Monday Moan 37



Latest from Sainsbury's on wasting food

Sainsbury’s have kept their promise to investigate my complaint about wasting food (see Moan 36 last week) and have sent me this further response:-

 

“I’ve contacted the store and spoke to our Customer Service Team Leader, [……].  She’s sent her apologies for this matter and informed me our bakery department should close at 5pm on a Sunday.  She also said there has been a shortage of colleagues at our bakery lately.  However, this doesn’t mean our bakery department should close early.  [……] will therefore feed this back to our Bakery Manager, […..], when he’s next available.  He will investigate this further and work hard to try and resolve this as soon as possible.  We’ll also continue to monitor any further comments regarding this to see if anyone else has had a similar experience.  As this isn’t the kind of visit we want our customers to have, I’ve arranged for a £10 gift card to be posted to you for the inconvenience caused.  Perhaps you can use this to buy something nice on your next visit." 

 

Oh dear.  What to do now?  Obviously, the £10 voucher is intended to buy my silence.  It may not be a life-changing amount of money, but it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it? 

 

Indeed it is – and that’s a worry.  I wasn’t looking for compensation, I wanted an answer to why good food was being thrown away. Unfortunately, three replies later, I am no nearer getting an explanation from Sainsbury’s than I was at the beginning.  It doesn’t matter to me that they might have had staff shortages and so decided to close early the day I was there. I’m puzzled by the apparent mystery over when the Bakery Manager might next be available. But neither of these things are relevant to the issues I have raised unless Sainsbury’s were to be telling me that the actions I observed were in breach of their procedures and they wanted an explanation from the Bakery Manager before taking further action.  Nothing of this nature has been said, and so I assume that the actions I witnessed were perfectly OK as far as the company is concerned.

 

Powerless to extract a proper response from the company, I shall spend my £10 voucher on food which I will then give away to the first homeless person I see on the street outside.  A small gesture, perhaps futile, but it’s all I can do.

 

 

Not a protest vote?

So, the Eastleigh by-election result saw the Lib Dems retaining a seat against the odds – those odds including being widely ridiculed as a political force, mainly it seems for behaving like grown-ups and accepting responsibility by going into coalition with the Conservatives. The Lib Dems then made their task much harder by having an MP lie to protect his driving licence and continue to lie in order to try to stay out of jail – almost certainly to no avail. And then the forces of political opportunism threw in a late additional ball and chain for the Lib Dems in the massive form of Lord Rennard and multiple allegations that he has behaved inappropriately.

 

In fact, as with most by-elections, almost everyone could claim to have done well.  The Lib Dems actually won, UKIP got their best ever result in a by-election, the Conservatives failed to take a very winnable seat but did avoid complete catastrophe, and Labour managed to improve its share of the vote despite coming in a rather bedraggled fourth.

 

The thing that strikes me most about this particular by-election, apart from the fact that the Lib Dems won, is the nonsense of UKIP's loudly repeated statements that this was not a protest vote and that it should now be taken seriously as a political force.  These positions seem to overlook some  rather obvious facts.  For example, any party whose public face is represented by ex-Conservatives Nigel Farage and Neil Hamilton starts from a position of difficulty if it wants to be taken seriously. And given that the party’s popular appeal is based almost exclusively on its populist opposition to things rather than on any positive policies (anti-immigration, anti-Europe, anti-gay marriage, etc), its whole appeal is based on the notion of protest - why deny it?

 

 

What’s the point?

There were 14 candidates in the Eastleigh by-election. Yes, in addition to the 4 ‘main’parties, another 10 people paid out their £500 deposits and found 10 registered electors in the constituency who were prepared to sign their nomination form.  These 10 candidates mustered just 1,756 votes between them.

 

I know it’s a democracy and anyone should be entitled to stand for election provided they meet the various rules involved. But it’s all a bit of a joke isn’t it, when we are supposed to take them all seriously?    Or is that the point – it is just a joke?

 

Trouble is, it’s hard to know which of them is serious and which of them is just having a laugh.  For example, isn’t there a lot of commonsense in the idea that the European Constitution could be sorted out by going for a long walk, on the basis that walking is good for the constitution?  Surley you'd vote for the party that said that?  But would you vote for a party with a policy that if you got into an unfortunate situation and went slightly overdrawn and the bank slapped a £30 charge on you for being a couple of quid overdrawn, provided you repaid the money in a few days you would get that penalty charge back?  Doesn’t that sound like fiscal irresponsibility? Would you vote for the party that wanted to scrap the Bedroom Tax, because spare bedrooms are very handy for storing bondage gear, watching porn on the internet or sleeping with your pet cat when you can’t stand sleeping with your spouse/partner anymore because of their unacceptable behaviour in the bedroom?  And then there was the party that wanted to defend the right to asylum – presumably so that there would be somewhere to house the other candidates?

 

In the end I had to admire the party that observed that an election with 14 candidates was always going to squeeze its share of the vote. As a result, it didn’t view its 30 votes in quite as negative a light as you might suppose. In fact, it took heart from this solid foundation of support and declared that its new aim was to work for the last to be first.

 

Ambition and a target - that's what it's all about, isn't it?

 

A great career change?

A few months ago Frankel, arguably the greatest ever racehorse, retired after winning all of his 14 races. I wonder how many conversations there were in bars all over the country where punters said they wouldn't mind being retired to stud, being asked to 'cover' 200 mares each year, and being paid £125,000 a time for the pleasure?

It doesn’t always work out, of course.  He might be a failure in the potency stakes.  He might turn out not to be that interested in mares, having been trained to ignore them until now. Although I doubt that he’ll find himself being retired from stud and sent back to race again, as happened to another highly-rated horse once.

 

But let’s hope he doesn’t suffer the indignity of the stud we were shown on BBC’s ‘Countryfile’ yesterday, who was fooled into thinking that a replica horse was the ‘real deal’ and got so excited that the amorous session with the dummy lasted only a few seconds.  Of course, the fact that this particular stud failed to spot that his dream mare did not have a head or legs might make you question whether he deserves any sympathy.

 

And all this before the watershed.  Good luck to the parents who had to explain it all to their curious children.