AMAZON DRONE DELIVERIES, AND £53 OFF YOUR FUEL BILL

£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.

NIGELLA LAWSON - A £100.000 A MONTH CREDIT CARD

PPI

Banks have been putting it about in the media that most people have now claimed their PPI refunds. Financial experts think this is the banks way of telling customers “Come on, it time to put this all behind us and move on”.

Despite the banking world saying this the HSBC Group have put aside a further £95m into the mis-selling pot. It’s thought that this might just be enough to repay Nigella Lawson over the PPI she had on the HSBC credit card she spent £100.000 on every month for ten years. On that very subject it’s been alleged in the court at the fraud trial of her two former assistants/personal shoppers that Miss Lawson has a class A drug habit. As yet no word from Nigella who might claim that it’s a misunderstanding. Yes she did allegedly say I love  Charlie, but the Charlie she loves is her husband Charlie Satchi. Not anymore obviously as they are now divorced after he took her for a slap up meal.

In total HSBC which includes First Direct and M&S Bank have put aside £1.8b. How busy were HSBC and its cohorts, they must have been stitching up customer during normal office hours, and in the evening and at double on Saturdays and at treble times on Sundays.

Even though HSBC admits mis-selling PPI the Financial Ombudsman Service in September showed that HSBC  wrongly dismissed or didn’t pay adequate redress in 37% of the claims in the first six months of the year.

Seems they hoped that the 37% of people they wrongly dismissed or didn’t adequately redress would simply accept the banks “Dear Sir/Madam, you are due nothing, or £10, so come on let’s put this all behind us and move on, Love HSBC” letter.

But the 37% of people didn’t accept this and they wrote to the FOS saying “Dear Sir/Madam, HSBC thinks I’m stupid”.

However HSBC aren’t the worst. Of the top 10 of most complained about financial firms Lloyds TSB and Bank of Scotland, both part of Lloyds Banking Group were number one and number two. Lloyds TSB wrongly rejected 86% of claims while Bank of Scotland wrongly rejected 80%. The FOS found that the 14% and 20% respectively of claims those banks paid out were the direct result of the claimant visiting them with a baseball bat and an angry look on their face.

Therefore both Lloyds TSB and BOS  have adopted the HSBC “hope they give up” ethos but they’ve taken it to the extreme.

And the situation seems to be getting worse for PPI claimants as the Ombudsman dealt with a 327,035 cases from January until June this year, up 15% on the previous six months. As the Ombudsman is indeed an ombudsman singular, the poor man’s workload has him exhausted.

90% of the complaints made against Lloyds TSB to the ombudsman were upheld proving that they were indeed stalling and had naughty sneaky monkeys dealing with the claims.

Lloyds TSB’s claims department apparently works on a similar principle to the theory that if you have an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, eventually the monkeys will type out the entire works of Shakespeare. Lloyds TSB appear to have an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of claims and given that they also appear to have an infinite amount of time, eventually they will wrongly dismiss all claims.

This is where Consumer Kings comes in; we don’t accept being fobbed off by the banana chompers. So claim with us.

You would have thought that the banks would be trying to rebuild trust and you could say that at least RBS are trying harder than most. They have upheld 68% of PPI claims. That could be that the bank wants to get most of their PPI cases with an average pay out of £1,736 out of the way to retrain the staff who work in their redress department to deal with claims from their small business customers who had their businesses closed down and their assets stolen by RBS.  I say deal with, I do of course mean reject because £1,736 will be chicken feed compared to what the average pay out will be from the “they destroyed my life” claimants.

RBS which is state owned have just announced losses of £634m for the last quarter. And here’s the funny thing. RBS announced they are creating an internal “bad bank” to deal with the £38b of problem loans. A bad bank?, everyone thought RBS was the bad bank. Perhaps RBS should have announced that they were setting up an internal “much worse bank”.

So are the PPI claims winding down?. The banks say yes but they then contradict themselves by putting further millions aside. £750m as in the case of Lloyds TSB.

Therefore there is a lot of money just waiting to be claimed.

www.consumerkings.co.uk