THE TIE RACK
The Tie Rack has begun closing down its 44 remaining UK
stores. Seems that the business model of concentrating on just one item of
clothing just isn’t working anymore. Not after all the other menswear shops
opened selling ties AND shirts to wear them with. The same applied to Tie Racks
sister company the Hankie Shop.
The Tie Rack was an 80’s thing and the company was very
successful in the 80s back when tie wearing was popular thanks to the Yuppie
culture thing. But since 1990 the Tie Racks sales plummeted and they only
managed to sell ties for funerals and for court appearances. If you are going
to a funeral or appearing in court the good news is that the Tie Rack is having
a closing down sale, which is hoped will be a lot better than Comet’s closing
down sale which wasn’t really much of a closing down sale at all.
Sony 48 inch full HD smart TV was £999. Now £989.
No wonder Comet went bust, they couldn’t even get their
everything must go clearance sale right. They went bust because they didn’t
concentrate on sales, they concentrated on pushing extended warranties down
their customers necks.
That sales philosophy was so entrenched that whenever a
member of staff was handed their P45 they were asked “Now would you like to
take an extended warranty out on that”.
The Tie Rack will close its doors forever just after the
Xmas which will be a bit sad for train travellers because no longer will they
have Tie Rack stores in stations to wander about in to pass the time until
their very late train eventually turns up.
SMUGGLERS.
The government have reported that thousands of smugglers
are going unpunished because of a breakdown in communications between HMRC and
the Border Force. In 2011/2012 445.2 million cigarettes and 4.2 million litres
of alcohol were seized and the seizures did not lead to any prosecutions. The reason
being that Charles Kennedy successfully proved they were for his personal use
by showing the Borders Force his passport and telling them “Look, I’m Charles
Kennedy”.
The procedure for reporting smugglers caught by at the
Borders was the Borders Agency phoning HMRC to inform them that they caught a
smuggler trying to evade duty and HMRC would then issue financial penalties.
But since HMRC changed their phone systems it now takes almost
40 minutes of hitting telephone menu buttons before anyone can actually talk to
a human being and the Borders Agency always get fed up and hang up.
Smuggling costs the UK Exchequer somewhere in the region of
£6b a year in lost revenue. But it does lead to some great Xmas parties for the
Borders Agency what with 4.2 million litres of alcohol to get through. Their
parties cost the taxpayer millions though in photocopier paper and ink because
people that drunk at office parties do tend to take an awful lot of photocopies
of their backside. In the case of the Borders Agency, they annually used
upwards of 170,000 reams of letterheaded high quality A4 paper on backside copying.
The government has claimed that all issues are being addressed,
which they will be when they get back from all the Borders Agency offices Xmas
parties which the government describes as “the best parties in the whole of the
civil service”.
One last word from George Osborne. He is furious over the lost revenue. He said "How dare the smugglers make millions from cigarettes and alcohol, that's the governments thing"
MORE FLOWERS.
Ed Miliband has said “Labour acted with complete integrity”
in its dealings with the Co-op bank and it’s disgraced ex chairman Paul
Flowers.
Flowers of course was videotaped in a car handing over cash
for drugs, and luckily for the Labour Party the tape ran out before Flowers
could be filmed handing over £50.000 to Ed Balls who was sitting in the back
seat.
David Cameron has accused Labour of knowing about Flowers
past all along, but Miliband denies knowing anything. About Flowers?. No,
Miliband denies knowing anything about anything, and the anything he knows
nothing about includes flowers and the Unite Unions involvement in the Falkirk
prospective candidate election process, and practically everything else.
