Why do companies act like they’re doing you a big favour by you giving them money? And why do we have to do their work for them?
I’ve been filling in a form so that Royal Mail can swap my stamps to the new version with a barcode on – and hey, they’re much bigger so they’ll use more paper – great! I have to Google what NVI stands for, find out how much the stamps currently cost (the answer is between 2 and 3 times what you’d expect), tot it all up, fill in a form, post it off and wait for replacements. They give ‘examples’ of the kind of stamps that you can ‘swap out’ which, aside from the fact that they should provide a proper list not some examples doesn’t mention large letter stamps (surely quite common ones?) unless you search about. All for their convenience it seems. So they can provide innovative new products apparently and ‘improve security’. Having used up a lot of my time. Mm…
And while I’m on if you can be bothered check out the tangle about whether they’ve extended the deadline for ‘swapping out’ and using old stamps. It’s something to do with the fact that they’re giving you more time but not extending the deadline. By the way, are there other products you buy and are then forced to use by a certain date by the company that provided them? Perhaps their management is a bit rubbish now half of them are in jail after the Horizon scandal. Oh hang on…
Similarly, I do a big shop in Morrisons and how many tills do they have open? The answer is none. That’s Zero, not even a tobacco kiosk with a queue of 25 people. When asked most people will guess that they only had one or two and that there was a massive queue while the supermarket has several staff floating round the self-service bit to sort out all the times it goes wrong and generally to make sure we’re not trying to rip them off in retaliation for ripping us off (we’ve all been wondering how increased energy costs doubles the cost of a particular product over a few months – I particularly notice the price of tinned grapefruit nearly doubling – presumably because of the closure of the Ukrainian grapefruit farms or something?) So it’s zero and I have to do it all myself with a massive queue behind me. When the machine says I need a member of staff (to check I’m over 18 it seems) I have to walk round half the shop looking for someone. Similarly I key in ‘bananas’ (why am I going through menus on a screen just so I can give them my money?) and it says to place them in ‘the weighing area’. I turn around to ask the queue if they know what that means. No-one does though one bloke says ‘I think there might be on over there mate’. Finally the single member of staff who’s looking after the entirety of the checkouts comes over and plonks the bananas down in what you or I might know as ‘the bagging area’.
In other areas (let’s say gig and event tickets) the people selling you the tickets think it’s OK to insist that you have a working / charged phone that you must use (and no, you’re not allowed to print anything out) and in order to buy a ticket (for someone else in this case) you must sign up and have a ‘digital wallet’ in their app. If you want to give someone a ticket as a present in some physical form just forget it – have a smartphone, have it charged, have reception, pay to use it, sign up to them, give them your money and **** right off, OK? I mean everyone has a phone right? And no-one would ever need a back up in case they had no power or reception or their phone was lost or stolen would they? That never happens.
So…here I am resentful again about the set of so and sos who just want my money and seem to think I should do half their job for them, be grateful and just sod off.
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