Mary Portas hasn't a prayer

Remember last year, when retail expert Mary Portas published her report?

Ms Portas outlines plans for cutting regulations for High Street traders and the launch of a national market day. But council leaders have criticised her for not consulting them

[From BBC News - Mary Portas unveils report into High Street revival]

Now Mary Portas is a smart cookie. If you've ever wondered why the stars of the BBCs "Absolutely Fabulous" went on about Harvey Nicks all the time, it was because Mary promised

writer and star of the show Jennifer Saunders the run of the store for research in return for Saunders namechecking the business

[From Mary Portas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Smart, as I say. I haven't read the report, but I can tell you right now she's wasting her time. Yesterday I needed to buy a phone for a relative, so I called two local mobile phone shops to see if they had the particular handset in stock. Neither of them picked up the phone and in both cases I left messages asking them to call me back because I wanted to buy something. Needless to say, neither of them did.

Driving home from the station, I did think of popping into a store to pick up a couple of things, but to park outside the Tesco Metro and Co-Op costs money which, even if I was prepared to pay it (I'm not) I don't because I can't be bothered to find to walk down to the machine and find coins to feed in to it. I was dying for a coffee, and I thought maybe I'd pick up a Starbucks but there's nowhere to park and I can't be bothered to go into the town centre and park in a multi-story just to pick up a coffee to take home. I thought this then I was driving through Weybridge the other day: I saw a Caffe Nero and I just fancied a large latte with an extra shot, but there was nowhere to park so I just drove on.

In the end I drove home without a coffee, bought the milk from the petrol station and ordered the phone online, just as I order everything else online. The UK High Street is as dead as the Dodo.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Lend me your earphones

I feel it my duty to report when I get a great new product that I'm very happy with. So "hear" (yuk yuk) we go. I lost my Shure in-ear earphones for my iPod. Well, I say lost. In fact they were almost certainly lifted by an (unsanitary) tea-leaf at a London hotel. I left them on a wooden cabinet and when I came back they had gone. Anyway, they were three years old, so I didn't grieve, I just got out my credit card and wandered into an iPod (etc) shop. I asked the assistant what he recommended: I wanted good quality in-ear headphones, good for speech as well as music, with a microphone on the cord. The assistant pointed me towards some earphones I'd not seen before, the V-moda in-ears. I bought them. Later on, when I was going shopping, I plugged in my new earphones and set off. The first track up on my shopping playlist was "Let the music do the talking". Not the Aerosmith version, but the Joe Perry Project version. I was stopped in my tracks. The sound was astounding. The clarity, response and "depth" of the sound pulled me up sharp. I had no idea that new earphones would be so much better than my old ones. I love the fit, I love the cloth cord (just the right length, and with a convenient lapel clip), I love the microphone. But most of all I love the way they sound. So much so that I've gone and blogged about it.

I'm listening to my the Paul Jones Rhythm and Blues show from Radio 2 right now (not on the radio, naturally, but on my iPhone -- I used iPlayerGrabber to pull the show down into my iTunes) and it's Little Feat up at the moment. Wow. The music is crystal clear, rich and full. I can't recommend these earphones highly enough.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Every day, in every way

As the tide of ignorance moves up the estuary of British society, it is threatening to turn into a Seven Bore of Stupidity.

A shopper was left baffled after she went to Asda to stock up on picnic equipment and was asked for proof of age to buy a set of teaspoons. The shop assistant reportedly informed the customer that someone had once been murdered with a teaspoon, and therefore age identification was now required.

[From Shopper asked for proof of age to buy Asda teaspoons - Telegraph]

The shop assistant had clearly made this up, having no idea why proof of age were needed to buy teaspoons. Oddly, the made up response seemed entirely plausible to me. I can imagine Jacqui Spliff announcing it, displaying an appropriately grave face, on breakfast television with no-one batting an eyelid at the pointless illiberal fatuous measure. Yes, Eamonn Holmes, might intone liltingly, something must be done about the teaspoon menace. Had I heard, half asleep at 10 to 7 in the morning, that the Home Office was working on a teaspoon strategy, I would have groaned and turned over, but would not have thought it April Fool's day.

Who knows why Asda are policing teaspoon sales? A number of theories are floating around on the web, ranging from worries about sharpened teaspoons being smuggled into jails to teenage boys using teaspoons from the fridge to delay premature ejaculation (I genuinely have no idea how: I did some pretty unusual things when I was a teenage boy, but I'd never even heard of this one). Personally, I suspect that teaspoons may have been classified as drug paraphernalia, and we have thus become a society where drugs are freely available to every teenager in Britain but teaspoons are not, which seems a fitting doom for a once-proud nation.

P.S. Since I wrote this, but didn't post it, I went on to do a bit more googling and have discovered, I think, the truth. Which is even more disturbing, in a way. It transpires that the shop assistants do not think for themselves at all: so when the POS terminal tells them to check age, they do unquestioningly. Hence a 75-year old war veteran found himself having to prove he was over 18 to buy a bottle of wine. Anyway, the likely explanation for the teaspoon event is, as is so often the case, a programming cock-up: the POS system was supposed to flag up proof of age demands for knife purchases, but somehow the code was flagging all cutlery. I imagine the people responsible have been fired and I hope Asda outsource their programming to Vietnam or somewhere in time to start registering people for the Second Home Secretary's flagship national identity card scheme.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Last minute Xmas shopping

I got an e-mail from Amazon, telling me that they had some fantastic savings in the "Toys and Games" section so I clicked on the link to see if there were any last minute bargains to be had.

Wow! A massive 1p off. I wonder if this is something to do with the Prime Mentalist's recovery plan. Another 0.03% off VAT to transform the British economy?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]