JOLLY
British Gas
blew £10,000 at Alton Towers on a jolly for staff to learn how to cope with
customers angered by the companies 9% price hike.
The jolly
was for the staff who cut people off because they can’t pay their bills. Seems
some of them actually feel bad about doing that. Not anymore they don’t because
there’s nothing that gets rid of a conscience quicker than a free go on an
Alton Towers carnival ride.
It hasn’t occurred
to the British Gas that the reason that people can’t afford to pay their bills
is because British Gas keep increasing them. That’s obvious to everyone except
British Gas.
The visit to
Alton Towers comes three weeks after the company spent £20,000 on a morale
boosting talent show at a hotel. A sort of British Gas’s Got Talent, won no
doubt by someone singing “Baby, its cold outside” and “Baby it’s cold inside
too because we’ve cut off your heating”.
MISSHAPEN
VEG.
Tesco have
been complaining that customers don’t want to buy misshapen vegetables. In days
gone past you just couldn’t get odd shaped veg because the BBC bought them all
up and used them as the entire premise for That’s Life. In fact Ester Rantzen
wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for carrots that looked like, well you know
what they look like, and potatoes that looked like someone’s bottom
Tesco claim
to throw away 60,000 tonnes of food every year, and that’s just in the cucumbers
they chuck out because they are shaped like bananas. Then there’s the other
40,000 tonnes of bananas they chucked away because they are shaped like
cucumbers. They are missing a trick here because people like exotic fruit and
veg so why don’t they sell them Cubananas or Bacumbers.
Despite throwing
so much away Tesco still make a fortune from vegetables. The reason being that
a lot of people don’t buy loose vegetable. They prefer them packaged. Therefore
a single carrot purchased loose costs around 6p, whereas the same carrot cut
into strips and packaged is priced around £1.20.
Do the maths.
The people who buy packaged carrots obviously can’t.
It would
indeed be better for the consumer to buy misshapen veg because they would cost
less, and they taste exactly the same. And it with save some poor souls having
to sit in front of a conveyor belt grading carrots.
I would draw
line at Tesco selling meat from misshapen animals because that’s maybe taking
it too far.
Although,
last year Tesco and many supermarkets did just that by selling horse meat in
the shape of a cow.
Sell by
dates also account for a lot of waste, especially when they err on the side of
caution. The rule of thumb for eating food that’s just by its sell by date is:
if you ate it and ended up with food poisoning, you maybe shouldn’t have eaten
it.
Sell by
dates doesn’t apply to all produce. Well it does, but in the case of UHT milk
it has shelf life of 2000 years. It’s like uranium in that respect. It doesn’t
taste anything like milk though.
According to
the Daily Mail Eastern Europeans have no problems with misshapen veg. That’s
good news for Tesco then because come January 1st all the Tesco’s stores will be full of all
the millions of Bulgarians and Romanians who’ll be allowed come to the UK for
cheap misshapen carrots.
Tesco research
found that two thirds of supermarket food ends up in the bin, including 68% of
bagged salads, half of bakery goods and a quarter of grapes.
This leads
me to believe that at the tills the staff should make the customers sign a
legally binding document stating that they will eat what they’ve bought.
Not quite
sure why Tesco are moaning about this. They’d have a lot more to moan about if they
sold 68% less bagged salad, 50% less bakery goods and 25% less grapes because
their customers came to the realisation “Pointless buying these because I won’t
eat them”.
£1
Labours former
City Minister Lord Myners has announced that he’ll be paid £1 a year for
leading a review into the troubled Co-operative Group.
He’d asked
for £1.50 a year but the Co-op told him that they are in so much trouble that a
£1 a year is all they can afford.
SELFIE
Probably
best not to take a selfie at a memorial service, probably even better not to
take a selfie when the memorial service is being beamed around the wold. That
didn’t stops Barack Obama, David Cameron and Denmark’s Helle Thorning-Schmidt
though. There they were at Nelson Mandela memorial service having a selfie.
They probably thought everyone was far too busy watching the fake signer for the
deaf. The culprit said that he suffered
a schizophrenic episode and was signing what the voice in his head was saying,
that and he doesn’t know sigh language, but thought “10,000 Rand for a couple
of hours work, how hard can it be”.
Bruno
Druchen, the national director of the Deaf Federation Of South Africa told the
Associated Press that Thamsanqa Jantjie was “he was literally just flapping his
arms about”. Adding the only time he did
making any sense was when he pointed at Obama, Cameron and Schmidt and mouthed “Oh
my god, they are taking a selfie, come on there’s a time and a place”.
The one thing
that made Nelson Mandela different from other politicians is that went from
prison and into politics. Usually for politicians it’s the other way about.
