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December 2004 - The last ever issue of Indie! PAUL SMITH - Knowing the price of nothing and the value of everything.
At 32 I swear I’ve become a Grumpy Old Man. Stickers left on the bottoms of shoes when they’re being worn now upset me as much as say… Fascism. Do something inconsiderate with your indicators on a roundabout in front of me and you may find you and your family cursed in perpetuity. And then there’s pricing.
I don’t mean the outrageous cost of petrol - I mean prices on things. I’m sick to death of looking at a product and then going on an expedition to discover its price. Is it too much to ask that a key factor in my purchasing decision process might be displayed on it, or at least near it? There’s been a move away from sticky labels - the type applied with a black gun that goes K-chung - towards hanger-end notices, but even these seem to be skipped more and more often. A glass-fronted fridge in Wales. A cool bottle of water. No price on it, the shelf or the door. I carry it to the counter, where a Welshman is waiting for me. Does he have a grudge against the English? Have we been forgiven for Anne Robinson yet? Is this water going to be 50p or a pound more? He doesn’t type a price in, he scans the barcode and I visibly relax, secure in the knowledge I’ve not just had the piss taken. Now I’m in Boots, looking at a higgledy-piggledy display of digital cameras. They all have prices on the shelf-edge below them, but closer inspection shows they’re prices for entirely different cameras. I play ‘match the ticket to the model’ for a while and my heart sinks when I discover only one camera which is actually on display has a corresponding label, and even that’s at the other end of the shelf. Elsewhere I’m looking at a birthday card, price code X. Do you think there’s a notice that tells me how much this X-rated card costs? Well do you? DO YOU? BOGOF on a box of waffles at Tesco. No clue how much one might expect to pay for one though. I thought there were rules about this kind of thing…
Perhaps it’s ‘uncool’ (to use a deeply uncool word in a Grumpy Old Man style) to worry about the cost of something now days, but I’ve always been more Bing than Bling. Maybe price has become less of an issue to the shopping public at large, but me, I like enough information to make an informed choice.
Paul Smith - Urbane Warrior - still seeks employment Nirvana. Please e-mail him at info@snapsandbytes.co.uk with your offers.
419 words on things that make me go ‘Arrrggh!’ Ali. I hope you liked them.