Wednesday 17 August 2016

Well I won't be buying Walkers anymore.

Like thousands of others, I was drawn in by the Walkers Crisps Spell & Go promotion in which 20,000 4* holidays were up for grabs.

Letters were obtained by entering the code from the specially bannered packs into the Spell & Go website, these letters were used to spell out various holiday destinations across the world, like an online game of scrabble.  Every destination contained at least one C, D or K.

And therein lies the problem.  

Like the Golden Ticket in Willy Wonka's chocolate bars, these letters were extremely sort after.  These three letters were classed as 'type one' and apparently there were enough codes printed to generate these letters to allow all of the holidays to be won, even though less than 800 of the 20,000 holidays were actually won.


There was an option to swap up to five of your letters with others from a central pot, these letters were, again, allegedly randomly selected.  However, the only letters available in the swap pot were 'type two' letters, ie, none of the letters people actually needed to win.

And like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket hunt I bought multipack after multipack, entering the maximum five codes per day.  I had people from the office where I work giving me codes off their packets.

And I still didn't win.

Now, I will be honest, I didn't expect to win, I've blogged before about not being able to get on that list of approved winners, but I didn't mind, I bought the crisps, I shared the crisps with others, I played the game, I didn't win, end of story.

But then I caught this story on the BBC highlighting just how difficult, nigh impossible, it was to win.  This is what has turned me against Walkers.

The whole thing just smacks even more of a marketing ploy now, or maybe I am just being cynical.

Anyway, I will no longer be buying Walkers.  

If I ever get through the mountain of crisps I now have. 



Thursday 11 August 2016

Brexit, who will do your job now?

Well let's see, anyone within a 90 minute public transport radius, who is able bodied enough to do the job and is on benefits.

There has been much on the television and in the papers that we are going to lose our labour force now that we have voted to leave the EU (not that much appears to have been done yet to facilitate our exit), and employers who offer seasonal or living wage jobs will struggle to fill their vacancies.  The doom-mongers are wringing their hands and predicting wage rises which will be passed on to the consumer in the form of price rises.

Why?

We have a ready made labour force currently reporting to every job centre once a fortnight.  But why should they work for £7.20 per hour (£288 per week before tax and NI, £257 after tax & NI), when you can get as much, if not more, just for sitting on your backside all day?


We need to get the benefits system back to what it was originally designed for - temporary help for the recently unemployed or redundant.  It should be seen as a last resort and not a life style choice.

Years ago, going on benefits was seen as a disgrace and people would do anything to avoid it.

We need to get back to that.