Beware of Dixons Tax Free shopping
Airports are pretty dull places. Last Wednesday, I found myself at Heathrow T2, at some unearthly hour in the morning. I wandered round Dixons to have a quick look at the latest gadgets and kill some time. I happened to see a couple of items I was interested in. The first was Microsoft Office 2003 for Student Edition (3 user license). I had already seen this on Amazon at 91GBP and Dixon's tax free price was 110GBP which was, err, twenty pounds more expensive. So, not exactly a brilliant saving at Dixons Tax Free shopping there.
Secondly, a cheap MP3 player (Logik 1GB). This was only 63GBP at Heathrow which was odd because the identical model is available for only 54GBP in my local Dixons on the high street and has also been advertised recently in the national press. So, another triumph for so called Tax Free shopping at Dixons.
Even more odd is that Dixons have a large poster at the entrance to the store proclaiming 'We beat Amazon/Tesco/Argos prices'. Now in the light of my very limited price comparison of just two items, that poster would seem to be misleading at best, downright dishonest at worst and possibly in breach of trading standards regulations.
The poster implies to potential customers that Dixons are proactively monitoring prices at three other major competitors and undercutting their prices so you can buy from Dixons with confidence.
I realise that Dixons are under massive pressure from UK supermarkets (who sell cheap DVD players alongside Cornflakes) and internet retailers. In addition, Dixons' profits have also been badly hit by the decision to stop forcing lucrative, extended warranties onto customers but is this really the way to win business back.
Out of interest, I sent an email to Dixons for their thoughts....
death of a Web site
I was just looking at my Web site and spontaneously decided to end its sad, sorry life. Static content unchanged in years with dead links with little of interest to anyone. Part blog, part bookmarks, part experiment in HTML. Now consigned to the Internet archives.British mentality
I was flying back from Dusseldorf to London on Lufthansa yesterday. For some reason, the kind lady at the check-in desk, upgraded me to business class so I got a nice bread roll and cloth napkin. The gentleman next to me was very disappointed that there were no English language newspapers available on board. When the steward asked why he didn't pick one up at the gate, he became even more irritated, telling him in no uncertain terms that there were no 'English' newspapers at the gate and worse, not a single 'English' newspaper in the business lounge. So he finally settled down with a copy of 'The Economist' or so I thought. Next thing the senior cabin director was summoned. This time the gentleman, still, obviously disgruntled asked 'Are you trying to cater for an international audience ?' The lady politely explained the situation, apologised once again and offered to scour the plane for a paper. Then he said 'What's the point of me paying extra money to fly business class if you can't even offer me an English newspaper ?' and finally let the subject die. Two things struck me:- I bet his company, or more likely, his client are the ones paying the premium for business class and not him.
- I was simply dying to say 'Well next time you fly on British Airways at 17.00 on a Friday to any German destination, why don't you see how many copies of 'Die Welt' and 'Der Spiegel' are available for German passengers ?'
backup your blog using Feedburner
I just created an RSS feed for my blog using Feedburner. It was actually quite interesting to see how my blog was presented in different RSS readers (Thunderbird, Google Reader and Bloglines) where the textual content is the same but may be presented in many different ways and styles.I once lost quite a long, rambling blog entry due to some finger trouble in the blogger editor so subscribing to the RSS feed will be a quick and easy way to backup the blog.
Another nice feature of Feedburner is that it will automatically ping a number of sources when the blog is updated.
change of scene
Creating this blog was an experiment and, somewhat to my surprise, I quite like the concept. So I have decided to host my blog on my Web space over at blueyonder. This isn't because I think Telewest's hosting service is any more reliable than blogger (never had any issues at all with blogger) but so I can peruse the Web server logs and referrer statistics that Blueyonder kindly gather for me. The transfer of the blog went surprisingly smoothly and I created a placeholder blog to grab the old namespace on blogger.