Financial & Travel Musings

In days gone by it was very easy to get “memory” for your camera it was all 35mm film so the only real choice was in the brand in regular shops.

These days though chances are you’ve gone digital and have a wealth of choice to make to find something that will both fit and work in your camera. There’s the old-timer compact flash which is still used in the very latest professional cameras because of it’s speed. Then there’s a whole range of SD cards and it’s far from obvious if these will work in your camera because some cameras only support up to 1GB (rarely indicated), others up to 2GB and then there’s the high capacity versions starting at 4GB and running up to 16GB at the moment which will actually work in some “normal” cameras too even if they don’t have the SDHC tag on them.

So watch what you’re lifting in the shop!

Popularity: 35% [?]

With Christmas coming up it’s the time of year when many businesses are being innundated with offers of all kinds of promotional products to give away to their customers over the Christmas and New Year period.

The sheer range of such products increases enormously every year so you’ve lots to choose from. However, the extra options don’t necessarily mean that they’re suitable for your business.

Ideally what you want is something 1) that the customer will keep, 2) that contains the relevant contact information for your business and 3) that is appropriate to your business. This, of course, explains the enormous numbers of diaries and addressbooks that we all receive as that covers the first two points easily enough. However, is a diary appropriate to your business? Sure, you can get one that lists, say, all kinds of electrical standards for those in the electrical industry but that doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate for your business.

You might think that it doesn’t matter that it’s appropriate and, to be fair, that’s in part just icing on the cake. However, if you do take the extra time to get an appropriate gift then chances are that it’ll be in the place in your customer’s business which is most appropriate too. For example, if you’re selling electrical gear to professionals then a little circuit tester with your details on might well be used by the people who’d be buying off you when a diary would end up in the admin section.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Whilst most people have the luxury of not having to think too much about their vacuum cleaner, we find that we use it so much that we need to consider the options that little bit more when we’re buying a new one because we need to do that quite regularly.

Since they’re pretty much a consumable item for us we originally figured that the way to go was to assume that they’d break down fairly often and that we’d therefore be best to buy the cheapest model so that we could consider it as a consumable. That does work quite well as a buying strategy but the problem is that when you drop down from the likes of Miele vacuum cleaners to el cheapo versions you lose a whole bunch of features and notably the suction power drops considerably so your floors aren’t quite so clean as they might be and it takes longer to do the vacuuming too.

So, we eventually plonked down a grand and bought quite an upmarket version. Operationally it’s brilliant as you would expect and it cuts the cleaning time down significantly. The downside is that it did eventually break down but thanks to the maintenance that comes as part of the purchase it’s now operational again.

What about the cost though? Well, the cheap ones broke down and had to be replaced (it’s not worthwhile trying to get a cheap clearner fixed) quite regularly. The more expensive version required more expensive bags and whatnot. Overall, the cost seemed to be pretty much the same but we got a much better cleaner for the extra money.

Popularity: 11% [?]