THE TIE RACK TO CLOSE, AND UNPUNISHED SMUGGLERS

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.

MORE CO-OP PROBLEMS AND THE £148M DIVORCE

 

 

MORE FLOWERS

The Co-op has been plunged into fresh chaos as its chairman Len Wardle resigned for being responsible for appointing crack addict Paul Flowers to head the groups banking operation. It has emerged that Flowers is not only a crack addict, but he also has a conviction for gross indecency AND had to quit as a Labour councillor for having pornography on his official you shouldn’t really have porn on it council computer. Crack, gross indecency and porn, surprised he had any time left over to the do the job he was paid for.

Labour are now embroiled in the mess too and Ed Balls is under pressure to return a £50.000 Co-op donation  which was backed by the Rev Flowers.

Flowers attended a private meeting with Ed Miliband, something Miliband sort of denies claiming “Yes I had a meeting with Mr Flowers but we hardly spoke as he spent most of the time in the toilet or on his computer”

But did Flowers crack, porn and grossness affect his judgement?. According to Tory MP Brooks Newmark “Only someone who was out of their face on crack would hand over £50,000 to Ed Balls”. That’s a fact that can’t be disputed.

And really? Who apart from someone whose judgement is very seriously would ever trust Ed Balls when it comes to money.

Critics have questioned why Len Wardle appointed Flowers, a man with no banking experience, to the banking job in the first place. But Wardle explained “I’d had a few drinks at the time, so…………”

Further revelations in the Daily Mail reveal that Flowers allegedly had trysts with a rent boy in a hotel room paid for by the Co-op.

The bank doesn’t as yet know if the Co-op was billed by Flowers for the £650 a night rent boy but given what Flowers has been up to on the Co-op’s buck I’d check his  company credit card bill and look for any payments to any companies called Rentboys-r-us or Boys2rent, or a payment paid to hire One Direction to sing topless as his birthday party.

One person who is over the moon regarding the Flowers scandals is Fred Goodwin. He’s taken to wearing a T shirt with the message “I don’t look so bad now do I?” emblazoned on the front.

 

 

DIVORCE

Adam and Gillian Byford the couple who won £148m on the Euro lottery just over a year ago have announced that they are getting a divorce. At the time of their win the couple said that the huge amount of money they now had would bring them closer. Everyone assumed that they meant closer together, they meant closer to a divorce. The Daily Mail reported that they are now living in separate mansions. Separate mansions? That’s just rubbing it in how rich they are.

Ooh look at us, we can afford to live in separate mansions. Kind of makes you feel a lot less sorry for them doesn’t it.

At the time of their win it was thought they’d spend most of their winnings on personal  trainers, just to lose a wee bit of weight. It was also thought they’d lose the rest to a dethroned Nigerian Prince who they’d meet over the internet. But no, they seem to have held on to most of the money, apart from the £2m they had to pay Wonga after missing two monthly payments in repayments for the £75 they’d borrowed.

The press noted that they celebrated their win with a Domino pizza, so basically they celebrated with their normal breakfast, lunch, dinner and mid evening snack, their late evening snack and their getting up in the middle of the night because they were feeling a wee bit peckish snack.

 

Mr Byford continued to run his music shop because he loved it so much but had to give it up because he got fed up with people begging.

Seems George Osbourne was never away from his door.

The thing is: why do people agree to have their lottery win publicised. Most normal people would choose to remain completely anonymous because all the relatives they never even knew they had would come out of the woodwork and all be needing an urgent life saving operation for either themselves or their hamster who has a tumour.

But that’s the lottery PR machine for you. They don’t want such big winners remaining undisclosed because there wouldn’t be much PR value in Camelot announcing that they’d handed £148m over and all they could say about the winners was that they were maybe slightly overweight and maybe they should be worried about diabetes.