11-27T01:49:00.000-08:00

In my opinion BT is abusing the direct debit system to try to force its customers to buy its most expensive "all calls included" package.

Sounds weird? Let me explain.

I've been with BT forever, and my usage hasn't varied in years. In some years they put the DD up to a large sum, and I end up with a credit balance of a couple of hundred pounds on them -- which you have to ring and ask for, naturally.

This summer I got a note from BT that they wanted to jack up my standing order to around £45 a month. Now that's a fantastic sum, way in excess of what I actually use. How had they managed that?

Well, they'd reduced the DD to a piddling sum, so a debit quickly came into existence. I rang in and got them to change it to something like what I really use.

All BT paper bills are horrible. They charge in advance for this, and in arrears for that, and they bill over a period of 5 months, but only include 3 months payments, etc etc. All the messing about that goes to make their bills unreadable and inscrutable, which I imagine is intentional.

Today I had another one. This time they say I am £70 in debit. How this is achieved, given that my usage really doesn't vary? The bill is carefully constructed to ensure that the details of the calls are not shown, and I can't tell, really. And they want to put the DD back up to £45 a month.

At this point I get suspicious. The reason I pay by DD is so that I do NOT have wild fluctuations in the cost of my services. How come that it's all over the place this year, all of a sudden? Is there any chance, could it be that there is a marketing reason behind this?

I got to the BT website. And ... ta-dah! I find that their "pay us line rental and all your calls are free" package costs about £41 a month.

What a coincidence. Whack the DD up to something ridiculous, based on manipulating the regular flow of costs, and then suddenly that massively over-priced deal looks cheaper, and hey, someone in BT gets a bonus.

Too cynical? Somehow I don't think so.

I wonder how many other people are being scammed this way. If only I didn't need a landline for my broadband, I probably wouldn't bother with one at all.

Hughes Direct and Miele - not a great experience

2009-10-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

My old washing machine died on Monday. So I need a new one. I decided to buy a Miele WT2670 washer-dryer. OK, it's a thousand quid, but if it lasts 20 years it's worth it.

A look on Tuesday at comparison websites revealed Marks and Spencers were offering it cheapest; but when I went a second time to their site the item had vanished! Inside 24 hours, no less! I suppose imported items will all go up, since Gordon Brown has been printing money. Also they only had a 2 week delivery.

Next in line was Hughes Direct. Their price was the next best. Their customer service is a bit strange. I rang them, and asked to buy this very expensive item and was told to use the website. Well, I did. Then I rang customer service, and they arranged to deliver it Thursday. They couldn't say when, but a call before 9:45 would tell me what time.

Thursday came, and the call came: "before 12 noon". In fact this meant "about 12 noon". It arrived, and since I'd paid for installation, they did that too. Boy was it heavy! They also removed the old machine for £10 - good value compared to the council £26 charge. I was fairly impressed with the delivery chaps, who did an excellent job. But... the machine was dirty on top, really dirty. How can that be, if it is new?

Time to catch up on the washing. But a load or two later... what's this? Water coming out from under the machine? How come?

Water continued to seep slowly but definitely out, even if it wasn't running, even with the input line turned off. Not much; but indicative of a problem. There was a sour smell, as of stagnant water as well. How can that be, if this is a new machine? I inspected the back of the machine; all dry. I inspected the filter at the front in a little panel; all dry.

I try the dryer. It doesn't seem to do much. I wash some socks, and then dry them for an hour. They are not dry at the end of it. That's ridiculous! They'd dry faster over a radiator.

This machine is not working correctly. I don't want to have to repair a brand new machine, but I don't quite know what to do. Maybe I can get an exchange? I email Hughes Direct (although the website makes this hard). No reply.

I clean up all the water, make sure everything is tight, put down towels on the kitchen floor and go to bed. In the morning... more water. Not much, but there is this smell...

Friday I had to go away, but when I get back, the smell greets me as I enter. It's late afternoon but I ring Hughes Direct. I get a rather determined young man who tells me that I have to have someone inspect it to see if it is damaged. I demur, and he says it again. And again. I politely refer him to the Distance Selling Regulations, and ask if it has to get all legal. He goes off to talk to his managers. He comes back and tells me that I can just have it returned, but in that case I have to pay for the carriage to and fro. I give in and agree to have a little man come round to see if there is water.

Presumably this is all really about their company insurance; they can claim on their insurance if it is damaged. But they don't tell me so; and a customer who just spent £1,000 is made to feel very upset and concerned that they are attempting to force him to accept a repair.

I think Hughes Direct must be a fairly small outfit. It is a mistake to order an expensive item from a small supplier. They will only have the one; and maybe this one has already been around the block?

UPDATE: The machine has an LCD display which you use to monitor progress and change settings. This has just gone dark too! Clearly I have a complete lemon here. Even Miele must produce the odd bad machine. It's going to go back, and I will have my money back, whatever it takes. It will be interesting to see just how difficult Hughes Direct try to make this, or whether they are reasonable and I just got someone on a bad day.

But next time, I will pay the extra and order from John Lewis. Apparently they make no difficulties about returns. If you have a duff washing machine, the last thing you need is someone else being difficult. I am sick of the quibbling.

UPDATE: Over the weekend the display LCD started to recover. It had set itself somehow to German. By Monday it was back to 'normal' brightness. This suggests a battery or something.

I did another dryer run on Saturday. I dried some socks for 2 hours; and it still didn't get them dry. But I noticed that water came out while I did so. I suspect that the condenser "dryer" is responsible for the leak.

On Monday I sat around for half the morning, and a man arrived "to look at my washing machine." I told him that I was rejecting the machine under the Sale of Goods Act and under the Distance Selling Regulations and wanted it removed. I told him about the problems. He asked if it leaked overnight; I said it did. He then made a long call to his boss, saying (without asking me) that I wanted an exchange and that it must be the installation plumbing. Then he told me someone would call me and left. He didn't even pull the machine out to see if the plumbing was leaking!

I didn't feel like waiting for a call (which has not come). I rang Hughes, and told them that I had bought it last week and wanted a return and my money back. After three calls I was told that they would collect on Wednesday and I would get a refund to the card after that. Let's hope, hope, that this is the end of the matter.

Because, after all, I still need a washing machine!

UPDATE: 28th October. I waited around this morning, and got a call at 9:45 telling me they would pick up between 1pm and 4pm. So of course I had to be in by 1pm, and wait. And wait. And wait. At 3:45pm I ring in -- and am told they're running a bit late. At 4:15pm I get a call from the driver, who says he'll be with me "by 5pm" in tones that make it plain this is a moveable time. I've sat here all afternoon, yet they must have known they wouldn't get to me for hours and hours. It's now getting dark, and removing it will be difficult and awkward in the dark. I am so wishing I never, ever bought from Hughes Direct!
UPDATE: They finally appeared at 5:05pm. I must have been the last job of the day. So... why did they make me wait from 1pm? But I was nice to the boys who came to collect it. Not their fault (probably).
Only one more step; to extract from their hands the £1,024 which I paid them a week ago for the experience.

UPDATE: They did refund my money. All of it, and no hassle and argument. Evidently I got a dodgy staff member when I enquired. So ... better than it might have been.

Then I went off and bought a washing machine from John Lewis -- another Miele, but NOT a washer-dryer. And this one was fine. It didn't leak, it didn't smell.

I have no doubt whatever that the Hughes item had been sitting in a warehouse for months, getting dirty. Thank heavens I returned it.

Short-changed at Sainsburys Warren Heath - and the result

2009-10-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

I went down to Sainsburys Warren Heath in Ipswich this evening, and bought £5.33 of goods. I paid for it with a £10 note. Unfortunately I didn't check the heap of change and just stuck it in my wallet. But when I got home, I had a look; and something was wrong. I only had two £1 coins, and little more. Instead of £4.67, it looks as if I got £2.67.

I can understand a busy shop assistant making a mistake. If I was £1 short, I'd think it was that. But TWO one-pound coins? I hardly think so.

This is the second time it has happened to me in the last couple of months. The recession is clearly making some people steal. And, of course, the great advantage of this crime to the thief is that once the victim leaves the till, it's impossible for them to prove the crime.

I've written to Sainsburys by email, enclosing receipt details.

Watch your change, chaps.

UPDATE: A week passed, and I thought hard thoughts of Sainsburys. But then I got an email from the customer services, telling me they had spoken to the store and I should take the receipt down there and they would refund me the £2. How very generous of them! I was pleased.

Light on Abbeygate lighting

2009-10-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

Today I made a trip to B&Q to get a new lighting fixture for my kitchen. Except... they didn't have any!

Oh, they had rows of eco-fittings, glowing dimly. Indeed there was a whole section of what looked like halogen fairy-lights, so feeble they were. But none of them gave any real light. What I wanted was something that does give some real light. I wanted a three-way spotlight using R80 incandescents, each of 60w. That's what I had before. But these items, previously as common as muck, have softly and silently vanished. Even on the web I can't find them.

But I remembered that there is an old-fashioned lighting shop on the square in Felixstowe. And so there is, Abbeygate Lighting (although the website doesn't do justice to what they have). Park in the centre of town and there it is. So I drove down there, and went in.

Bless them! They had two on display, one chrome, one white. The prices were higher than B&Q used to charge, but so what, when you can't get it any other way? They had all the bulbs one would want as well, unlike B&Q whose range gets shorter every day. A wide range of fittings, shades, and so forth, and they could order in even more.

The shop is small, and the lady who runs it gives excellent service. All the fittings are wired up, and you can see what you get. If you want a halogen setup, she's got the higher-wattage bulbs that you would really need to get any light, and can advise on what you would need in order to fit them. You can find out what wattage each fitting will take.

After the impersonality and sheer uselessness of B&Q, it was a relief to find somewhere that stocked what I actually needed.

Prices ARE higher. I bought a dozen R80 bulbs for my new unit, and they were £2 each. B&Q were selling triple life bulbs in two's for £4.50. But... for how long? It isn't B&Q that is focused on selling us what we want. The eco-nutters are determined to get us all sitting in the dark and the cold. Stockpile your bulbs, and the fittings that use them, now.

So support your local lighting provider. I did!

Plumbase, or plumb-no-good?

2009-09-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

I need a monobloc mixer tap for a kitchen sink in a house I'm renovating. Mustn't cost too much; mustn't look too cheap.

B&Q have one, for £45, which seems a bit steep; except that they haven't any stock in the East Ipswich branch. So I drive over to West Ipswich B&Q and they haven't any either.

OK, let's go to a plumber's merchant. Plumbase are on the Ransome's Industrial Estate, near Sainsburys. I go in there at 12:30.

Joy! There is a pile of just what I want on the side, at £26+VAT. That'll do fine. There's no-one on the desk, and two people waiting, but no doubt someone will come back in a moment. I expect slow service in a plumbers' merchant; it's the reason why the DIY's took so much trade from them.

I wait. And I wait. And I wait.

Eventually some dozy herbert comes back. He ignores me, and stands in front a terminal and starts tapping away. And carries on, ignoring all the people in the shop.

Some minutes later, another blank-faced herbert very slowly appears, and slowly hands over some goods to the man at the front of the queue. Then he slowly walks off again. And doesn't come back.

More time passes. I've been stood here holding a monobloc mixer -- a heavy item -- for nearly 10 minutes now. Smiles are long gone. I want to get on.

Blank-face finally comes back. He lethargically starts talking to number two in the queue, who is dressed in overalls and starts reciting a long list to him, evidently in no hurry. Meanwhile Dozy is still tap-tapping away, slow but continuous.

I suddenly realise that I am the only person in this shop whose time is not being paid by someone else. They're wasting time, because they're being paid for it. The staff don't give a damn if they sell anything or not.

At that, I feel disgust, put the mixer back where I found it and walk out. Not a word is spoken. It's as if I was never there. But I'm glad to get out. Why should I give money to people who treat me with such contempt? Any business should just have paused for a second to take my money and let me go. These people? Useless.

I had a bad experience some years ago at this same joint. I needed a bit for a toilet, and brought up the old bit. They didn't have it. But the guy on the desk put on a face which I have since learned to call "the faithless look", and offered me an item which he said "might" work. I declined, acting on instinct. Later I found that it certainly would have been useless; and that he must have known this. But hey, I was a punter, and he didn't give a damn. But he was willing to swindle me, and, to do so, blocked out of his mind that I was a fellow human being whose money was not so great as to waste it. Thus the faithless look, as he mentally dehumanised me.

We all feel sorry for people at the bottom of the job heap who can't find work. But then you get an experience like this, and you realise that some of them are overdue a period of unemployment.

Avoid Plumbase. They're time-wasters.

Suffolk Coastal Services - what a rubbish service

2009-08-17T02:03:00.000-07:00

We pay our council tax so that our rubbish is collected. This makes the community cleaner, reduces disease and generally improves the quality of life for all.

Unfortunately the eco-scum have got hold of this, and decided to put a stop to it, for ideological reasons. They want to force people to live with rats and rotting food for weeks on end. Like the Old Testament peasants, powerless against oppression, we can only ask for God to punish these evil men.

A new twist today. I have a three-piece suite which has to go. I ring Suffolk Coastal and ask for the rubbish collection department. These now call themselves "Suffolk Coastal Services". How grand!

I tell them my story. "That will be £26", they reply. And they'll pick it up some time in the next 7 working days. Perhaps I could leave it in the street, outside my house? Of course in a nice neighbourhood you don't do that sort of thing, but what do they care? They do agree that I can leave it round the back and they'll get it from there.

This is the same, lazy, inadequate collection of bulk goods that the council used to run. The difference is that, although I already pay all their wages, they levy a tax on it. No better service; it just costs more. At a time of recession, it increases the price of everything.

Of course in a council estate the residents would just throw it over the back of the fence and forget about it. How nice of the council to encourage that! And able-bodied people will simply borrow a van from a friend and take it down the dump.

Poor, infirm, elderly people... they have no such choice. The poor must pay, to satisfy the wicked men who levied this.

Lord have mercy on us, and deliver us all from these evil people.

UPDATE: I started this blog to record the heroes and the villains I have encountered, so that I could remember who to use, and who not to. Unfortunately I really no longer have the time to do this, so I am handing it over to another fellow Ipswichian. He prefers to remain anonymous and will post as "shopperman". Good luck!

You really do NOT want to have a Barclaycard

2009-07-15T02:47:00.000-07:00

Like many people I remember the Rowan Atkinson adverts for Barclaycard. I always have thought of it as the premier credit card in the UK.

My previous post indicated that I was getting very bad service from them, trying to get my money back for a £200 CD that I bought over the web. I got so fed up, that I demanded to make a complaint.

Now read on!

Once I complained, I was handed to Customer Relations. This was the first point at which I was dealt with as anything but a nuisance. These told me that I had to accept the vendor's offer of a partial refund, but that they would make up the difference. I accepted this, and emailed the vendor for the refund, who ignored me. Two weeks later I rang Customer Relations again, who quite properly decided to do a chargeback.

But... no mention of any compensation for 3 months of hell. So I wrote a letter, making a complaint, listing the 9 unnecessary telephone calls I had had to make, the endless failures of customer service, and asking for £90 compensation. Not a lot, actually, considering their utterly useless service. I got a call back saying that they wouldn't pay for poor customer service, and could I tell them whether I had made each call by landline or mobile, so they could reimburse me for the call costs.

Well, I'm paranoid. When a transaction goes wrong, I record each contact in a word document. But I'm not that paranoid! I don't write down the length of each call, what network it was on, etc etc. No, this demand is merely an attempt to run the customer around. I refused to play and said I would refer the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service. They said they would send the "final letter"; for this is a technical term.

The complaints process for financial things is very regulated, and you need to understand and follow the rules. You need to use this system; but the FOS is your friend in keeping these guys honest.

Today I got the "final reply" letter. To my surprise it contained a statement that they would credit me with £20 for call costs. I never agreed to this; and it didn't alter my views one bit.

On the phone I went to the FOS. These people were good to deal with. I told them about the £20 and they laughed. Apparently the credit card companies do calculations as to how much they can fob people off with and make them go away. A lot of people take it, rather than face the hassle.

Once you ring up the FOS, the FOS send you a form to fill in, which they partly pre-fill. But ... they also send a letter at the same time to the credit card company, telling them the basics of the complaint and that the game is up. Apparently at that point a lot of customers receive a sudden phone call from the company, "spontaneously" making an improved offer. Because I learned that once the form has gone back to the FOS, it costs the credit card companies a LOT more.

I'll let you know how it goes. But it all smells, doesn't it? It's a system, with Barclaycard doing the minimum it can to save itself money. The idea that the customer is valued is clearly nowhere on their agenda. They don't care if customers are happy one bit.

So ... how much money do Barclaycard make off me? Well, I won't disclose my bills, but they get a fee for every transaction. If that is 5%, and you spend £2,400 a year on your card (i.e. £200 a month) then they get £120 a year from you. You probably only complain once in a blue moon. So that's all profit, even if you pay it all off every month. Credit cards are very profitable, which is why so many are available.

A picture now emerges. Barclaycard is no longer a premium company. It's a rubbish company with a premium brand, and it is making "cost savings" by what is called "sweating the brand." That's to say, people buy something because it has a good reputation, but get sold rubbish. Naturally the brand loses its shine pretty quickly. But in the short term, profits improve; and when the bill comes in, the wide-boy beancounters have collected their bonus and moved on. This is precisely the spirit that wrecked the banks.

And this is what Barclaycard is doing. Do the mininum. Use the cheapest, shoddiest call centre in the world -- even people in India think it's rubbish -- and when customers complain, run them around as long as you can, and pay the minimum you have to.

This is a company on the way down. If you ever need their help, they will put you through hell, merely to save a few bucks.

I would recommend every Barclaycard holder to dump their card. Pay it off, and move elsewhere.

I imagine I'll get a call tomorrow. They'll offer me £50, which I will decline (I would have accepted it on Monday, but they've messed me around so now I won't). If I am unlucky, they will then say they'll pay me the full amount, to get rid of me. If I am lucky, they will be stupid and try to fight on, in which case the FOS will be all over them and about time too.

I only wish I had asked for £200 or even more. I only asked £90 as it seemed like a reasonable non-greedy sum for the multiple failures of customer service and the losses of time and money incurred. But now that I know that "reasonable" doesn't matter; that it's purely a question of what they can get away with... I wish I'd known, and done the same to them.

A shit company. Get away from them.

Nastiness from Barclaycard

2009-06-08T07:25:00.001-07:00

Years ago I got a credit card with Barclaycard. I buy quite a bit of stuff abroad, and a credit card company with good customer service is really important to me. This they certainly once were. Unfortunately in 2007 Barclaycard outsourced their call centre to India. I'm currently experiencing how bad things have got since.

Back in February I bought something from the French National Library. It arrived; was useless, and I sent it back. They agreed to refund me, but... not on my card. No, they wanted to do a bank-to-bank transfer. Of course Barclaycard had charged me currency conversion charges to send the money, and I'd have to pay them again to get it back this way. So I rang Barclaycard.

It took 5 weeks to get a claim form! I made 10 calls in all. Invariably the staff could not understand English well enough to deal with me. Nor was this all. Some of the people who answered the phone would say "yes, yes" and then simply ignore the call! Others would promise a "call back" which would never appear. When I sent a dossier of the correspondence, it was rejected as "insufficient" (which it wasn't). I ended up sending them a letter threatening court action -- which has been ignored.

Researching the court option, I learned that you have to go to arbitration first. I rang the Financial Ombudsman Service, who gave me the number of a UK call centre for Barclaycard!

This I rang, and got someone sensible. It still took a while for them to get back to me, but I got a reply.

It turns out that Barclaycard didn't consider it was their problem! The vendor was offering a refund, that was good enough for them. And they behaved as if I knew this and was being difficult!?! The fact that I would lose money on the double currency charges was of no concern to them.

I then demanded to complain, and difficulties were raised; but I persisted (since I need this for the court). It was, frankly, a rather unpleasant phone call.

It's been, what, 4 months now. Barclaycard have been an utter misery to deal with. Avoid this company. You don't want to deal with them, really you don't!

My only consolation is that dealing with me will be costing them more than if they had been fair and decent in the first place.

Eyecare opticians

2009-02-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

My eyes don't seem to work as well as they used to. So I went along to see Peter Gerber, at Eyecare opticians in the Norwich Road. I remember when he used to have his shop in Tacket Street, and he's always been a reliable optician. I take along my last couple of prescriptions, for comparison. He seems rather grumpier than I remember, but he does an eye-test for me, and I get the prescription. Maybe he just doesn't like the online competition! Anyway I order some reading glasses from him (around £60); and I get a new set of distance glasses made up online (around £20).

A couple of weeks ago, I mislaid my reading glasses. So I decided to order another set online. I get the prescription, which is hand-written, and I'm not sure about a couple of figures in it. By chance the previous two prescriptions are with it, so I check to see if they are clearer.

Shock! The prescription from Eyecare is nothing like the previous two. Figures are wildly different. The sphere on one eye, which went from 3.0, to 3.2, is 6.0! And so on. Yet I get my eyes tested regularly. Surely my eyes can't have changed that much in a year?

Only one way to find out. Off I go to Dollond and Aitcheson in Watford. I pay them, and get a new prescription. And guess what... it's got the same sort of figures as the original two. Sphere of 3.4, not 6.0. Allowing for wear and tear on me, it's what I would expect. So where did the crazy figures on the Eyecare prescription come from?

I don't know what happened here. But I don't think that I will go back to Eyecare Opticians any time soon.

Why the Royal Mail are useless

2009-01-29T05:38:00.001-08:00

Having got my bank draft (see yesterday), I wanted to send it to the USA. So I put it in an envelope and went down to Watford Post Office.

The Post Office has abandoned its building, and now squats at the back of W.H.Smith, where you have to fight through a crowd to get to it. There the surly staff deal slowly with what is invariably an immense queue.

I get to the front. What I get is an immigrant with limited English. I mention that I want a signature -- meaning that I need to know it is delivered -- and everything else I say is ignored. I'm pretty much forced to accept an international recorded delivery, despite being fairly sure from the website that what I want their 'AirSure' service. They charge me more than the website mentioned. There is no tracking of the letter; or, in their cute phrase, they only track it until it leaves the country. It will take a week, for some unknown reason, to put it on a plane and offload it.

"What's in it?" she demands loudly. I don't really want to say that it contains a bank draft, in the hearing of the local office pickpocket, but have no choice. I make sure it is insured. She partly sticks an ugly printed thing on the front; but it's far too large for the envelope, so she takes it off again. She demands I write the from address on the middle of the back -- I hope that I don't get the envelope sent to me at home instead!

It's a nasty, stressful experience. Poor quality service, poor quality post, no tracking, and very slow. Amazing how things have got worse in a century, when first-class post could arrive same day.

Getting a bank draft

2009-01-28T04:41:00.000-08:00

It's funny how bank branches vary. HSBC in Ipswich are useless and nasty; HSBC in Watford are nice, helpful and intelligent. Lloyds TSB in Ipswich are nice; Lloyds TSB in Watford are as thick as bricks.

So what brought this on, I hear you ask?

Well, I need to send a couple of hundred dollars to a colleague in the USA. Must happen every day, so I ring HSBC. Am told that a cheque will take 12 weeks to clear. Express astonishment, am told the same, and go on my way. Ring Lloyds TSB, told that I will have to physically come into a branch and sign a little form, then wait a week, and then I can have a draft.

I go into Lloyds TSB in Watford. The girl on the desk produces a multi-page form, which she tries to hand to me. "Just fill that in," she says. I demur; I don't pay people to do things for me so that they can do this. I try another staff member, and ask to complain. I'm swiftly side-tracked; she offers to fill in the form. She starts. She gets to the money field and does it really badly. Instead of $_ _ _ _ 200.12, she enters $200 _ _ _ _ .12. Any fool can see that can be altered readily, and I object. Her response is to try to get me to fill it out. Seeing that I am dealing with idiots, I leave.

Lloyds TSB in Ipswich are better; but they still demand that I physically visit them twice, a week apart. They allege fraud as the reason. No doubt this is so. But... preventing the customer doing business is not the answer.

Then I go into HSBC in Watford. I talk to the girl, who reckons it might be available in an hour. She fills in a simple form and asks me to sign. I can't hang around for an hour, so agree to pick it up tomorrow. Quick, simple, easy.

Well done, HSBC. But fire those call centre staff, OK? And... it really isn't worth trying to do foreign currency transfers with Lloyds. They don't know how, even when they're being helpful.

Getting rid of normal light-bulbs will damage our health

2009-01-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

The green movement is determined to prevent us lighting our homes as we find appropriate. To this end they have used backstairs undemocratic political influence to outlaw incandescent bulbs in countries under left-wing control around the world. But problems are starting to emerge, only a few weeks after it became impossible to buy 100w lightbulbs here in the UK, and no wonder.

Today the BBC reports sight fears over low-energy bulbs. Unless you have perfect sight, it's like going partly blind with the diminished light. The Royal National Institute for the Blind are pointing out how this will affect the blind and partially sighted, and the risk of falls and injury in the home. The Royal College of Opthalmologists says that something must be done. Greenpeace and DEFRA set their faces hard against this, of course. The ideology must go through, and let people break their necks, it's for the greater good! Not that the people got asked, of course. Another report tells of allergic reactions to the new, dimmer lights. Another BBC report tells of people hoarding, as I am doing. I've seen letters on Teletext from people who have tried testing the new bulbs with a photographic light-meter and found that a "100w equivalent" is actually equivalent to about 40-50w, and a forum here reports the same.

A petition has been started at the Number 10 Downing Street site. Sign it and express your opposition to this nonsense.

British Gas come up trumps

2008-12-25T03:38:00.000-08:00

I got back home from holiday this morning - Christmas morning - at 1am, to find the house stoney cold. Nothing I could do seemed to get the radiators working. The boiler was working, the pump was working, there was ample hot water - but nothing from the radiators.

Fortunately I have a Homecare agreement with British Gas, covering my boiler and central heating system. At 8:30am I called them, and got a nice Indian lady who promised to have someone with me by 1pm. By 11am the man had arrived and fixed the problem. I was his third customer of Christmas day. It turned out that the little motor that operates the valve which decides whether you get hot water and heating, or just hot water, had failed.

It's easy to dislike British Gas. The company goes out of its way to be unlikeable, as I have documented elsewhere in this blog. Indeed I encountered another example of corporate greed and stupidity today; the Indian woman was obliged to try to sell me a still more expensive policy - as if someone making a call in an emergency wants to hear that!

But the service provided by the engineers is first class. Imagine what misery I would have faced without it; no heating for days and days, and then dealing with surly, lazy tradesmen who merely wanted to be on holiday. It would most certainly have ruined my entire Christmas break with worry and stress. As it is, I wish you all a merry Christmas.

Keeping us in the dark - the vanishing 100 watt lightbulbs

2008-12-05T17:30:00.001-08:00

Last weekend, the last day of November, I went down to B&Q. The lightbulbs were right in the entrance, but something looked odd to me. Then I realised that there were no 100 watt lightbulbs there. Neither B&Q had any; one branch told me that it had withdrawn them. Nor did Homebase, nor did Sainsburys. I don't know if any other shop in Ipswich is still stocking these.

Now I know that Gordon Brown has decided that we can't have any 100w light bulbs from 2011. He and his friends have decided that they will decide whether we have enough light, and what kind, in our homes. But... it's not 2011.

It's pretty clear that the major retailers have got together, like a cartel, and decided to fix the market. After all, if B&Q took them off the shelves and the rest didn't, B&Q would just lose all that trade. The same would apply to any retailer. And that would never do, oh dear me no. So they all got together in a little conspiracy to deny us these goods.

Fortunately it is still possible to order them online. I got a delivery of 20 this week by post.

I know that retailers must obey the law, however wicked and depraved the people who passed it. But to conspire against us, as a group? I thought that was against the law itself.

Notice how no media mention of this event has appeared. Something that affects most houses in Britain; and no-one says a thing. It makes you realise that only the unimportant news appears on TV.

I found something small-time: Premier Inn, premier prices

2008-11-22T11:25:00.000-08:00

I was staying in a Premier Inn this week, me and my laptop. I didn't need much access, but decided to buy one of their coupons for WiFi access one evening. It used to cost £3 for a couple of hours, and that was all I needed.

Instead it now costs £5 for an hour, £10 for a day. Of course you can get mobile broadband for £10 a month. So this was an exceedingly bad deal.

But it got worse. That grossly inflated £5 would only buy you 256k speed. They had a pipe which was registering 40Mbits; but all they would let you use was that dial-up speed.

I don't suppose anyone ever buys any...

Premier Inn is not cheap, but you usually get good quality. This is an exception; very, very bad quality at appallingly high prices. Shame on you, Travel Inn.

Parcel Force parcel farce

2008-09-20T01:15:00.001-07:00

The internet! A new frontier for us all. Now we can all shop online while we're away from home, as all of us are, every day, while working.

Isn't it odd that Royal Mail and Parcel Force -- the parcels business of Royal Mail -- haven't adjusted at all to this? They still behave as if there would be someone at home at whatever hour of the day they choose to turn up.

The deal is that you order a parcel, Parcel Force arrive, find -- surprise -- that you aren't home, leave a card, and take it back to their depot. The depot is open late, so you have some chance to get your goods. They make it a bit difficult and unpleasant -- they pretend that they're doing you a favour, make you wait in unsalubrious surroundings, etc. Yet every day they must get hundreds of people doing that. It's inevitable in modern life.#

I live pretty close to a Parcel Force depot, so this has always worked for me adequately. Until recently, that is...

Now Parcel Force have come up with a good 'un!

I came home to find a card on the mat. To my horror, it had changed. No longer was it a 5 minute trip to the depot. Instead, they had taken it to some little local post office branch (open from 10am-12am, one day a week or the like). Worse yet, they hadn't printed where they had taken it; they'd left a space for the underpaid non-English speaking immigrant to scrawl something.

Of course I couldn't read it. It was a single word, ending in '..WAY' and starting with QW.

Frankly this told me nothing. I don't have a memorised list of possible post offices in my head. The QW told me that, whatever it said, the guy who wrote it was illiterate.

Fine. Parcel Force must know where it is. I'll ring them. I ring the customer services number on the card. I spend quite some time working my way through their robot answering system before I discover that NONE of the options will connect me to a human being.

Eventually I go to my Yellow Pages, find a number there for customer services, ring that. The staff there are helpful and quickly find that the mystery word is "Queensway".

I stand baffled. I've lived here for 10 years. Where's that?!? I enquire further. It turns out to mean the little post office on the Nacton Road, known as such to everyone other than Royal Mail. Fortunately it's still before 5pm -- they shut promptly, these little places -- and I drive down there, much further away than the depot, queue behind people wanting to buy stamps, am forced by the schoolmarmish postmistress to fill out some silly and pointless form or other, and eventually get my parcel.

Won't it be nice when Parcel Force go bust, and we can have some people delivering parcels who actually WANT to deliver them?

Direct line car bodywork repairs - a good deal?

2008-09-10T04:06:00.000-07:00

Lucky me. My car bonnet paint-work got damaged in a hotel car-park.

OK, I've been insured with Direct Line for 14 years, and haven't made a claim since 1997. So I ring up. They tell me that there is an excess of £125, and no courtesy car. They refer me to Rackhams of Ipswich to fix it.

Rackhams reckon that a machine polish of the bonnet might well take out the damage, and the price be less than the excess (which is good of them). I have to leave it with them for a day, which means a day of leave lost. They don't do a bad job; but somehow there is a dark mark now visible under the paint at the front of the bonnet. I see it instantly. Price is £2 less than the excess; a little surprising to be so close to the exact figure of the excess. They convince me to go off with the car that way. But part way home I get cold feet. I call in at Marshalls Vauxhall, and their bodyshop tell me it's no good and needs to go back.

Back I go, and it has to go in for a week for a respray. Of course I need a car to go to work. So I go to 1car1, who are just around the corner. They lease me a Vauxhall Corsa for a week for £85, including insurance, which is excellent value. In fact 1car1 are very good to deal with indeed, advising me on special deals and to book via the website. They give me an air-conditioned car, although the price didn't theoretically include this.

Rackhams ring up during the week. Do I want the stone-chip damage on the bonnet fixed as well? If I don't, it will look terrible. Of course I want the bonnet prepared for spraying -- what kind of game is this? I say yes, and learn it will cost £30.

Is Rackhams trying to diddle me, I wonder, so I ring Direct Line. The claims line tell me this is normal. They will pay for the respray, but not to prepare the bonnet for the respray (!). In short it's a fiddle by the insurance company to sneak out of necessary work for the repair.

Since I'm getting a respray, I ask about my scratched wing mirrors. Oh no, say Direct Line. That would have to be a further claim, and a further excess! At £125 per excess, it won't be worth a claim.

Rackhams do a good job indeed, and I am happy with the quality of the work. 1Car1 take the car back, without trying to swindle me in any way, and I will certainly use them again.

But DirectLine? I'm not a happy bunny. Their excess is so high that you're paying most of the cost. A respray is perhaps only £200 anyway. Their way of sneaking out of preparation cost me extra; so did their refusal to supply a courtesy car. The price is good, when you insure; not so good, when you come to claim.

Charging me up - getting new phone batteries

2008-04-09T03:35:00.000-07:00

My Nokia 6230 takes a small BL-5C battery. I've had it for a few years, so the battery doesn't take much of a charge any more. Getting a replacement has been a struggle, tho.

My first port of call was Amazon. Lots of those batteries there... until you discover that they're all practising a scam -- ask £4 a battery, and then £9 postage! Lots of stuff about 'genuine Nokia' batteries gives the impression of lots of counterfeits around, eh?

Anyhow, I order two: "Nokia Genuine Battery for 6230 Bl-5C Li-Ion Nokia Sealed product" - £8 each plus £8 P&P.

A day or so later, a tiny jiffy bag flops through the letter box. Posted first class letter post (cost less than 50p), it contains, loose, a single (1, not 2) BL-5C battery, not in any kind of wrapping at all, as if it had come straight out of the back of a phone. The P&P was clearly less than a pound. Back it went, and, to their credit, they made no fuss.

Bruised, I try ordering direct from Nokia online. They stock the batteries, but want a lot. Total order is £35! I order, sit, and wait. 8 days later, I look on their site, and it has not despatched. I email them and ask when it's available. No answer is received. Next day I telephone their customer service. I get an Indian who tells me that the order has been cancelled and that I should talk to my bank. As far as he is concerned that is the end of the matter. Considering the quantity of books I have bought over the last week, I know better. Nokia, it seems, don't care about customer service at all.

I'm not going back to Amazon. I want a reputable supplier. In the end I try an online advertiser again, Foneshop.com. I ordered two today, £23 including next day postage. Let's see what arrives...

Ipswich Hospital - robbing the sick?

2008-04-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

I went to see my GP today, and he asked me to do a sample and drop it in to Ipswich NHS Hospital for analysis. I drove up there, parked... and found that they wanted £2.50 for the privilege. I was there around 10 minutes in total.

Petty officials can be very mean and very impudent when they think that they can get away with it. It's hard to imagine such a nasty tax on the sick -- worst, of course, for those poor souls who must go there regularly.

The moral of the story is that the NHS probably needs to be abolished. It's sad to say, but what can you do with so rotten an institution? It's not as if it is free for most of us. It costs £100bn a year; since there are around 25 million workers in the country, that means each worker pays around £4,000 a year for the health service in tax. Most of us probably get about £15 a year of value from it. You could get a pretty huge amount of care for that sum, privately.

I'd rather have a proper NHS. But at the moment, we pay...and pay, and pay ... for one which is cheapskate in every respect.

I noted today that Rose Gibb, who was 'chief executive' of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in Kent, and was forced to leave after a dirty-hospital scandal, is sueing for 'compensation' (See The Great Simpleton: Rewarding failure goverenment style). In my opinion she deserves to hang. What can you say, however, about an institution that handsomely rewards greed, impudence and negligence, at the cost of our health and lives?

British Gas - shortchanging the customer?

2008-03-10T03:19:00.000-07:00

I've had a British Gas homecare agreement for years. They used to service my boiler every August. In 2006, I got no letter arranging an appointment for this; I rang, eventually, and it was done in November. In 2007 likewise no letter arrived; I rang in January and it has been done today. Not that they serviced it -- today BG call it "an inspection".

The engineer managed to turn off my pilot light and couldn't restart it. This was very bad news, and somewhat annoying. I don't need to have someone come out to disable my system, after all. But then he announced that he would have to call someone else to fix it. "I don't carry parts" he said. "You'll be lucky to get someone today". "You need a technician". When I queried whether the service engineers used to carry parts, he confirmed that they did. "We used to do services in the summer and concentrate on breakdowns in the winter."

Fortunately it was merely being difficult, and restarted after a few attempts and a long wait to reset the thermostat. But I feel swindled. British Gas forced me to take half a day off work. If there was work to be done, that's fine; but to make me wait even longer, possibly a day or so, if they manage to break something?

I want my boiler serviced every year. But in fact they're stretching the window longer each year. And they don't service it, they carry out "an inspection". And then they won't fix any fault they find?

Cunning rascals

2008-03-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

After blogging on the Royal Mail scam, whereby they charge you an £8'international handling charge' to receive your parcel if customs decide to levy VAT on it, I thought that I would try complaining. The industry is regulated by PostComm, so I went to their web site. This said:

Contact Royal Mail
If you get no joy, try Postwatch
Otherwise you can sue (ha ha)

So you cannot, in fact, complain to Postcomm. It looks as if it is just a quango.

Anyhow I complained to Royal Mail who sent me a long canned email suggesting that I complain to HM Revenue and Customs. This, of course, was disingenuous -- it is Royal Mail who impose this charge -- indicating that Royal Mail know full well that they're engaged in a scam.

I then complained to Postwatch. I got back a long canned email from them, which was interesting in that it retailed the Royal Mail line and then added:

"Issues relating to customs and excise is outside Postwatch's remit therefore we cannot become involved in disputes regarding this matter."

In other words, because Royal Mail claim that this is to do with customs, they can charge us what they like?!

Clearly this is a loophole in the law, which Royal Mail have discovered and are abusing for profit. Nasty, nasty stuff.

One other interesting snippet:

"Customers can refuse to pay these duties and charges, in which case the goods will be returned to sender at Royal Mail's expense."

If only we could all do that, and specify that another operator be used.

Royal Mail "International handling fee" scam

2008-02-16T03:51:00.000-08:00

This is a good one!

I'm rarely in when Royal Mail deliver, so I often come home to a little red card on the mat telling me to come down to the sorting office and collect it.

In January I ordered some software on Ebay from a US supplier for $150, or about £75. Postage was $19, or about £10.

Then I came home to find a grey card on the mat. This demanded £21.45 in charges. The duty is merely VAT, at 17.5%, or around £12, so I scratched my head a bit at this.

Down I go to the sorting office. I query the charge, and they shrug and say 'nothing to do with us'. The parcel is presented, plus a sticker on the side, which says that the Royal Mail have added their own 'international handling fee' of £8!?!

And so it proves. A look at their web site reveals that a year ago they imposed this charge -- almost equal to the cost of international parcel post.

Clearly this is a rip-off. They've been paid to deliver the mail. If they want to put a sticker on it, that costs nothing. If they take money for the government, that costs almost nothing either. So the fee is just profit.

Is it really legal for Royal Mail to invent charges of any size, as a ransom demand, on mail for which postage has already been paid? Really? But who can afford lawyers in our country?

I don't much appreciate having to pay Gordon Brown £13.45 out of money which he has already claimed tax on at 46% (22% income tax + 11% 'national insurance' tax + 13% 'employers' -- as if! -- 'national insurance' tax). But Royal Mail are taking the p***.

Interestingly the sticker has two different telephone numbers on it; one is for HMRC about the VAT. But the other, added to the bottom, reads "Queries about contents or handling fee should be referred to Royal Mail International Tel: 08457 740 740". I imagine that HMRC got tired of getting irate phone calls, and insisted on Royal Mail printing this number as well. So they know, and Royal Mail know, that a scam is being perpetrated.

Adam Crozier, the CEO of Royal Mail, who thought this one up, is paid over £1m a year to invent ways to steal from the public like this. I don't know where he lives, but I hope his neighbours make his life hell.

See also:

http://paulm.com/inchoate/2005/04/customs_royal_mail_clearance_scam.html

The regulator is Postcomm. Their website is mainly about referring you to someone else! I've emailed a complaint to Royal Mail, so when they ignore it I can escalate it through their tree of people.

Not so Sage when it comes to Payroll

2007-12-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

Sage Instant Payroll is something that we've used at my company for years. The directors used to do a run and pay people ad-hoc -- often missing several months out. But Instant Payroll coped with this. We also had to pay for SageCover -- £100 a year -- in order to get updates. However this seemed like poor value when we discovered that it didn't include more than telephone support (which we hardly ever used), a booklet telling you how to do the end-of-year, and a booklet with PAYE numbers to type in whenever Gordon Brown made his annual raid on our wallets.

A couple of years ago we dumped it. This was because we had to re-enter all the data at the end of year -- they hadn't checked that it actually worked!

But the HMRC calculators didn't do the job, so we bought another copy back in May. The interface is a bit weird. Worse, it had a bug so that you couldn't register the programme, and we had to ring up and ask for help. We didn't buy SageCover this time, until we were sure we were going to use it.

We ran the payroll then, and it seemed OK. Then we left it. But last week we needed to run it again. And... we couldn't. The damn thing just sat there. Our employees that we needed to pay simply would not appear in the list of employees to pay. They were there in Instant Payroll, but we couldn't pay them.

It looks as if Instant Payroll requires you to run a payroll run every month, whether you need to or not. This is a real problem for a small firm, which doesn't need to do this. Of course if you do a run paying nothing each month, you end up with a pile of payslips for your people and have to manually total the lot up to work out what to pay to who. This is NOT what you buy a software package for.

We were a bit cross at this. So we emailed Sage, customer relations and technical support. We accepted that we had no contract, and that we were out of the 30-day warranty period. But on the other hand we plainly had only just bought it, and didn't want to pay another fee to get it to work (if it could be got to work -- we don't know).

Sage didn't respond. No reply whatsoever. No doubt they felt that they had our money and we could go to hell.

All this suggests that Sage is in trouble. If they had any business sense at all, they should be ringing us up and trying to sell us something to get us out of our problem. (Indeed endless sales calls from SageCover is something I remember well). An unhappy customer can be turned into a delighted customer if you know your job. An angry customer can be turned into a customer for life if you keep your cool. But no customer thinks highly of a firm who ignore emails. I've read in the press that their profits have been taking a hit, and perhaps the firm really is in trouble.

So we won't be using Sage ever again for anything. They ripped us off; but never again. What we've decided to do is to ring up their competitors and make sure that the product will do the job. At the moment Tasbooks and MYOB are in the frame. If their product will help us, we'll use it. If their 'cover plans' give us something useful, we'll buy them.

Anyone want to buy a copy of Sage Instant Payroll?

Direct line to your wallet

2007-11-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Insurance companies enjoy a chequered reputation. Direct Line have just managed to do something interesting. A letter arrived telling me that they were going to renew my insurance automatically. It seems that, without my knowledge, they had stored my credit card details. They had also awarded themselves a mandate to deduct from it every year, again without my knowledge.

I complained, of course, but got nowhere. I then complained to Barclaycard who said "what do you expect us to do?"

I would have thought that this was fraud. Apparently the rules are different for insurance companies.

The smell of Dell

2007-10-25T01:45:00.000-07:00

I thought that I would buy a laptop from Dell PC. I have two already, but the experience has been so horrific that I am now looking only to escape.

Yesterday I placed an order through their internet site for a laptop. The first sign of trouble was that the confirmation email didn't list the specification of the laptop that I had chosen -- thus I had no record of my choices. Going back into the system and trying to build the same system so that I could print it off came up with a different price! It seems to change, within an hour or two!

That night Barclaycard decided to throw a wobbly and block the payment (see elsewhere). They told me to ring up Dell and get them to attempt the charge again.

I ring Dell customer service. I get a robot. I follow the options and end up in a dead end. I try again. I get an Indian woman who asks for the details. She tells me that Dell don't send emails when orders fail, only when they work. After telling her the story, she then asks if the laptop has arrived! Obviously she didn't understand anything that I told her. I query this, and she starts demanding aggressively that I tell her if it has arrived. At that point I put the phone down and ring again.

This time I get another Indian, who asks for the details. She then transfers me to another Indian who asks for the details and transfers me to another one who does the same!

By now I am getting rather frustrated, but -- I have played before -- I remain calm and state my queries calmly and clearly.

I'm then put onto someone who clearly isn't an Indian, but tells me that the order will have died and that I will have to reorder the laptop again. At this point my instincts flare -- these people are so disorganised that I could easily end up with two! She passes me to a saleswoman -- another Indian -- who tells me that I want to make an order. Of course I don't, so she passes me back to 'customer service' -- the same gang of Indians as before.

The next one to come up asks once again for all the details of my order. This time I refuse, and say that I want to make a complaint. I am transferred to yet another Indian, who tells me that she is placing a complaint for me, but refuses to allow me to say what my complaint is -- she clearly doesn't understand what the word means! At this I snap and ask, calmly and clearly, for the order to be cancelled. This does seem to be understood, and I am told that I will get an email in 24-48 hours confirming the cancellation.

I wonder if they can manage that...

Barclaycard problems

2007-10-25T01:40:00.001-07:00

Barclaycard's fraud prevention team are destroying their business, I think.

In the summer I bought a holiday. I got a call one evening from Barclaycard telling me that they had declined the payment, since it was unusual and made overseas. I had to call up the holiday company and tell them to take the money again. This was a pain, but not unreasonable since the holiday company (for reasons known to themselves) had a payment processing company in Belgium.

Yesterday I tried to buy a laptop from Dell. Last night I got The Call. Barclaycard had decided to decline that payment too. Would I ring up Dell and tell them to take the money again. My experience doing that is detailed in the following post, but of course I couldn't get any cooperation. So I decided to cancel the order, and, since Dell were in such a mess, to make sure that the money was blocked.

I ring up Barclaycard, and have to listen endlessly to their robot system. Eventually I get through to someone who listens and blandly tells me that they can't block any payment from Dell -- why not? they did yesterday! -- and that if one is made I should just raise a claim. Well, that was worth sitting in a queue for!

Barclaycard ARE good for chargebacks. But I don't use a creditcard in order to have to ring up and confirm every purchase.

Orange Broadband problems

2007-08-27T00:41:00.000-07:00

Friday night, 8:45pm, I fire up my trusty laptop and hit the connect icon. And... nothing happens. All I get is a message that 'remote computer not responding'. I repeat for 2 hours, with no better results. Same all day Saturday, so I look to ring them.

One problem with Orange is that they hide their contact details. You can look on their web site for quite a while without finding a number, and, if you have no internet access, a number is what you need. In fact the status of their service can be found at 0845-330-7124. Customer services is 0870-010-2462.

I call them up, and end up on the phone for 22 minutes while they get me to create a new internet connection, reboot, etc, which of course fails. Then they tell me to keep my PC on for 4 hours (!) while they do a line test. But *I* have to ring them again -- on their national rate number, naturally -- to find out the results.

I don't use my PC on Sunday, so power the PC up at 8:15am on Monday. Still no connection. Turn off and draw curtains, etc. I then go for the phone, at 8:40, and restart my PC. To my amazement it connects. Evidently someone came into work at 8:30, saw that something was down and flipped a switch.

I'm not sure how I feel about Orange. Their service is very reliable, and outages are few. But they do not deal with them very well when they occur.

Certainly their customer service has improved from what it was last time, when they pretended never to have heard of my modem -- a Speedtouch 330 USB, which every single one of the customers they bought from Wanadoo would be using -- and simply tried to get me to sign up to a new contract. But... they still have some way to go. We wouldn't tolerate a telephone outage of 48 hours, without apology. Why should we expect one for the internet?

Wheel clamps

2007-08-16T02:03:00.000-07:00

Great news today that the government has issued new guidelines (although, when did we stop having laws subject to parliament and start having guidelines issued by anonymous civil servants?) to stop the menace of wheel-clamping. Let us all raise a glass to Ruth Kelly, who has put a stop to it.

This evil was always hated by everyone. It's worth remembering that all things pass. The government does dumb things, which we must endure. But once the civil servant who made it happen has been promoted and rewarded and passes on, his successor feels no obligation to continue it and gets rewarded etc for dumping it. Thus there is a natural term to these things.

When we see some bit of evident madness, let us remember that this too will pass.

GP: Collins &c again

2007-08-16T01:56:00.000-07:00

I'm off to sunny Libya! So I need to make sure I'm jabbed up. I went last year as well, so should be OK! But I need to check.

I ring the surgery. They tell me I must physically come in and see the nurse. I'm at home this week so reluctantly agree. Then they tell me I must do so next week some time, when I will be on the road. I politely ask whether I will be forced to take a chance and go without jabs? The receptionist takes my details, not all that graciously, and says that she will leave a message for the nurse who may ring me.

Rather to my surprise the phone goes 10 minutes later, and it is the nurse. I don't need any jabs: great news! So that's all fine. And she'll pop the travel advice sheet in the post -- better yet. Good service -- excellent.

But... why the difficulty in the first place. Something seems unsatisfactory in the management of this practice.

GP: Dr Collins & Partners, 235 Felixstowe Road

2007-08-16T01:37:00.000-07:00

I don't go to the doctor very often. When I do, I have mixed feelings about the experience. This practice is one of the better NHS practices, but something is going wrong with it. Like most, they no longer bother to open outside office hours, which is very awkward if you work away from home.

Last month I went there and saw Dr McCarthy. I felt fobbed off. I was led to suppose that my ailment would never get better and that it would always come back, which can't be true. But he also asked me to leave a urine sampe to test for diabetes.

When I rang back for the results some days later, they had no record of the sample. It had been lost, it seemed. I was asked to drop another in. Such things happen; they did send me a container in the post -- full marks for being helpful --, and I returned it.

When I rang for the result on this, it too had been lost! But this time the receptionist was a bit more clued up; apparently the sample from the first time had not been sent off, but analysed in-house, and the results were on the screen (and negative, thankfully).

Naturally I was concerned. But I could find no-one who cared, although one member of staff seemed eager to have a fight with me (ah, the joy of public sector 'services'!)

Is an NHS GP actually any use? For some time I have felt that very few of the minor ailments that I take to my doctor ever get sorted out. I get fobbed off, I get 5 minutes at most, and somehow I have lost hours of earnings for very little result. It simply isn't worth going there, most of the time.

Perhaps the answer is a private GP; restore the link between money paid and performance? Are any of these any good?

Royal Mail -- robbing the public?

2007-07-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

I've just come across a new scam! It's a beauty.

Remember when the Royal Mail was established, set up by Rowland Hill? There was a single stamp, at one penny, for a letter to go anywhere, for next day, with weight categories. In the 1960's they introduced 'first class' and 'second class'. This of course made it more complicated.

This year they introduced tariffs by size as well. I've just been caught by it.

You see, all businesses tend to send out mail in A4 envelopes. That the standard size of printer paper; the standard size of photocopier paper.

I just did my trading accounts for the year, and posted them to Companies House, to the taxman, to the accountant, and so on; in A4 envelopes with a nice first class stamp on it.

Today I was in the post office, looking at their complicated letter-size measuring template, and realised with a sick feeling that all those letters would not arrive. Instead the recipient would have to go and collect them from some dingy mail office, and pay some huge sum to do so. I have some doubts that anyone from government offices bothers to do this. So I have been forced to send the items again, again in A4. So the Royal Mail gets two lots of payment for each item!

Nice scam, eh? Does anyone believe that this isn't intentional?

But there is more. No-one has any idea what the new rate for these might be, except that it is more than a first-class stamp, and less than two. No-one keeps stamps of varied denominations, anyway; and no-one is going to queue in some smelly post-office behind people trying to register their car. So most of us will just put TWO first-class stamps on the letter, and get on with our lives. Thus the post office can overcharge us for our mail again. Again, does anyone believe that this isn't intentional and foreseen?

In post offices around the country undelivered mail must be piling up. Items sent, paid for, and never arrived, diverted silently so that the Royal Mail can make just a bit more money in fines. The loss to everyone, the nuisance, the interference with the postal service -- there must be a huge cost in time and money to the community. All this, just to squeeze out a bit more short-term profit.

I don't know who runs the Post Office. I don't wish him very well, somehow. The post should be simple and easy to use. To make it complex so as to fine people for failing to follow the rules is the quintessence of third-world officialdom.

LowCostSpex.com again

2007-07-21T07:13:00.001-07:00

Just a note to say that I have worn their £15 prescription spectacles ever since I got them, and they have been fine. Indeed I am wearing them now. Everyone comments how nice they look. So I may not bother to get the lenses changed in my old ones, titanium or not.

I have recommended them to my parents, and my mother has placed an order herself. Let's see what happens!

LowCostSpex (online opticians)

2007-07-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

After my experiences with SpecSavers of Harlow, I was interested to see what this firm could do for me, over the internet. I had my prescription.

I didn't have the "pupil distance". This is the distance from the centre of one pupil to the other, but it's best to get the optician to measure it. However LowCostSpex website shows you how to measure it.

The form was a little confusing, but thankfully there was a box in which I could clarify things. For ordinary glasses you just specify "distance glasses". I chose a frame, hit the button, and ordered some glasses. Price for frames with prescription lenses was £15, plus ca. £2 postage. Well, at that price, I can afford to throw them away if they're no good!

The following day I get a call. It's LowCostSpex, who want to make sure they understand my order. I'm astonished, but pleased.

A week later a jiffy bag drops onto the mat. Inside is a hard-case -- the normal kind -- containing a gleaming new pair of spectacles. They're easy enough to bend with my fingers, so I quickly get them to fit.

Five days later, I'm still wearing them. They seem excellent. The frames are a little flimsy, but at £15 more than adequate. If you just want a pair for a few weeks, they are excellent. They look smart. Frankly they are worth every penny.

In short I am delighted. Excellent service, excellent value.

Now all I need is an online firm to 'reglaze' (technical term) my old frames, at a good price. The Ipswich Co-op quoted me £150 to reglaze. I wonder what the lowest price I can get online is?!

Addison Dental Practise, Harlow

2007-07-02T03:12:00.000-07:00

Teeth. The only worse than having teeth is not having any. Mine hurt. I ring up a Harlow NHS practise that I have been to before today, Monday, and tell them that I have toothache. They give me an appointment on Wednesday 4pm. Hmm.

More on Mystery Shopping

2007-06-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

It's been interesting to see how British retailers have measured up over one short month, just going about my daily existence. The good have been very good. Even the bad have been polite. I've had no really terrible experiences so far, although there are clearly retailers who need to sharpen up and deliver better value for money. The old adage of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, is still as potent as ever. Always shop around.

Wherever the internet is involved, the quality of service and the value for money has improved perceptibly, even among offline retailers. But so many trades are still mainly offline. I approach all such with trepidation!

Let's see what happens in July! I'm doing some work in Harlow at the moment, so expect some posts about Harlow retailers.

SpecSavers (Harlow)

2007-06-29T13:17:00.000-07:00

You know, I don't seem to see as well as I did. Those number plates are getting harder to read. I sit in a meeting, with a spreadsheet flashed up on a big plasma screen, and I can't read what it says. Maybe I need to get my eyes checked, hey?

Opticians are funny guys. They can't do any business with me unless they do an eye-test first. You'd have thought that they would fall over themselves to offer these. But not a bit of it. I traipse around. I go into Dolland and Aitcheson in Ipswich, which stinks to high heaven of mould and damp. Luckily for me the staff tell me that they can't test me.

So here I am in Harlow, and I go into the SpecSavers there. The shop is empty. They can do a test for me, so I tell them to. It's £18, which they don't mention until I ask. They do a test. It doesn't seem too bad. Yes, I need new glasses.

But I have a very nice set of frames now. So I ask for just new lenses. Problem!!! PROBLEM!!!

They won't sell me lenses. I have to buy complete frames and lenses from them. I query this. The girl who tested my eyes leads me to some manager woman who sits there, scowling. She asks. I don't get a reply; just a tightening of the mouth and a shake of the head. Then she says "Company policy." That's all I get. She looks like she's dying to rip into me. So I leave. I don't need or want any new frames. I don't need or want a fight. I didn't need to spend £18 on an eye-test if I can't get lenses.

But have I just been diddled here? OK, I have a prescription. But if I take it elsewhere, and there's a problem, the dispenser is going to blame the prescription, right? Then where am I? Glasses cost a lot. So I pretty much have to get the eye-test at the people I buy the lenses from. That means, surely, that I am £18 down?

Couldn't they have mentioned this little policy of theirs before they did business with me? Given the attitude, I suspect that they are getting flak -- and no surprise there.

I go into Dolland and Aitcheson in Harlow and ask if they could make me up some lenses. They tell me they can, but my glasses have to go away for a week or two (why?). I ask what the cheapest pair of frames and lenses would be, to tide me over while I wait. £65 they say. That's real money for something I'll use only once.

But I did find one thing to do with the prescription. I found LowCostSpex, an online dispenser. They'll do me a pair of lenses and frames for £15, if I type in the prescription. For that much, I'm willing to take a punt. Let's see what comes back! It's a lot cheaper than £65.

Glasses have gone up massively in the last 10-15 years. Looks like profits have too.

PS: Two days later I get a call from LowCostSpex. They aren't sure that what I entered in their form is correct, and want to make sure. For £15 they are certainly working hard. I tell them that they deserve to make a fortune. Meanwhile I go around 3 opticians in Ipswich, asking about new lenses -- known as 'reglazing' in the trade. One quote for £110, another for £150; just for the lenses. My, these people aren't losing money!

Abacus Fire and Security of Hadleigh

2007-06-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

These lads did a job for me back in 2006, but I came across their invoice recently and thought I would recommend them.

When I bought my house, it came with an unmaintained burglar alarm system. After it went off unexpectedly a couple of times, I wanted it disabled. Over the years I tried various firms. The response was always the same -- a long and endless argument against doing so from whoever I rang. Half an hour of argument was not exceptional; and I didn't invite argument -- I just got argued with whether I wanted it or not. Of course I didn't want to hear why a burglar alarm was a good idea; I just wanted the one I had disabled. I was never actually able to get any of these gentry to take my money, so cussed were they.

Many thanks to Abacus, then, who I rang last year after the last set of misbehaviour. After checking that I really did want this done, out they came, and they did the job. Ah the relief!

Marshall Vauxhall of Ipswich servicing (part 2)

2007-06-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

There was one loose end from my experience of Marshall Vauxhall. The Vauxhall Corsa has two lights on the petrol gauge. The first tells you "prepare to fill up" and appears when you are about three quarters empty. The next indicates "prepare to walk"! -- you have almost no petrol left. The first of these was not working so I asked for it to be done when I booked the car in.

On arrival, they had no record of that request. I made it again, and ensured that it was logged on the sheet. I was told that to fix this would involve removing the whole dashboard, take an hour and would cost £60; "would I prefer to just live with it"? I said go ahead; being marooned by the roadside has nearly happened twice already.

I got a call mid-morning to say that it wasn't a bulb, and that this wouldn't need to happen after all; the fitter was doing something with the connections.

That was the last I heard of it, and I presumed that it had been fixed. Today I found otherwise.

Lunchtime I rang Marshall Vauxhall. The man who answered the phone knew nothing but promised to ask around and ring back. He rang back shortly after to say that everyone was at a funeral, but that he would get back to me after 2pm. No call came back.

Around 4pm I was returning to Ipswich, so I went in to the showroom in person. None of the staff seemed to know what it was about. One started fiddling slowly with a computer system. Another came off the phone and stood by, watching his colleague interestedly. This seemed absurd, so I asked all of them openly whether they knew about it -- the watcher promptly admitted it was him! I expected an apology for the failure to ring back, but it did not come.

I was told that on the day of the servicing the fitter had decided that the defective light could only be fixed by replacing the complete dashboard, at a price of £200. No-one had called me. No-one apparently knew. They merely ignored it and carried on.

This seemed incredible, so I spoke with the foreman of the garage and verified that this was the story that they were telling me. They one and all seemed to take it for granted that I wouldn't want the problem fixed. Nor did I wish to put my car in yet again just then.

I am left with a problem, and some uncomfortable reflections. If it really does cost this much to fix a trivial problem, then why on earth are they so uninterested in fixing it? Fundamentally for them it's money for old rope. Yet all along I have met resistance. The original request mysteriously being omitted from the job sheet; attempts on check-in to get me to abandon the job; an ambiguous phone call which concealed that the fault was being left; failure to return calls; utter uninterest in getting the car in.

This is a business. Standard retail markup is 50%, so this cannot be less than £130 profit, surely? Why don't they want the money? Is there something I am not being told?

Aerial-tech

2007-06-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

My neighbours have a pet door. The little doggie shoots out of it at dawn, and it goes bang-bang-bang. When dawn is at 5am, this means a rude awakening for me.

Except that my neighbours have moved. The doggie has gone, and the pet door too. But the bang-bang-bang continues. Whatever can it be?

Looking on the roof, I see aerials. Could one be banging against another, or on the roof? How can I find out? I get vertigo going up stairs, never mind ladders!

Friday morning, and I ring a couple of firms. I tell them that I want someone to go up on the roof and see if an aerial is loose. "That will be £80 for a new bracket, and £120 for a new aerial" a smooth voice tells me. I thank him and put the phone down.

Then I talk to Aerial-Tech. His name is Neil, and yes, he can come out late this afternoon, depending on whether a job gets done. He'll charge £25 for half an hour, and then we'll see.

I get home mid-afternoon, and I get a call soon after that he's on his way. He arrives as rain is falling. The roof is mossy, and slippery. But up he goes onto the roof. He waggles one aerial -- no problem. He waggles the other -- and it moves! Indeed it moves too and fro a lot. Clearly this is the problem, and birds roosting on it overnight set it moving when they take off. What to do?

Neil shrugs. It's loose because it isn't put on properly. It's held on by a couple of bolts too close to the top, and going into a softwood fascia. He'll stick a few more bolts in there and it will be fine.

I look down the road, where the houses are lower, and see some substantial aerials attached to walls by big bits of metal and rising high over the house. I explore with Neil whether something similar is needed here. But he says no. He doesn't try to take me for something I don't need.

As he tries to go up again, the ladder shifts. It's really treacherous. But he gets it up somehow, and does the job. He charges me £25. And off he goes, leaving me happy and astonished.

One day I will want to replace that aerial, certainly when digital reception is actually possible here. He explains that my aerial simply can't receive the ITV channels on digital -- it has a yellow knob on the end indicating the wavelengths it can get, and ITV is outside that. But when the changeover comes, local boosters will change also. When that day comes, Neil will be my first choice for the business.

Aerial-Tech aerial and satellite services. Neil Wingar, 32 Westholme Road, Ipswich IP1 4HH. Mob. 07818-018510. Tel. 01473-425622. Email: aerial_tech@hotmail.com.

UPDATE 2011: Neil has now sold the company, which is therefore out of business.

Marshall Vauxhall -- and Anglian Auto Assist

2007-06-19T09:07:00.001-07:00

My little Vauxhall Corsa needs an oil change. And every time I start it, the mileometer displays a cryptic symbol for several seconds, which is irritating. And the low petrol indicator light doesn't come on, which gave me a nervous time recently. It's 3 years old; time for a service.

I live within walking distance of Marshall's so I took it there. They want £180 for a service. This doesn't include changing spark plugs, or most of the filters. I pay up, and afterwards ask for a list of what it does include. It's not available, it seems. In fact, as far as I can see, all they are doing is changing the oil and checking various things are working. The latter is good, but can hardly take a lot of time. Anyway, that checklist gives them to the chance to sell me more services.

And they do! Brake pads and discs are worn -- that's another £120. They check my tires, and one is worn. Luckily for me, they don't have a tyre that size. They don't check the pressure in my air-conditioning system. I happen to know that National do this as a free check. But Marshalls tell me that there is no way to do this. Perhaps I misunderstand; but any system involving a liquid and a gas can be tested. That's common sense, isn't it?

They do change the screen-wash. They change a windscreen wiper; likewise. They give me some 'free' oil and cleaning materials. Thus I go forth, £324 lighter. That is a phenomenal sum; yet what do I have to show for this?

But I still need a tyre. So I ring around. Anglian Auto Assist -- who appear as a Hi-Q franchise in the phone book -- they have a Pirelli of the kind that I want, at a price that is not too out of line with the web. Down I go, and they do it while I wait -- £65. But on the wall I see servicing sheets, listing what they do. All of them include oil, spark plugs, filters. I ask for prices. The cheapest ('bronze') is £80; the next one ('silver') £140. The top one ('gold') isn't even mentioned. I ask about the little nag feature, if I don't take it to a main dealer. They laugh and say that they have the tool to turn that off themselves. So long as the book is stamped, the full service history stands. I ask how much notice they need; they say about 2-3 days for a service. They can do the job in a morning. They work Saturdays, so it's possible to leave the car with them, walk into town, and pick it up after lunch.

I come away, feeling that I didn't get much from Marshalls for my £180. In fact I feel that I got about £60 of value. Is it too much to ask for filters and spark plugs changed?

One thing tends to reinforce this impression. Marshall's charged me £10 to dispose of the old oil -- an 'environmental' tax. But Auto Assist charge half that, according to their price list. Are Marshall's inflating that appalling bit of government interference? Can it be so?

Moral: I must resolve not to deal with Marshalls, however convenient they are, because I feel that I do not get value for money. I will go to Anglian Auto Assist instead. If I go in a few months time, then I can get the filters and spark plugs done before winter comes on, and an oil change too.

Details: Anglian Auto Assist. Ipswich Tyre Centre. 37-41 Holywells Road (at the bottom of Landseer Road). (01473) 256321.

Ryan Insurance Brokers

2007-06-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

Ryan Insurance Brokers have just lost my business for buildings and contents. This year they sent me a renewal quotation for around £170, plus £10 fee. Looking at it, the quotation was from exactly the same firm -- Legal and General -- that they had insured me with the previous year, and the year before that. I recall that last year I rang them up and asked if that was really the best quote. They assured me that it was.

I couldn't believe that they had really gone out and searched; not this time. The renewal notice arrived very shortly before the renewal was due, which meant that busy people were under pressure to just renew. This didn't feel very good to me.

This time I used google, and got some quotes from MoneySupermarket.com. These beat the Ryan Insurance quote substantially. But the terms and conditions did not quite match my needs. I read these carefully, and saw that premiums get pumped up by accidental damage cover (which I didn't need or want) and legal cover.

The best quote was from the Halifax. These I rang, and after listening carefully and asking them to remove various extras such as the above, got a quote of ca. £130. I accepted. They guaranteed that premium for three years, no less.

So what were Ryan Insurance doing? I don't know, of course; but I can certainly guess. They took £10 from me to find me the cheapest quote. But insurance companies pay commission. Is it possible that L&G were the 'best' quote -- best in terms of paying Ryan Insurance commission? What were Ryan Insurance doing for the £10? Anything? Just offering the renewal, and collecting the commission?

There was a time when everyone went to a broker for home and motor insurance. That disappeared rapidly once telephone organisations like Direct Line got going, and the internet has made this happen even more. The reason for this was the poor customer experience; that very often the broker, supposedly being paid by you, just didn't bother to look after you. It is sad to see a firm still ploughing this futile furrow.

I intend to try to avoid doing business with Ryan Insurance again. An internet search is always going to be a better option, it seems.

The mystery shopper

2007-06-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

Don't you often find yourself thinking that you wish you had never gone to some merchant, or plumber, or whoever?

A few such things have happened to me recently, and I thought that I would blog about them. I live in Ipswich in Suffolk, in the UK. Local firms often don't have web sites.

In each case I hope to indicate, not just the failings of a particular firm, but what I intend to do instead.

I hope that this will be of interest to others also. After all, bad customer service thrives on silence. I also hope to report instances of excellent service and value.