Tax Credits changes- a low blow?
February 15th, 2012 • 13 Comments
picture from strategystew.com
Now that all that ridiculous furore about certain bankers’ measly £1million bonus has all died down, politicians can get back to more serious financial matters. Like explaining to an estimated 212,000 ( or 82,000 if you are currently in Government) households why their tax credit income is going to fall by a quarter or more in two months’ time.
The changes, coming in from 6 April this year, are not new, but the extent of the application of the changes means that it is not just the middle classes with child benefit facing a drop in income. The region with the most affected households likely to be London (46,205), followed by the North West (26,845), West Midlands (22,675) and Yorkshire and the Humber (20,225).
From April, couples with at least one child need to jointly work 24 hours a week, with one working at least 16 hours a week, to continue to receive the ‘working’ element of the tax credits. Previously the minimum working requirement was 16 hours. The full working element is worth up to £3,870 per year.
The example shown on the Direct.gov website of a married couple with one child, where one parent works 16 hours a week earning £13,000 shows a drop in tax credits of £19 a week , down from £81 to £62 a week. This equates to a drop of 23.5% in tax credits. And assumes the worker is capable of earning nearly £17 an hour.
Treasury Minister Chloe Smith’s excuse, as given to BBC News, was that that the policy was part of “what we have to do as a country to get out of the enormous deficit mess left by Labour,” adding that it was not unfair because it “levels two parent households with what lone parents have to do.”
Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rachel Reeves said “This is a deeply unfair change from a government that is increasingly out of touch with parents feeling the squeeze and struggling to juggle work and family life.”
Now. At this point, if you work long hours and still have little disposable income, you may be struggling to find sympathy for those affected, even for the 470,000 children who have no say in the matter. However, whatever your personal feelings, if we look at the changes purely on a practical level, it isn’t hard to see why Labour are rubbing their hands at the mess the Government has created for themselves.
Firstly, while it may be easy to demand people conjure up an extra 8 hours work per week, if you are unskilled and facing/experiencing long-term unemployment, actually getting extra work is likely to prove more difficult. Even those with a job are often facing cuts to their hours, rather than being offered overtime.
Secondly, this change only applies to parents with at least one child. While those with children of school age could probably find the time (if not perhaps the work) to work 8 or 16 hours a week, what about those with pre-schoolers? Even assuming the free nursery places are available, at 15 hours per week, term time only, it is difficult even in a booming recession to find an 8 hour per week plus job that fits these criteria.
Thirdly, what exactly is the Government trying to achieve with these changes? Presumably they want people on benefits to work harder for their free money, but if an employer only has 48 hours work per week, increasing the minimum requirement to 24 hours would effectively put one person out of a job- surely the ideal would be three people working 16 hours a week rather than two at 24 hours each, if we want to encourage as many people as possible into work?
And assuming people find it too difficult to achieve the increased minimum, what are they going to do instead? Live apart? The new requirement only applies to couples, so by booting a parent out, a single parent could regain that money. Stop working altogether? Employment Support Allowance and Income Support could leave them better off.
While the motives behind the changes may be laudable, ish, the reality for thousands of families is going to be much more difficult. The Government defend the changes by pointing out that the child element of child tax credit will increase in April by inflation of 5.2% and that fuel duty and council tax (bearing in mind how those people on benefits drive gaz guzzler cars and pay council tax on their council house) have been frozen.
That’s OK then.
The death of online price comparison
December 23rd, 2011 • 31 Comments
The news of Microsoft selling off Ciao to the mid-size French company LeGuide.com has us scratching our heads here at Bitterwallet HQ and wondering if we are seeing the end of online price comparison. The golden days seem to be behind us as the old big names slump in traffic and value. Ciao was bought by Microsoft for a half-billion dollars only a few years ago but has been bought in cash by a company with EBT of €8.6m and a market cap of only €51m. Kelkoo was bought by Yahoo back in 2004 for €450m and sold a scant 4 years later for a rumoured fraction of the price. Pricegrabber jumped on the mid-2000 sales club by selling to Experian for a half-billion and has slipped down the traffic rankings since then.
It seems the heady valuations of 6 years ago haven’t panned out as the sector has declined in popularity even though online shopping has grown massively. Indeed it seems illogical that price comparison portals with their early head start haven’t become the defacto starting point for online shopping. While other ecommerce sites such as codes, group shopping, cashback, and deals have exploded, the comparison sites have taken a distant back seat.
There are two probable reasons for this decline: (1) comparison sites were built on the idea of a rational consumer, someone who was carefully planning and executing on their purchases, (2) the model and traffic of price comparison in the first decade was built around traffic arbitrage and search rather than genuine consumers.
Let’s take apart reason two first. The initial boom of price comparison was built on the back of organic search as comparison sites churned out millions of pages optimised to rank on the long tail of model number and product search. If you think back to 2004 you probably remember doing a model number search and seeing nothing but page after page of comparison sites ranking for these keywords. Google slapped down these rankings on an individual basis with site penalties in the subsequent years but their recent focus culminating in Panda has made this a central part of Google’s ranking algorithm. In a nutshell Google doesn’t want pages rankings which are simply link collections to other sites – they want unique content or some value add. Second, the early comparison models were built around CPC (cost-per-click) payments from retailers to the comparison sites. A little bit of simple math (buy incoming clicks for less than outgoing clicks) meant they were able to funnel through large amounts of traffic from cheap sources and simply arbitrage the pricing. This practice has declined as cheap traffic sources have declined and retailers improved their source value attribution tracking and moved away from CPC towards performance models. Lastly, the entrance of Google into the comparison market with Froogle (now Google Shopping/Product Search) and mainly the promotion of these Google Shopping results to the top of the results page has meant that organic traffic for comparison has pretty much dried up.
The second reason is not as simple but I think strikes to the core of why comparison was valued so highly at its peak. When shopping tools are built we often consider the end user to be a rational and ideal future self – the kind of future self that will eat healthy, budget carefully, bike to work and never get *that* drunk again. In reality our present self is very different and driven more by soft social and psychological factors rather than logical reasoning. In the sector of online shopping the price comparison site is more of a tool for the rational future self which is not the mode most people are in when they make a purchase. On paper it looks like the price comparison site would be a necessary piece of the online shopping boom – after all wouldn’t every single purchase be checked on a price comparison before going through checkout?
In the end it seems that convenience and reputation are still as powerful online as offline. Consumers continue to keep Amazon as the largest online shop because they trust the service, enjoy the convenience and more or less believe that it’s probably a reasonable price they are paying. Sites like Groupon have shown that consumers will happily purchase without comparison based on the narrative of the sale (50% off!!) and the time pressure (today only!).
A third reason for the decline in price comparison may be that the online market has become increasingly large and less transparent. With the boom in private sale sites where prices are hidden behind a registration wall, special discounting services like Amazon Prime, and, again, sites like Groupon where prices are short-term and limited, it has become difficult to compare true prices. Simply put, the price is harder to compare than in early online shopping days where the number of merchants was limited and prices were easier to compare like-for-like.
A last bit to throw in is that as online shopping has become the norm and more brands have become trusted consumers may be less likely to visit price comparison as a trust reference and product discovery mechanism.
After all that waffling on – what say you the Bitterwallet consumer? Have you found your price comparison use habits shifting? Do you remember using comparison sites more in the past?
Musing on the future of high street electronic retail. Part I.
November 9th, 2011 • 19 CommentsThere’s few things I like musing about more than what comes next for high street retail. Anyone reading Bitterwallet or active on HUKD probably agrees with me that the high street electronics chains are a terminal case without much reason to look into resuscitation options – the recent Best Buy and Comet collapses back that up – so we don’t have much to talk about there. Let’s move straight to what the future of the high street may look like for electronic retail presuming that big box dies.
The biggest problem for any bricks and mortar retailer is that there isn’t an information gap for consumers anymore. You could look at the past decades of high street retail as being an arbitrage of information – the chains knew where to buy goods cheap and the consumer couldn’t easily compare the prices and sources for goods. The retailer was able to profit off the consumer not easily knowing whether their pricing was good or poor. On top of the pricing information gap you also had an information gap where the average consumer did not have a reliable source (we’re talking large scale adoption of internet) of information on what product was suitable for needs, reviews, and other unbiased advice. So the consumer was really reliant on the high street retailer for product/sector advice as well as honesty in pricing competitively.
Now that information gap is gone and the average consumer is becoming more and more product savvy (they don’t need the retailer’s help in evaluating a product) and price savvy. This is becoming even more pronounced now that mobile has come of age and we’re able to product *and* price check in store.
High street retail has pretty much become a free product showroom for Amazon to sell products. We are already at the point where a consumer can walk into a store, check out the physical product, compare online and buy immediately from an online retailer for delivery today (admittedly only in the major centres aka London). The b&m retailer is supporting that purchase without making a pence from it and Amazon (plus the consumer) is laughing all the way to the eBank.
Oddly, combined with this shift to buying online using the barcode of the physical product we also seem to like buying online to pick up offline… which is the reverse of the above trend. Argos have been issuing profit warnings but it does seem to be the case that many are buying from Argos online to pick up in store – thereby getting the pricing advantages of online with the immediacy of product pickup.
Even when things fall apart in the current high street/big box model there does seem to be value in a physical presence for consumers, whether it’s for immediate purchasing gratification or to evaluate physical products. And yet there doesn’t seem to be a way to support a physical presence and remain competitive on price. So what could the new models of electronic retailing look like?
Best Buy throws in the towel. Is this the beginning of the end for big box electronics?
November 7th, 2011 • 30 Comments
By now we’ve all heard the bell toll for Best Buy UK. After the flurry of launch hype (Bitterwallet included) and high hopes for a US chain breaking in and destroying the doldrums of UK big box retail (Bitterwallet included) we’re left with nothing but 11 mega stores for Currys or Comet or a mini Ikea to move into.
The harsh part of the story seems to be that Best Buy did not fail because the UK incumbents were too smart, too strong, too price conscious. During the 2010/2011 period where they went head to head we’ve seen troubling revenue numbers at DSGi and Comet and no great spark of competitive innovation. It may be fair to say that Best Buy did not lose in the UK market because DSGi/Comet won but rather because they all lost and Best Buy was the one with the least to lose by jumping out.
Indeed, while we can surely imagine the suits at DSGi/Comet patting themselves on the back for holding off the US invader, the truth is probably that they themselves are next to fall. Inside the story spun out by Best Buy is the point that smartphones and tablets have meant that fewer buyers are coming to the electronic retail stores for the classic sectors of computing and TVs. As consumers we all know the desktop computer sector is dead and notebooks are quickly following (the slumping fortunes of Dell and HP also indicate this) and the golden days of the LCD cycle (do you even remember when you said goodbye to your monitor CRT or TV CRT???) are now far behind.
So for what will our modern consumer wander the aisles of a big box electronics store? Half the store filled with legacy entertainment formats (CDs, DVDs, MP3 players), passé electronics (desktop computers, TVs we already have) and the other half with overpriced accessories (hello dealextreme), AV equipment (another moribund mainstream sector best served by specialist retailers and online), white goods, cameras (digital consumer rush is over also) and a collection of random handsets equally served by the ten high street shops you pass on your walk to work from the station/carpark.
The big box brands profited greatly off the past consumer gold rushes – cashing in on the switch to LCD from CRT and the growth of personal computing. However they’re failing to stake any real ground in the newest gold rush – mobile and tablet computing.
So what say you? Are we seeing the end of big box electronic retailing? Without even touching the question of pricing (which is generally ludicrous) will we be sending our kids off to PC World to buy their jetpacks 10 years hence?
The days are already getting shorter at this London hotel
June 21st, 2011 • 4 Comments
It’s because of hotel rooms like this that I’m already of the firm opinion that everything within a mile radius of Paddington station could be set fire to and London would be none the poorer for it. I swore I’d never return but the bank balance insisted otherwise, so it was with a heavy heart I paid £84 and checked into the Lancaster Court Hotel.
I could piss and moan about the fire doors being propped open; the room’s main lightswitch being at the normal height of a light switch, except on a draw string; no toilet in the room, and only one working toilet on three floors; a bedside lamp that had been screwed into the top of a piece of furniture purpose-built but serving no purpose at all; wardrobe doors that refuse to close etc.
None of that has irritated me as much as the WiFi set-up. Yes, you’ve got to pay – I think it’s shortsighted but it’s to be expected. What’s upsetting is how the Lancaster Court Hotel (and hotels using the same third party set-up, no doubt) redefines the length of a day:
What’s that? You checked in at 3pm and paid for a day’s worth of internet service? Your WiFi will be looking to suck your wallet dry further before you wake up, sir. This room cost £84 a night. Internet service costs £20 from an afternoon check-in to departure the next morning. No toilet for three floors? No problem – the WiFi takes the piss.
Are Kindle Books a threat to your personal privacy?
June 9th, 2011 • 11 Comments
We quite like ebooks here at Bitterwallet. However, software freedom activist (no, I haven’t made that job title up) Richard Stallman has now told us we are wrong to like Kindle and that it and Amazon are evil privacy thieves.
In an article entitled The Dangers of eBooks, the founder of the Free Software Foundation warns that “technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead” and has called on consumers to reject eBooks until they “respect our freedom”. Heavy stuff.
His issue is with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) code such as that embedded in Kindle books sold by Amazon as an example of such restrictions on our personal liberty. He also thinks it’s all a bit Big Brother (as in the original 1984 book, rather than a trashy TV programme) as a cash buyer can purchase a book anonymously from a book shop, but Amazon requires identification to by a Kindle book, and can therefore identify you and your reading habits. Best not purchase ‘Bombs 101’ or ‘How to rob a bank’ then. In an exquisite turn of irony, Amazon actually used its DRM in 2009 to wipe a book from everyone’s Kindles without permission. The book? George Orwell’s 1984…
Stallman, founder of the GNU project offering free software, unsurprisingly also has an issue with the proprietary software used by Amazon on Kindles. He also points out that in some countries the Kindle book purchaser does not actually own the book. Amazon does. Sounds like we’re getting back into Spotify argument territory here…
Of course, companies like Amazon using DRM claim that the controls are necessary to ensure author protection, as in the absence of such tight restrictions, people could just share or swap ebooks. Just as they currently do with actual books, then.
Stallman reckons that levying a tax on ebooks and Kindle books that is then distributed out to authors based on their popularity, or building in a non-compulsory ‘thanks’ payment mechanism into ebook readers would help protect and reward authors. Bearing in mind that ebooks are already subject (in the UK) to VAT at 20% where printed books are not, and the fact that some paperback books are cheaper than their electronic counterpart, adding tax may not be the best move here. And how many people really ever pay for something when they don’t have to? Do you?
So what do you think- is the ease of Kindle worth sacrificing your anonymity for? Do you care if Amazon know what you are reading? Have you read 1984? Are you scared?
Persistent text marketing, fictional solicitors and suspect ads. Wonga.com aren’t so friendly now.
May 20th, 2011 • 7 Comments
You’ve all heard of Wonga, with their jolly adverts and cartoonish website. Lending money to people at a ‘representative’ APR of 4214% is not a serious business at all. It’s fun! And with Moneysupermarket.com reporting a 400 per cent increase in people looking for payday loans since the beginning of the year, it’s popular too.
But a Bitterwallet reader who had availed himself of Wonga’s services contacted us, concerned about the SMS marketing he was receiving, and was powerless to stop. Now we don’t like to hear of powerless consumers, nor do we think pursuing people who, in all likelihood, have already got money worries with offers of easy cash, is particularly responsible of Wonga as a lender. So we investigated.
We started with the texts themselves. Now, as a Wonga victim customer you are required to give them a mobile number so they can text you a PIN number that you must enter on the website in order to get your cash. Clearly this is how they get your mobile number.
Our guy repaid his loan on time, but has been receiving text messages every couple of months ever since. And he can’t stop them. Upon logging into his account the only preference he can change states “Communications preference- Would you like to receive Wonga news, offers and service updates via email?” Absolutely no mention of SMS messages. And even when this box is ticked ‘no’, the SMS keep on coming. We asked Wonga about the continual receipts of SMS. They said it was “an isolated glitch.” We’ll leave you to decide whether you believe them.
But even considering the SMS messages themselves, as you can see in the picture, there is no option to unsubscribe in the SMS, something that directly contravenes the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (upheld by the Information Commissioners Office) which say they should ensure that “you were given an opportunity to refuse the marketing when your details were collected and, if you did not refuse, you were given a simple way to opt out in every future communication”. Wonga’s privacy policy offers the following gems on the subject of marketing communications “If you ticked “yes” but no longer wish to receive such communications, please visit the My Account page, login and change your communication preference at any time, or follow the instructions in the message itself.” The first doesn’t cover SMS and the second is non-existent.
So given Wonga have already breached these regulations, what about the principle of sending messages offering money to the cash-strapped? Not that Wonga have a great reputation here- they were heavily criticised last year when their sponsorship of the free new years eve tube allowed them to advertise “sometimes you need extra cash” to the drunk and happy, with not the merest whisper of an APR. A quick search for ‘Wonga’ also reveals less than transparent debt collection tactics, with customers receiving threatening letters from ‘Solicitors’ firms’ that are really just made up trading names of Wonga or its parent company Quickbridge UK Ltd.
Well, when we asked Wonga about how responsible this was, after raving on about how responsible a lender they are (something repeated ad nauseum all over their website) they sent us a copy of their Code of Conduct. And the number one operating principle?
“you will never be sold, encouraged or forced to borrow more credit than required”
So, sending an unsolicited text offering credit to someone who has not expressed a need for credit is clearly not encouraging them to borrow. As that would contravene their own code of conduct. But it’s OK- Wonga told us “we sometimes remind customers that we’re here to help if we haven’t seen them in a while, but we never hard-sell our service.” So that’s what it is. A reminder.
So we contacted the Office of Fair Trading, who grant Wonga its credit licence to see whether there was any official wrongdoing. And unsurprisingly, they offered no help. The SMS data protection issue is one for the Information Commissioner, and the OFT definition of ‘responsible lending’ is doing a credit check. No more, no less. However the OFT did say that they would take customer complaints into account when considering whether to revoke a licence.
So, aside from a slapped wrist from the ICO, which will most likely end up in an unsubscribe link in the SMS, will Wonga change? Unlikely. In an interview with the Guardian last week, Wonga founder and former investment banker Errol Damelin said “We are the good guys… [we offer] an important social service. To have social mobility you have to have credit available to people where it’s required and where it’s appropriate.”
So Wonga can legitimately call themselves responsible lenders, and consider themselves an aid to social mobility. Welcome to toothless regulation in the UK 2011.
O2 customers back on the line- but no compensation for loss of connection
May 19th, 2011 • 14 Comments
If you were an O2 customer in North or East London, East Sussex or Kent yesterday, you may have found your service a little lacking. For 16 hours, people trying to use their phones in these areas could not make calls, or send or receive texts and e-mails.
The reason was not a technical glitch, or a satellite falling over, it was a good old fashioned smash and grab. Thieves broke in to O2′s East London network point and damaged equipment, which led to the service breakdown. O2 said it did not know how many of its 22 million customers were affected, and so are not offering compensation.
The company claim they cannot offer anything to customers because “the nature of mobile services means that it is not possible for operators to derive which customers may or may not have used their mobiles in an affected area”. Granted, it might be difficult to track or prove which sales reps, for example, drove through the affected areas and couldn’t get a signal, but what about the people who live or work there?
So O2 are copping out of the compensation. But should they have felt the need to offer compensation anyway? After all, they were not responsible for the thieves who damaged the equipment? On the other hand, they are a service provider, and for 16 hours they did not offer a service? What if someone missed an important and valuable call? What if someone died because they couldn’t speak to someone (OK this is unlikely, but nevertheless possible). O are we now just a nation of money-grabbers?
Thoughts please…
Corporate Bullying- support Team Eco-labs.org
May 13th, 2011 • 4 Comments
Sometimes it’s just not enough that you are a multi-million pound US corporation, sometimes you just need to pick on someone *much* smaller than you to make your cock feel bigger.
“With sales of $6 billion and more than 26,000 associates, Ecolab is the global leader in cleaning, sanitizing, food safety and infection prevention products and services.” EcoLabs, on the other hand, is a small non-profit environmental education organisation based in London.
Despite the fact thatthe UK EcoLabs was formed and registered two years before the US company registered trademarks in the UK, EcoLab Inc. claims that the UK EcoLabs is infringing their trademark by using the name “Eco labs” and they are attempting to legally steal their www.eco-labs.org domain name from them.
Now, we aren’t ones to get involved in other people’s domestics, but we think this one is a little too shameful to go by unnoticed. For two years running this voluntary group have had to pay legal fees to fend off takedown requests. Of course if you have deep American pockets, this is not a problem, but for a small not-for-profit?
EcoLabs put it best themselves “The prefix ‘ECO‘ is in common usage, being shorthand for the term ‘ecological’. The term ‘LABS‘ refers to the research and development conducted as part of our communication design practice. Both words are so common that it is absurd for a corporate entity to assume the legal right to prevent others from combining these two ideas together. We are willing to share the common use of ‘eco’ and ‘labs’ with everyone.
“The legal costs to defend ourselves are high by our standards (since most of the work we do we do for free). Despite what seems like an enormous waste of time and money, we feel it is important to not back down. If you are concerned with corporate encroachment of the English language (or if you think our resources are worthwhile) please consider helping with our legal fees”.
They need £800 to defend their case in Minneapolis at the end of May, and have so far raised £50. The open rights group have joined the crusade and besides, where are you going to find a cheaper and more satisfying way to kick a big fat American butt?
photo by kodomut on flickr.
A UK online bookstore is being hailed as the ‘Go Compare’* of the digital publishing world, after becoming the first e-tailer to stock all three main formats of ebook, Kindle, ePub and iBooks.
UK sales of digital books increased last year by 20 per cent to £180m, according to the latest figures from The Publishers Association and the demand for eBooks in the UK continues to rise, fuelled by the growing popularity of digital readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and titles by bestselling authors including Stieg Larsson.
Peter Crawshaw, Director and Co-Founder of Lovereading.co.uk , says “having the world’s first one-stop shop will greatly benefit consumers, making comparing and buying eBooks as simple and straightforward as possible.”
Not that we are cynical you understand, but we thought we’d have a go. We started with current trendy book The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest which costs £5.24 in paperback, £6.89 on ePub and £2.44 on Kindle. But there was no price comparison for iBooks. We then tried Harry Potter, and couldn’t find an iBook comparison price on any of them.
In fact, it took us a while, but we did eventually find a comparable book. Bloody Valentine by James Patterson, could be purchased in Kindle format for £1.56, which would save you 23p on the ePub price of£1.79 and a massive 43p on the iBooks price £1.99. All of which, incidentally, were more than the paperback price of £1.49. Or if Jeffrey Archer is more your thing, his latest novel The Fourth Estate sells for £7.99 on iBooks, £5.70 on Kindle or £5.24 in paperback.
Much of the problem is that Apple’s iBookstore is less well-stocked than your local Big Society funded library, so finding an e-book that you are interested in reading is the first challenge. And when you do find one, it is likely to be cheaper on Kindle, in paperback or both. So why bother? Even better, why not just read the millions of free eBooks that are out there- either because they are out of copyright or because we handily located these sources of free reading material for you last Christmas. We just keep on giving.
Anyway, nice try lovereading, but we ain’t buying it.
* other price comparison websites are available.
It’s that time of year again, when women across the country start thinking about finding swimwear for the summer. And as a responsible retailer of the people, Debenhams recently surveyed 14,000 of their own customers to find out what women were aiming for on the beach stakes.
The results revealed Raquel Welch and Kim Kardashian to be top of the beach bods. Sasha Nagalingam, Swimwear Buyer at Debenhams, said “Despite a forty year age gap between Raquel and Kim, the voluptuous shape they have in common is clearly coveted by women across the country.”
British TV newcomer, Amy Childs from The Only Way is Essex also made the list, further confirming the trend for ample bosoms and curvy hips. Sasha continued, “Looking great in a bikini is not about being a stick-thin teenager. Our results show women appreciate womanly bodies of all ages.”
Which makes it all the more surprising that their swimwear body shape guide is, well, less about about curves and more about stick-thin teenagers.
Take this lovely lady. Is she the quintessential pear shape- narrow of shoulder and coy of breast yet ample of buttock? Actually no, this lady is classic hourglass, boobs, bum and tiny waist. Apparently.
Or how about this one? She surely can’t be apple shaped- reasonable boobs, smaller bum but big fat tum with that tiny waist, so she must be athletic (slim built, in need of boob padding), right? Er, no. Clearly, with that unnoteworthy chest and humungous arse she is pear shaped. Sigh.
In fact, if you look at all four Debenhams swimwear models side by side, you’d be hard pushed to know which was supposed to be any particular body shape, with the titles cunningly removed. And none of these girls could really be described as voluptuous or ample.
Come on Debenhams- at least pretend you mean what you say…
How the supermarkets are disrupting our digital lives
April 21st, 2011 • 2 Comments
Yesterday, Tesco announced it had taken a majority stake in Blinkbox, an online on-demand service for films and television shows. Today, tech site gdgt is carrying a commentary about Amazon‘s likely move into tablets. It’s an opinion that seems widely supported; the online retailer is apparently developing a tablet device, likely to be manufactured by Samsung, and likely to be marketed as a mainstream, low-cost alternative to the iPad.
Why is Amazon doing this? Because the retailer can make more money by aiding consumption. If Amazon creates a device for facilitating content, customers are likely to buy more from them. The same is exactly true of Apple; the sale of an iPod or an iPhone generates a one-off profit, but once in the hands of a user they’re a money-making conduit, selling music, apps and video to the owner for the lifetime of the devices. Hardware is profitable, but it’s far easier to make money by skimming revenue from the sale of content.
Amazon and Tesco are uniquely placed to disrupt; they’re established hubs of commerce – whether virtual or online – and they already have mainstream traction. They can add new product lines and delivery channels whenever they like – and they do; Amazon has obviously far outstripped its humble bookshop personae, while the Tesco brand has been stretched across new platforms and dozens of products and services to become synonymous with value.
The step into hardware didn’t prove too difficult for Amazon; they realised they could own and control a far greater share of the e-book market by creating the device that facilitated consumption. It took four years and three generations of product, but the Kindle is now very much a mainstream consumer product that will only grow in popularity.
Tesco may follow a very similar path with their acquisition of Blinkbox. They already have a consumer base that is purchasing third party content from them, but while DVD sales are hardly Tesco’s focus, the company can create a new delivery platform and instantly take a stake in on-demand media and establish themselves in what is still an embryonic market. And like Amazon, Tesco are perfectly placed to go beyond simply delivering the content, and create the hardware too; low-cost set-top boxes that aggregate many other on-demand services. Hardware, on-demand entertainment, monthly subscriptions, brand broadband servies and a mainstream consumer base – Tesco genuinely could deal a blow to current players like Sky and Virgin.
Nobody really saw it coming five years ago, but there’s now the very real prospect of an online bookstore and a supermarket disrupting the digital future and determining how we consume entertainment. But it’s not because they are global corporations with infrastructure and wealth, although that undeniably helps. It’s not about whether they are proficient in technology or recognised as entertainment brands. It’s because these businesses are inextricably rooted in community – they’re already an integral part of our routines and livelihoods. You don’t have to knock on a door to make a sale if you’re already in the house.
Fat tax – could you stomach it?
April 18th, 2011 • 15 Comments
Some things that come out of the good old US of A are good. Like Angelina Jolie. Or hamburgers. Other things are not so good.
Now, the state of Arizona has come up with Fat Tax, a levy of $50 (£30.60) a year for Medicaid patients who, let’s say, have let themselves go a bit. An Arizonian offical said “We want to be able to provide health care to people, and we want to stretch our dollars as far as we can. Part of that is engaging people to take better care of themselves.” People like 44 year old Donna M Simpson (pictured) whose weight is currently a mere stone short of her age, and who is well on the way to reaching her target weight of 72 stone, which would make her the heaviest woman alive. Or dead.
But putting this American oneup(wo)manship aside, those crafty US sorts may have come up with an alternative solution to the prospect of NHS cuts in this country. If we charged every fatty an annual fee for utilising NHS services, or maybe even only those affected by weight, we could make up some of the shortfall. We could even have a sliding scale starting at BMI of 26 (the ‘official’ definition of overweight).
Sounds plausible, in theory, but there are some issues that would need ironing out. For example, my own BMI might perhaps, possibly be a teeny smidge higher than 25, but I *do* have very heavy bones. And I have long hair. That’s got to weigh a couple of stone at least right?
So what do you think? A fat tax for porkers? A fag tax for smokers? A fun tax for wan…
[The Sunday Times]
It’s only their PR skills that died at Thorpe Park yesterday
April 15th, 2011 • 11 CommentsIf you’re a consumer-facing company, whether or not you bother with Twitter should be a no-brainer. Customers are able to discuss your brands and your products in public – they’re may be praising them, but you can be sure they’ll criticise them given the slightest provocation. So as a business, you have a choice; ignore the criticism and let it spread, or be part of the conversation to provide balance, support customers and correct mistruths.
Thorpe Park are on Twitter but their etiquette leaves a lot to be desired – to the point where they’ve been threatening teenage girls.
Avid Bitterwallet reader Kip got in touch with us about an incident that occurred yesterday. A Twitter user mentioned there had been a fatality on a ride at the theme park; the original tweet appears to have disappeared, but from the reaction of those involved, it doesn’t appear to have been sent with any malice. They were simply repeating a rumour that turned out to be untrue, but not before several other Twitter users responded and forwarded on the message.
It’s this repetition that caught the attention of Thorpe Park PR, who responded in typical knee-jerk reaction by sending a denial and veiled threat to anyone who mentioned it:
Aside from Thorpe Park not being able to spell, the Twitter users they repeatedly menace for libelling them are teenagers; specifically fans of X Factor finalists One Direction. They’re kids – presumably Thorpe Park’s target market. That doesn’t stop the theme park’s PR team going on to harass another two teenage girls:
You may think anyone claiming to be a fan of One Direction deserves the heavy-handed approach, but the fact is there were plenty of different ways Thorpe Park could have handled themselves instead of threatening teenagers. The PR people are right – it’s not a rumour you want circulating unchallenged – but Twitter users usually prove to be their own checks and balances. A lighter approach reassuring people that no deaths had occurred would have easily quelled the rumours – senselessly shouting about libel over and over again is only going to cause further attention.
So back to where we came in. Engaging customers – and potential customers – on Twitter is easy enough to do. Doing it well, without menacing overtones of douchebaggery, is considerably harder.
Apologists are United for passenger thrown off plane
February 21st, 2013 • 7 Comments By Paul SmithThe guts of the story is this: Matthew was flying from Newark to Istanbul in business class. He wanted to write a review of the new cabins and took a single photo , while seated, of the headrest in front. A flight attendant warned him it was against company policy to take photos of the aircraft (it’s arguable whether it is or not), and went on to chastise another passenger for doing similar. As a frequent flyer, Matthew felt the need to apologise, so he said to the attendant:
This exchange led to Matthew being led away by an airline representative and, eventually, a conversation with the captain:
That’s the short version; the full details are available on Matthew’s blog. The bottom line is that Matthew is angry at the flight attendant because she lied to the captain by claiming he ignored her and continued taking photos:
Several passengers on the same flight have commented on the blog and verified key aspects of Matthew’s story, but there’s plenty of support for his version of events, but what’s more interesting is the reaction from others reading the story. Not those who think Matthew is an idiot for using the word “terrorist’ (after all, one terrorist attack 11 years ago should mean we should never try and deny being one), but those who are adamant that Matthew was an idiot for taking the time to apologise in the first place:
Thanks to the internet we’ve become world-class complainers; everyone has a voice, including those who have nothing to say and no right to say it. Social media is worse, full of customers telling half-truths and outright lies in a bid to extract compensation from companies. In amongst all the bluster, however, are genuine grievances, concerns and complaints. The bottom line is that ‘passengers’ are ultimately ‘customers’ too – so how did we get to the point where so many feel they’re not allowed to speak onboard a plane, let alone complain?
What say you, avid reader? Apologist nonsense or passenger lunacy?