£53 DECREASE
British Gas owner
Centrica said it would cut bills by £53 in January, two months after a £123
price rise for the average dual fuel customer.
£53? Wow, that’s like
a huge saving of just over a £1 a week. The travel agents will have to take on extra
staff to deal with dual fuel customers booking luxury cruises.
It shows you how out
of touch politicians are with the real world if they are heralding a £53 price
decrease. The PM David Cameron was asked what a pint of milk cost and he didn’t
know. Perhaps Cameron should be asked what the average annual wage is and when
he wrongly guesses “about £70 a year?” it will then be explained to him “no it
isn’t, and that’s why £53 is a paltry amount that actually a bit of an insult”.
The price for fuel
went up by £123, and Centrica taking £53 off means they are still ahead by £70.
It’s like the scene in
A Christmas Carol movie where out of the goodness of his black heart Scrooge lets
a freezing Bob Scratchit have one lump of coal to keep warm. The £53 off is
Centrica’s one lump of coal.
It’s practically the
equivalent of being beaten over the head with a baseball bat, but the assailant
then buys you a packet of Solpadine for the pain and feels good about himself
for doing so.
What perhaps is needed
is for a visit to energy company bosses from the Ghosts of Customers Past, Present
and Future.If they are going to act like Dickensian overlords they should get
treated like Dickensian overlords.
It was revealed last
week that 30,000 people basically froze to death last winter; the vast majority
of them were pensioners. That saved the government millions in pension payments
and made the energy companies millions too because cremating 30,000 bodies isn’t
free. The heat needed to cremate a body is something like 1000 degrees
centigrade and who supplied that heat, the energy companies. Pensioner groups
are angry and have said that OAP’s freezing to death makes the UK look like a
Third World country. Unfortunately that’s not strictly true as Third World
countries are always hot countries where no one ever freezes to death.
Too busy sweating away
at sewing machine 22 hours a day producing garments for the UK’s fashion
retailers.
On that note it’s
rumoured that George Osborne is in talks with Primark to try and persuade the
company to get involved in the energy market. It would be great if they did
because the average dual fuel bill would drop from Centrica’s and EDF’s etc
from an annual £1340 a year to Primark Energy’s £16.20 a year.
DRONES
Amazon has been
testing unmanned drones as a method for delivering goods to customers. The
drones called Octocopters could deliver items weighing up to 2.3kg within 30
minutes of placing an order. Seems they got the idea after seeing that the US military
could deliver packages to Taliban leaders. In this case packages is a euphemism
for very unwanted gifts.
Amazon haven’t quite
explained how the packages will be ultimately delivered, gently or fired at you
at high speed?
This could also save
the US military a fortune because each drone strike costs around $500.000. If
they join Amazon Prime they could have a “package” delivered to an address in
North Pakistan or delivered to a moving car in the same area for a mere $99 a
year.
Today is the busiest
day for Amazon’s online shopping with an expected 5 million orders placed, and
quite a lot of them will be for missiles to be delivered as early Xmas presents
for Taliban and Al Queda leaders.
Credit card firm Visa
expects £450m to be spent. Well they did, but then they remembered that the
Grillo sisters no longer have access to Nigella Lawson and Charles Satchi’s
credit cards and they dropped their expectation down to £250m.
Visa reckons that
£312,000 will be spent per minute. Only £10,000 of which credit card holders
will be aware of, the other £302,000 will end up on their card because they had
inadvertently gone within 30 feet of a contactless payment system.
John Lewis expects to
be busy today too and predict that Ipads, Ugg boots and cashmere will be the most
wanted items.
What. So John Lewis
customers will be sitting playing with their Ipads with toasty feet thanks to the
Uggs and a toasty neck thanks to a cashmere scarf?
John Lewis has ruined
the surprise for millions by mentioning this. Now whenever a giftee sees the
gifter coming home with a John Lewis bag they now know that they are either
getting an Ipad, a pair of Ugg’s or something made of cashmere.
But if you don’t have
money to buy presents this Xmas there is an easy get out. Simply tell whoever
was expecting a present that you bought a goat on their behalf for a village
somewhere in Africa. It’s not as if they’d want to see the goat as proof that
you’d bought. If it’s a really close relative tell them you bought an elephant
on their behalf for a very poor logging company in India. If they do demand
proof simply Google goat or elephant for a photograph, download it, print it
out and tell them “that’s the goat/elephant there”
It’s thought that
upwards of 200,000 people do that every year and if everyone who claimed to
have bought a goat or an elephant had actually done so African villages and
Indian logging camps would have so many of the creatures that they would have
been classified as pests and being pest controlled by Rentokil.
