SHOPPING

Have a good idea of what you mean. My local High ST, Eltham. Charity shops, eateries, mobile phone outlets, Mr Sighn & Patel with their cheapy plasticware, a few betting shops. I often remember years ago. Woolworths and the like. Our council has recently forked out several million poins part pedestrianizing the area. Now a new cinema has just been built.

Folk come out and leave their brains and manners at home. YE Gods. Stop the world, I want to get off!!

 

As most men , never really enjoyed traipsing around the shops in the town . I think now I only go into town to shop at Wilkos and maybe once a year go to my bank . It's the mega-supermarket , retail park and online for most of my shopping . And of course Screwfix for 90% of my DIY stuff , rarely go to B and Q now. So we are the reason for the demise of the high-street.

 

I dislike internet shopping with a passion preferring to go to a shop to actually look,feel and try on what I am buying if they are clothes or shoes,so I don’t know how people can buy stuff on line especially shoes and trainers etc because if they don’t fit they have to be repackaged and taken down to the next village a couple of miles away then I would have to stand in a queue because the young women (stay at home mums)are all taking their ebay items to be weighed and posted plus they have to have a chat with the young lady on the tills because being at home all day they are bored with not coming into contact with anyone until the kids want picking up from school.

Also with all this internet shopping groceries and goods are having to be delivered so that is even more traffic on the roads belching out obnoxious fumes that we are all breathing in.

Now that our town no longer has an M&S and the big town where I used to live no longer has a M&S,BHS,Woolworths,Littlewoods,Jessops,etc I don’t bother going into town much at all now apart from if we want our hair cutting then we go on a Sunday which is free parking.

Before Xmas we were having to take in parcels for people in our street as I said before because the ones at work spend half their working day ordering all their Xmas presents on line.

The couple of occasions that Mr Kandy has had stuff delivered to our door we have sat in all day waiting for the item to arrive (7.00 am -9pm) the item turned up at 8.40pm and the tracking system didn’t start working until the delivery man was down the other end of the village

Sadly with the demise of our towns due to high shop rents we will eventually be forced to join everyone else in having to order everything on line but at the moment we are resisting and at least it is still keeping the shop workers in a job for the time being but don’t know for how much longer...

PS there is even talk of Dr’s practices doing one to one chats over the internet with their patients if it hasn’t started already and prescriptions can be ordered on line and delivered to our door if we so wish.No wonder we are getting to be a nation of fatties

 

Sorry @Kandy I have to disagree with you here. I personally have never ordered groceries on-line but is it not better one truck/van trundling around delivering groceries than say 30/50 other vehicles with one person inside going to one or more grocery stores?

Again, personally not me as I shopped in my lunch break (fortunately always worked downtown) but this is not always possible for some people. On the other hand, it was unfortunate that you took neighbours' parcels because they were at work (maybe they ordered in the evening when they were home) ... but you could have said no as these neighbours would never know the delivery person came to you.

 

Although I make a weekly trip to Sainsburys and go to Waitrose and M&S once or twice a month, we do a lot of shopping on line. My wife buys meat from Donald Russell and pies from a pie company and cakes from somewhere else.
Although we have a big Miele fridge/freezer in the kitchen, we have two freezers in the shed where we keep perishable bulk purchases. Due to her disability she buys most of her clothes on-line, as well as bedding and towels. If she doesn't like it she can send it back and get a refund, as she often does.

We've just bought a new memory foam mattress to replace one we've had for about eight years and a replacement silk-lined quilt.

I buy a lot of new stuff on eBay, it's my first port of call.
The last three month's purchases have been varied.

Replacement headphones for my leccy piano
Slippers.
Replacement freezer for the shed
Winter wheels for my leccy golf trolley
Glue for my wife's decoupage hobby.
Replacement cutter blades for her paper guilotine
Decleor shaving gel
Floor lamp
Six "poppy" coffee mugs.

You can't beat "free postage."
I've never had a problem with an eBay purchase which hasn't been resolved to my satisfaction.
You just need to check a vendor's feedback and sales record, before ordering anything.

I'm talking about four hundred over the years.

 

Good point @Victoria but round here it is never one person in a car as the whole family goes shopping just for something to do at the weekends even if they don’t buy anything they go to browse and that is a day out in itself and you haven’t seen the amount of delivery lorries/vans trundling round our village every day either delivering food (mainly evenings) or furniture etc and unlike us who keep items for many years before replacing them they change stuff every couple of years

Yes they might have ordered them of an evening but if so they should at least pay extra to have the items delivered when they get home from work.I find I am to polite not to take the stuff in but I draw the line of taking the parcels round to their house I make them come knocking to retrieve them

 

One of the best advantages for me, is the ability to purchase sheet music on-line.

In the old days, I had to trapse into Manchester to buy what I needed.
Usually they had to order it. Music stores are now few and far between and few that remain stock popular sheet music.

Printed sheet music is produce in there versions. For C, Bb and Eb instruments.

If you just chose one version, say for piano, trumpet and tenor sax and all played it straight off the written MS sheet, two instruments would be playing in the wrong key.
Most amateur musicians like me have keys of they prefer, given the choice, which adds to the problem.

But I can download and print off pretty much any tune I want in any key I choose from "Music Notes" site in the USA for between three and four quid. I downloaded and printed off this four-page one yesterday. It's just like buying it in a store, except that it doesn't have a fancy coloured front cover and I didn't have to get the car out and find a parking space after driving through the traffic.
The best bit is you can hear a tune on the radio or on the TV and if you want the music, you can get it in a couple of minutes, including the printing.

 

Rarely buy online and I object to it. Bang online sellers with a mahoosive sales tax, say 100%.
Whilst we're at it, stop the chains telling the council what they will pay in business rates. Whack them with the correct business rates for the square metreage and start giving independent retailers a discount on their rates instead.

People buy their meat from supermarkets for christs sake!
a] it's crap
b] it is full of water and so once cooked and shrunk it is actually dearer
c] supermarkets bully farmers.

It's not just meat though. I live in a town of 27000 people yet there is not one fishmonger, not one greengrocer, not one proper bakery and just one greengrocer. We do have two butchers but there used to be three others.
We have a twice weekly market and I do support this. The greengrocer who I've got to know over the years now gives me squidgy tomatoes for sauce making, sells the best dates in town (and very cheaply), and is generally cheaper and better quality than the s/markets. Supermarkets are for tinned stuff and bog roll!!!

Anyway, rant over..................

 

Sounds good but It's just the customer who will end up paying.
Supermarket meat is rubbish agreed, but I'm yet to find anyone's meat that is worth what you pay for it, it's more to do with farming rather than retail.

 

I agree with your points Longk . An on-line sales tax is needed to level the playing field . I think every town centre is really struggling . As an ardent internet shopper I am part of the problem and not the answer.
I live in a town of 120,000 and I can't think of a fishmonger here ? There is a van that comes round once a week selling fresh fish.

 

@Doghouse Riley agree with you about the sheetmusic! Also very useful to tap the screen when wanting to turn the page instead of having to manually turn it

I’ve also found that amazon sell loads of second hand music books dirt cheap.

Agree with @longk about supemarket meat...I rarely touch the stuff. Meat comes from farm next door and support the local market which is quite good. We have a good fish monger at the market too.

 

I use Morrisons for fish, when I cant get down the coast, it's actually pretty good.
Much better than the meat they sell, which is often just drenched in some strange flavouring in an attempt to make the stuff edible.
Dont matter how you cook it, its tough.

 

Yes morrisons do do good fish...a lot is from Grimsby that’s why (my birthplace ) us Grimbarians know good fish

 

Not if they get off their asses and use the local retailer instead.

Disagree. Both our local butchers offer infinitely better meat that is in reality cheaper. And local. Jeez, put their bacon in the pan and none of that watery scum comes out like it does with the s/market rubbish.

 

Ahh now there I've got to say, I usually buy bacon at Morrisons , none of that white ooze.
I bought some from the local farm shop, from a local farm and it oozed white scum all the time and never cooked properly.

I know which I prefer.