A Time of Magic

If the marketing companies could get a definitive answer to that question we’d be even more inundated with the give aways than we are at the moment.

Of course, the problem is that there are many different reasons why things are collected and kept. I still have the stress ball from an IT convention from many years ago largely because it was the only time I’ve been to a place giving those out: it was unique. A few years ago I remember one stand being swamped because they had cute little pens and those were kept for a while ’til the likes of IKEA started handing similar things out: another unique item. Then there’s the personal reasons: I still use the promo keychains or rather keychain, singular, given with the £60,000 computer system I bought almost 15 years ago basically as a reminder of how daft the procurement people were at that time. I’m quite sure it’s the most expensive keyring in our street!

That unique quality is something worth searching for in items that you give away but requires you to move outside the standard catalogues and make that little bit more effort.

Not too far from us we’ve a major shopping area with two major supermarkets on opposite sides of a dual carriageway.

In principle, it should really matter which we go to as the competition should level out any pricing differences given that they’re so close to each other. Well, perhaps in principle but in practice there are major differences in the pricing.

Thus we do almost all our shopping in one of those supermarkets and largely ignore the other one. That in turn seems to seriously confuse the marketing algorithm that the loyalty card system in the lesser used supermarket uses. Every time we go (which works out at maybe a couple of times each month) we get what seems like a crazy offer from them yet when we go back to use that offer we don’t get anything comparable afterwards.

Now, I can understand that tactic being useful when a supermarket opens as a way to attract customers from the other supermarket. Why they do it getting on for ten years on is something of a mystery though.

In principle, it sounded like a good idea. Other countries have organised debates between their potential leaders in the run-up to an election, so why not do it in the UK too?

For one thing, by the time they’d gotten around to running with the idea, the UK had saddled itself with three separate regional governments in addition to the Westminster parliament and therefore there needed to be four separate debates running in the pre-election period. Not a big deal to be sure but it meant that the heavy-hitters in terms of presenters were snapped up by the main debate so the other debates seemed very much a down market affair in comparison.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t actually elect those leaders directly. They’re selected from amongst all the people we’ve already elected around the country in the regional assemblies and in Westminster. Those regional assemblies are a problem too because their election periods aren’t in sync with those at Westminster so there wasn’t a lot of point in having the regional debates on air now.

But then it descended into silliness with the little worm thing going across the screen as the second debate progressed. What was the point of that? It was driven by people the TV companies had selected from amongst the “I want to be on TV” crowd (we noticed several on the programme who’d clearly joined that bandwagon some time ago). That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but it ended up with a reliability that must be close to zero given that the TV people had “balanced” the audience controlling the thing thus making it highly skewed towards minorities (the “token white” syndrome) but did they really think that everyone would remain alert to what was being said throughout the long and tedious debate?

Perhaps if it had been a debate, they might have but it seemed more like isolated presentations for the most part, particularly in the regional debates.

All it really showed was that the leaders are quite good at making presentations and that leaders of parties with no real hope of forming the next government can really let their total lack of responsibility run wild.