Financial & Travel Musings

One of the oddest marketing ideas around for me is the people in stores handing out discount coupons for stuff which you’re clearly going to be buying anyway. Not that I’m complaining about the discounts obviously.

In the online world there are untold numbers of sites offering discount codes like buy.com coupons or similar ones for just about every online shop that you come across. They’re slightly different in that they can be much more targeted so it’s sometimes a bit hit and miss as to whether there’s a discount coupon for the thing that you’re about to buy.

It’s still worth looking though as some of the discounts are pretty substantial.

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Over the past few months we have just been totally swamped with things that we never could have anticipated arising just a few months earlier and there seems to be no let up in the tasks in prospect either.

Oddly though it’s largely been down to a relatively small number of things that have eaten up an unbelievably large chunk of the day between them.

To begin with my Mum needed to go to the physiotherapist. Sounded easy except that it wasn’t one appointment but two or three a week over almost three months. All right in the middle of the morning too so in effect the entire morning was eaten up by each one of them and often part of the afternoon. Losing two or three days out of your week like that makes a big difference to what you can do over the course of a week.

Then Wendy got what seemed a nice little job as temporary dinner lady in the kids’ school. Only an hour a day so not much pay but boy was that an awkward job! For one thing, when added to Mum’s appointments it meant that quite frequently we’d to drive over town, drop Mum, back to drop Wendy, wait for Wendy, race to collect Mum and then race back to get the kids which meant getting on for two hours driving those days for no  apparent benefit.

With just those two things taking up surprisingly large chunks of the day there was a knock-on effect on everything else with massive delays in getting things done. Thus our bathroom which should have been totally redone about two months ago is still sitting ready to be done  and with the holidays coming up next week it may be sitting like that for another month or two.

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One of the interesting things on the agenda of the new Conservative/Liberal government was the rolling back of the surveillance culture that we seem to have been saddled with in recent years.

There seems to be a security camera almost everywhere you look these days. In the early days they were placed in places which clearly needed them. Thus shops sprouted them like nobodies business in the hope that it would eliminate shop lifting. The snag is that they then needed to recruit security people to watch the cameras and in many cases one suspects that the losses due to shoplifting were smaller than the wages of the security guards. Of course, these days there are the security tags on the products but although I’ve seen the alarm go off many times as I’ve been going in or out of a store, I’ve yet to see anyone other than legitimate customers being stopped.

It’s going to be interesting to see if they get to the point of removing cameras. Somehow I can’t see it happening.

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