Bargain!

You can get some wonderful bargains if you shop around.

What is 2 x 7.95?

Here you see two bottles of wine on offer for ... twice the price of one bottle of wine.

The Emperor's New Doughnut

Yesterday I decided to check out a store that has recently opened at a nearby shopping centre. Doughnut Time it was called. It was a cool hole-in-the-wall with a retro neon sign above and music playing. It was surrounded by a crowd of young adults and was obviously very popular with them.

They were selling doughnuts at six dollars a piece.

I purchased a doughnut with the somewhat witty name of "Ferrero No Share". It looked pretty good. On the doughnut was a thick chocolate topping which I had assumed was something like a ganache, with some crumbled hazelnut and topped with a Ferrero Rocher chocolate.

 

It tasted horrible. It was amazing how bad it was.

The doughnut itself was a moderately good yeast doughnut, but it was completely ruined by the topping. Rather than the beautiful creamy chocolate it appeared to be, it was instead a tasteless, sickly-sweet glaze which for some unknown reason had an unpleasant gritty texture as well. How they managed this I have no idea. The Ferrero Rocher on top was stale (and they go like chocolate flavoured cardboard when this happens), but still managed to taste good by contrast.

It was less good than a 50¢ Coles doughnut.

The name certainly made sense; you wouldn't want to share it - at least not with anyone you liked.

 

The packaging of this thing contained hip references to trendy stuff such as Snapchat and so I thought I'd check out the hashtag on Twitter. I had always thought that Twitter had a high proportion of cynical people eager to skewer pretentious nonsense like this and I anticipated pages of witty one-liners lampooning this textbook example of style over substance.

But instead it was full of people glorying in the delicious worderfulness of these decadent treats with not a negative voice to be heard. People were bragging (with photographic evidence) about how they were treating themselves to a six-pack of the nauseating things; which is a quantity I have difficulty in imagining any human being able to ingest in a sitting.

Have the marketers (they are certainly not cooks) running the company employed an army of paid trolls to overwhelm the social media or are people really such sheep?

Seemingly the latter: This business has supposedly expanded from a single store last year to over twenty at the moment. Obviously they're very popular and certainly the local store was. The kids were mobbing the place - something I have never seen at the local bakery which has mud-cake slices that are a thousand times better for half the price.

Still, this is in the electorate that recently reelected Peter Dutton (albeit by a very narrow margin), so the qualities of independent thought and good taste are obviously in short supply.

QANTAS Baggage Handlers' Football Club: Favourites for the World Cup

It is arguably unfair to put the boot into airline baggage handlers, since they are only a symptom of deeper problems with our national airline. Nevertheless, it's a bit like the mugger who comes from a broken home; the ultimate cause behind their behaviour might lie elsewhere and they might be worthy of some sympathy - but that sympathy reaches its limits when it's your kidney they're poking a knife into. Or in this case trying to drop-kick your luggage into the back row of the grandstand.

Some years ago, after having numerous suitcases damaged, I purchased a Pelican case. This came with a lifetime warranty against everything except "shark bite, bear attack and children under five"*. On their web site they had photos of Pelican cases which had survived being blown up in Iraq.

[* = Yes, they are one of those over-hyped American products, but they are still very tough for all that.]

I don't suppose they employ bears or sharks at QANTAS, so they must be using children under five, because the first time I took the case on a flight, it arrived damaged so badly that I had to borrow a screwdriver to open it.

Here is what they managed to do:

Exhibit A

It doesn't look so spectacular, but consider that the metal reinforcing for the locking point was torn loose and rammed so deeply into the side of the latching mechanism as to jam it solid. It wasn't possible to open the case by hand. It's a mystery how they managed to achieve this; it must have required considerable force. Did they place it against a sharp edge and jump on it? Did someone repeatedly hit it with a hammer?

In subsequent trips, the case acquired scratches all over, deep gouges in the top, and was sent to the wrong place on one occasion.

The check-in staff used to have a nasty trick they'd play on people.

"Is it fragile?" they would ask.

"Yes," you would reply, hoping to have your case spared the worst of the kicking.

"OK," they would say, "sign this."

And you'd be given a label to sign waiving your rights to claim damages, because your property was "fragile and improperly packed". Checkmate, sucker!

The abuse of baggage, however, is actually one of the least bad aspects of airline travel these days.

I use to be strongly loyal to QANTAS, but now I alternate between airlines. I try QANTAS and they piss me off so much that I vow never to fly with them again. So I travel Virgin. Virgin then manage to piss me off even worse and I think QANTAS weren't so bad after all. So I go QANTAS next time, whereupon they find some new different way to annoy me.

At this stage the reader is probably thinking "First World Problems", and for sure I'm appreciative of the fact that I have (at least currently) safe and (moderately) convenient air travel available at a reasonable price. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that things are unnecessarily and artificially bad and this is symptomatic of a worse underlying problem. Things could be (and were in the past) so much better.

It seems that both major airlines are engaged in a classic race to the bottom. Dishonest and deceptive practices are the norm. Staff are mistreated. Customers are a fungible commodity - eleven dollars made by annoying and ripping off a (previously) loyal customer is better than ten made by treating them decently.

A couple of examples:

1) Low cost air fares cannot be changed on line, but instead you have to ring them up to do this. Since they already have to set up the software to allow the more expensive fares to be changed, they could do this for cheaper fares at zero cost. Instead they have to spend extra money to employ people to handle the calls.

This is bean-counter logic. You actively spend money to give people on cheap fares a worse experience, in order to make those on the more expensive fares feel like they're getting something extra. It's the sort of thing that no one with a conscience would even think of, but it's more cost-effective than providing value for money, and that's all that matters.

2) Then there are tricks with extra baggage. If you want to take a second piece of luggage, it has to be booked separately, and rather than an endorsement on your ticket, you get sent a separate receipt by email which you have to print out (and it's not even a PDF, just to make printing harder). Sometimes - and this has happened to me - they "forget" to send the receipt and you have to ring them up and hassle them about it. It's all about tricking the careless (and we're all careless sometimes) into not bringing the receipt with them to the airport, so they have to pay again, at an even higher rate, for their baggage.

Naturally people complain and I'm sure they get their money back eventually, but meanwhile QANTAS essentially have an interest-free loan of your money. Again, appealing to the bean-counters. Of course the check-in staff have to bear the wrath of angry customers, but that doesn't appear on the balance sheet.

I could go on here and bore you with a list of further petty grievances: crowded seating, check-in Nazis with idiosyncratic ideas of what may be allowed in baggage, meals which exemplify the term "all sizzle and no steak", frequent-flier programs now rendered a joke, the high incidence of cancelled flights, peculiar pricing policies which often make it cheaper to forfeit a flight rather than rebook, and of course the ever-present Security Theatre, which is just as much a farce as ever. [And to be clear, these complaints apply equally to QANTAS, Virgin and Jetstar.]

What really concerns me, however, is that aircraft maintenance has not been exempted from this mania for sacrificing everything in the pursuit of the short-term Dollar. We are seeing yet another round of job cuts to engineering staff in QANTAS.

My understanding is that modern aircraft are like modern cars: they are safer and require less maintenance than previously. Paradoxically, this can be dangerous because it gives an excuse to cut back on maintenance and you can get away with more for longer before a real disaster happens. I have zero confidence that the heavy-handed industrial relations attitude of QANTAS is in proportion to any reduced demand for maintenance.