Online Retailers Please Use Proper Packaging!

I seem to be so busy these days and so I tend to buy books, clothing and presents online as it’s so much more convenient. I’ve always been one for time saving ideas and just being able to sit at the computer and order what the family needs at any given time is a real relief. There’s nothing worse than having to spend your Saturdays shopping for school clothes, when you’d rather be enjoying a barbecue in the garden – as for shopping on Sundays, don’t get me started. Having just extolled the virtues of online shopping, only this weekend I was confronted with some of its problems. I’d ordered a couple of books from a new bookseller and some new school trousers for my youngest son. The books turned up in torn paper packaging and the cover of one of them...

Selling My Old Car

This last week has been a real pain for me as I am trying to sell my old mini so that I can buy a new car. It just never occurred to me that newspapers and auto magazines would charge such high prices just to advertise a second hand car. I tried the local paper first of all and that wasn’t a good idea as those advertisements tend to attract a load of time wasters. The first two guys who came to look at my car wanted to beat me down on the price by £100. I said that as I had already advertised it at below its market value, there was no way I was taking less than stated. One of the potential buyers said he understood but that his budget was less than I was asking. So why come? I can understand that people might want to try to knock something off the cost, but not...

Adverts are very annoying!

There’s nothing more annoying than adverts on the TV at the moment – and they seem to be getting worse. It appears that the secret of a good advertising campaign is to make the advert as annoying as possible so people will remember it. And also to turn up the volume of the adverts so that we all jump out of our skin when a program ends and have to leap for the remote control – every time. The problem I have with adverts is that they take themselves too seriously. Occasionally you get an advert that’s genuinely funny, but most of them are either over the stop serious or cringingly bad. The meerkat adverts are one example of how advertising should be done. The basic formula is don’t take yourself too seriously, make a funny advert and then capitalise on it...