photo from CPD Direct
In these austere times we all
like to look at ways of saving money, I for one am always switching lights off
around the house that Mandi has left on even though she isn’t in the room. I am
not a rich man but I’m not poor either, I am in that middle bracket where I can
enjoy nice things but am wary of the fact that I need to keep working to keep
the nice things and live in a nice house. When it comes to a bargain I am as
pleased with myself as anyone is when I realise that I have made a saving and I
shop around to find a good deal. When my daughter Emily was about five years
old I taught her the value of money one day when she counted up the coins in
her money box and had two pounds to spend. She wanted to buy herself something
so I suggested that we look everywhere first and if she sees something she
fancies then make a note of where it is and once we’ve shopped around we’ll go
back and get the chosen item. The lesson was to find the best way to spend two
pounds, and eventually she settled on the popular game Guess Who?, purchased in
perfect condition for two pounds from a charity shop (she inherited my love of
a charity shop rummage). To enforce the point we went to Woolworths and found
that Guess Who? cost ten pounds, and in another toy shop it was twelve pounds. I
was very proud of this exercise and Emily was pleased with her game. Perhaps
this shopping day caused the butterfly effect that led to Woolworths closing
down, we’ll never know.
Please don’t think that I am a
skinflint, I am not that person who inspects a restaurant bill to see who owes
the most and I only use teabags once, but saving money is an achievement only
matched by putting one over on the people who try to take your money for the flimsiest
of reasons. This afternoon I bought a tray of chips and mushy peas from the
chip shop in Bulwell. Mushy peas and chips (with vinegar) is, I think you’ll agree
a runny meal. Those dopey little wooden forks simply aren’t up to the job;
nobody would expect you to eat soup with chopsticks would they? Not the best
argument I’ll grant you, but my point is that when you spend money on food you
would think that the person who sold it to you would want you to be able to eat
it. I asked for a bigger fork, I know they have them but they keep them hidden.
You can have all the wooden forks you need but a plastic fork (the size of an
actual fork) is an under the counter operation and they want to charge you 10p
for it. It isn’t enough that you’ve handed over good money already, now they
want more and they had me over a barrel because I was too hungry to tell them
to shove their chips so I had no choice but to hand over an additional 10p.
Okay, so 10p isn’t going to bankrupt me and there is nothing you can do with
10p these days (I once used the expression “here’s 10p go and phone someone who
cares” to someone much younger than me and they didn’t understand it) but 10p
is 10p. I very rarely use this chip shop now that I don’t frequent Bulwell as I
once did when I was on the radio and I don’t very often eat ‘outdoor chips’ so
this 10p could be written off. However, it isn’t the money as much as the
principal (and the money); would you go to a restaurant to eat and expect to
pay extra for using the cutlery? I would have been too easy for me to have
thrown the fork away with the chip wrapping and have to buy another one next
time, but this time I have outsmarted this chip shop. The fork is now in my
coat pocket ready for using again next time. Every time I have a bag of chips
from this place from now on, they are going to be 10p down thanks to my cunning
scheme. At two pound forty for my order, once I have been back there twenty
four times I will have broken even and my twenty-fifth bag of chips will effectively
be free and every bag of chips I have from then on will put me in credit. My
rare visits to this chip shop mean that it might take me several years to
accomplish this dastardly plot but I have a point to prove.
Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.
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February housekeeping
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