Blagger » Shopping

Bag a book bargain

Nik — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:19:54 +0000

The Book People site is selling Rosie Boycott’s book Our Farm for just £2.99. That’s a £13 discount.

It’s the same hardback version that Blagger reviewed it in August last year. Here’s the link to our review of Our Farm, in which we concluded:

If you’re looking to start up your own small holding, this is a refreshing reality check, and nobody who has ready it can undertake such an endeavour with anything but open eyes and a fully-informed mind. If you want a lighter, more easily digestible treatise on the evils of big supermarkets without reading Andrew Simm’s excellent, shocking Tescopoly, or a semi-biography of a one-time newspaper editor who has fallen into the Good Life, then this quickly-read volume could be right up your street.

We gave it a rating of three out of five back then, but that’s when it cost the full £15.99. Now that it’s on sale at £2.99 we’d up that to a full five out of five. Highly recommended.

Bag your copy today. Click here to visit The Book People.

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Halfords to target frugal cyclists

Nik — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:52:15 +0000

I love my bike. One of the best parts of the day is the ride from home to the station or, even better, from home to the market on a Saturday morning.

And I’m not the only one. My car is just one of many that’s sitting idle these days, as the credit crunch has seen 3.3 million extra bikes out on the streets. Halfords – a name most often associated with oil filters, tyres and new car stereos – is cashing in, and breaking out its existing bike business into 50 dedicated stores.

It’s a gutsy move, but a stroke of brilliance in a time of uncertain petrol prices and general frugal belt-tightening. They’ll run under one of two brands: Cycle Republic and Bikehut, which sound so much better than Halfords.

The Times covers the move in full, and quotes the national cyclicts’ association’s belief that us cyclists are only going to get more numerous: ‘It predicts the economy will increase the number of miles cycled in Britain by 40 per cent, based on data after the oil price rises and recessions of the 1970s.’

Me? Well, much as I welcome the news, I don’t think I’ll be heading to a Bikehut any time soon. Chelmsford has three excellent independent bike stores that I plan on supporting for a good long time yet.

As an aside, why all the secrecy? If you go to the Bikehut homepage there’s no mention of Halfords – not even in the underlying code. Yet if you dig it out of the online archive, you can see that just last year it was covered in Halfords branding. And if you apply for a job there, the dedicated recruitment site doesn’t include any Halfords branding, either, and it’s using a specialist recruitment agency, PPS with no mention of the Halfords name.

Frugal Christmas

Nik — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 09:25:40 +0000

Hot on the heels of this week’s posting about the hampers we’re making for our neighbours this Christmas, the Telegraph notes that ‘sewing machines, buttons and craft equipment are flying off the shelves as consumers start preparing a make-do-and-mend Christmas’.

So it sounds like we’re not the only ones.

Other than the baskets we don’t plan on making any Christmas presents ourselves, but it’s interesting to see what people are buying. Tesco has reported a surge in sales of shoe cleaning kits, but that’s probably got more to do with smartening yourself up when there are redundancies on the way than with cleaning your shoes in preference to throwing them out.

However:

John Lewis, despite suffering from a sharp fall in overall sales, has sold 18 per cent more sewing machines and 40 per cent more buttons than a year ago [says the Telegraph]. Dress pattern sales have shot up by 12 per cent…

Julia Dudrenec, at the Welwyn Garden City outlet of John Lewis, said: “There are many first-timers coming into the haberdashery and dress fabrics departments asking for advice on how to create their own gifts.

Now I do know how to sew on a button and repair a pocket, both of which I need to do right now (in fact, the jeans I’m wearing today have a hole in one pocket that needs some attention), so it’s good to read that we’re just two in a growing band that’s not turfing out their old clothes as soon as they start to show a little wear and tear.

I still refuse to sew my friends an off-cut tea cosy for Christmas, though. Much to their relief, I’m sure.

Why self-sufficiency matters

Nik — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:56:48 +0000

A day before trumpeting profits to rival a Bond villain’s ransom, British Gas announced it was putting up its prices by 35%. That caused uproar, but it seems it was only half of the story: the 35% figure was a national average, with our region – the east – shooting up by a far more substantial 43.9%. Effective immediately.

This is despite the fact that British Gas’ profits have risen 500% to £571 million in the last 12 months, and that its parent company, Centrica, banked £1.96bn in the same period. The companies’ public image was hardly enhanced when they announced bonuses for their directors the following day, and the papers pointed out that they coincided with a fall, not a hike, in the cost of oil. That went down from $147 a barrel to a more reasonable $123.

Needless to say the TV was full of commentators and ‘experts’ telling us all to turn down the thermostat by a degree or two – as if we hadn’t already thought of that – seemingly never spotting the fact that at this time of year, when the thermostat is usually down at zero anyway, you can’t take it any lower without coughing up for air-con.

You can blame it on inflation or corporate greed – your choice – but the truth of the matter is that prices are rising, and not just in terms of fuel. I don’t often remember what I pay for groceries from one shopping trip to the next, but on a late night trolley-push around the local store last night, two products stood out as having shot up.

Malt loafs, which for as long as I can remember, have been two for £1, were tagged up at £1.12. A 12% increase. The cat biscuits that I’d bought six weeks ago at 30p a carton (I remember because the cat goes through them so fast that I picked up a palette of 10 and it cost £3) were now 68p a pop. That’s £6.80 for the same palette, or an increase of 126%.

Now there’s not much you can grow at home to feed your pet, unless you’re keeping a vegetarian rodent, and you do have to heat your home, but with prices rising these are two good reasons for moving towards self-sufficiency, and that’s excluding the fact that the shorter food miles save on petrol.

By relying less on your local store you naturally save money in real terms. More importantly, though, every year you keep on growing your own food is more profitable than the last: not only do you get better at encouraging a higher yield, but the value of your produce is higher, too, thanks to increasing global crop prices.

Tescopoly by Andrew Simms: review

Nik — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:00:00 +0000

There are many reasons to become self-sufficient. For some it’s the simple enjoyment of standing on your own two feet, while for others it’s a desire not to be beholden to the whims and manipulation of the big-chain supermarkets.

That second group would get a whole lot larger if everyone was forced to read Andrew Simms’ extraordinary Tescopoly. Bursting with stats and facts it documents the big four supermarket groups’ (and Tesco in general’s) exploitation of the market for groceries, and the harm they do to their customers, suppliers and the environment by strangling competition and forcing food producers into impossible deals.

More worryingly, though, it documents Tesco’s drive into ever more areas, wiping out whole high streets by providing everything from cabbages to cutlets, baps to bank accounts, and ready meals to medicine. Now, as it moves into providing phone services, broadband and even legal services, its power over our day to day lives gets ever stronger, and we only feed its ability to exercise this control by giving it more and more information about who we are, what we like and what we do.

There is so much in this book that is incredible, extraordinary and frightening that picking out just one quote is close to impossible, but Simms’ analysis of the supermarkets’ ability to gather such minute information on ourselves sticks in the mine, and should be enough to have us cutting up our Clubcards in droves.

With the power of Clubcard to analyse the lives of Tesco customers, this creates some fascinating opportunities for cross-selling. Remember, 60,000 different customised promotions go out with Clubcard mailings. Should the computer notice that Mr Smith is buying a lot of condoms when Mrs Smith seems to be away (indicated by a break in her regular shopping patterns), and Mr Smith appears to be buying flowers and lingere when it isn’t Mrs Smith’s birthday, it’s perfectly imaginable that Mr Smith’s next Clubcard mailing might include a money-off voucher for the Tesco Divorce Pack. This would, after all, be simple, customer driver marketing logic. From Baby Club to getting divorced to making your Last Will and Testament, Tesco will be there to take a slice of all of life’s (and death’s) key moments.

Is this feasible? Certainly.

There are around 25 million [Clubcards] in existence, representing 14 million households. Perhaps 10 million cards are in active use. This creates an extraordinary eventuality. Shortly before its fall, the German Democratic Republic – East Germany, one of the most famous police states in the world – only had a population of around 16 million. That means Tesco almost certainly holds more files on British citizens than the East German state ever held on its own people.

But of course the German Democratic Republic was very different to the UK, and it neither built up its records with overt help from the supermarkets, nor shared with them what it knew about their customers. In the UK, however, that may yet happen.

A darker twist to such surveillance technology emerged when the UK government let it be known that it planned to link proposed compulsory biometric identity cards, designed to help control immigration, to the data contained on supermakrt loyalty cards. The idea floated was to allow two-way data traffic between the government and major corporations like banks and supermarkets. Information contained on the national identity database, set up to underpin the ID card scheme, would be made available to companies for a price. In the other direction, the police could be alerted the moment someone who was the target of an inquiry made use of a loyalty card or cash machine.

You could discount a lot of what is said in this book as paranoia had Simms, who is policy director for the New Economics Foundation and coined the term Clone Towns, not backed up his facts with an impressive array of references and stats that add weight to his argument.

I’d have liked to have seen some direct response from Tesco, rather than mere reported quotes, and there is no indication whether or not the company was directly asked to contribute to the work, but this remains an important and compelling read, and one that will make you think twice, and perhaps three times before shopping at the famous red and blue store.

Self-sufficiency, then, could be about more than the simple satisfaction of eating your own produce throughout the year. It could be about preserving your own privacy, fighting for the rights of small producers and helping to save the environment.

There’s loads more about Tescopoly, and local campaigns about and against the store’s further expansion, at tescopoly.org.

Technorati Tags:
tescopoly

Grow your own cauliflowers

Nik — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:44:32 +0000

That’s not such a frivolous dream any more. Or it might not be this year, at least. The National Farmers’ Union is warning that we could see a wholesale desertion of the crop in 2008 after last year’s bad weather saw the chunky staple of a British roast dinner turn into a loss-maker for its members.

For every acre of cauliflower they grow, they lose somewhere between £400 and £500 as the supermarkets refuse to pay them more than 18p a head. When it costs 35p a head to produce its an income that can’t be sustained.

And yet for once it’s not entirely the supermarkets’ fault. Last summer’s floods meant that the crop had to be planted late, and so the harvest that should have started at the beginning of winter is only now getting underway. As such we have a glut on the supermarket shelves, and the likes of Sainsbury’s are having to punt them out at two for £1, or risk having tons of unwanted produce going to waste.

Suddenly cauliflower isn’t the guaranteed cash crop it once was, and so its continued propagation – in the UK at least – is in doubt. That will likely push up prices next year as we face a shortage, making growing at home a financially sensible proposition.

In the UK, Thompson and Morgan sells 325 cauliflower seeds for £1.69, which assuming an unrealistic 100% success rate could average out at around half a penny per head.

For £1.29, Unwins will sell you 100 seeds ready for planting four weeks from now and harvesting from September onwards, while Suttons does 250 seeds for a bargain £1.25.

But the biggest consideration isn’t the cost of the seeds, but the size of the land you need to grow them. Cauliflowers are a greedy vegetable, demanding 18in of space both horizontally and vertically for each plant, so they’re not really suitable for a smaller plot or allotment. Not when you consider how many beans you could grow in that space.

More information about the falling price of cauliflower crops and the threat to a future harvest, can be found through these links:

Low prices force farmers to give up on cauliflowers, The Independent
Greedy supermarkets are ‘killing off caulis’, Metro
Cauliflower under threat, says NFU, Telegraph

Technorati Tags:
farming, flooding, garden, self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, vegetables

The Butt Butt water butt

Nik — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 09:36:01 +0000

It’s weeks like this when you wish you had more than one water butt. Rain, rain and more rain, with only a slight respite on Monday. If you could somehow catch it all you’d be watering for free until June.

I’ve got one butt at the back of the outhouse, and I have another one coming, courtesy of Essex and Suffolk Water. I’m guessing (and hoping) that it doesn’t look like the Butt Butt, the snigger-worthy play on words from Gerardine and Wayne Hemingway. It’s on sale through Ever Greener for £99.95.

It holds a little over 200 litres, comes in a choice of three colours, and has a conveniently-placed tap around the back, which is technically the front. The front, which is technically the back, is flattened to sit flush against the wall. If the front was at the front, then the water would come out of a far more appropriate place, obviously, but it would somewhat ruin the butt pun.

I wonder if you could get a butt plug if it starts to leak.

Technorati Tags:
garden, gardening, water+conservation

Five online ethical eco superstores

Nik — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:28:19 +0000

The saying ‘it’s not easy being green’ no longer rings true. The options for buying cleaner, more ethical, lower carbon products are growing by the day. So much so, in fact, that there are almost too many options. Here is Blagger’s pick of the top five online ethical or eco superstores.

Nigel’s Eco Store is one of the longest-running online ethical outlets, and it’s well stocked with everyday essentials, like detergent-free washing products, quick boiling kettles and environmentally-friendly pencils. It’s run from Brighton by, not surprisingly, Nigel, who maintains a blog highlighting events and new products. It was also named winner in the shopping category of Yahoo!’s Finds of the Year for 2007.

The Offset Shop is great for those times when you absolutely positively have to shop from one particular retailer, like Sainsbury’s, Boots or PC World. If you go to those stores – and dozens more – by clicking through the links here, it offsets 1kg of carbon for every £2 you spend. There are even car insurance deals which offset a massive 2900kg, equivalent to the amount pumped out by the average family car in a year.

Ethical Superstore runs along much the same lines as Nigel’s Eco Store, and has direct links to your favourite ethical brands, such as Ecover and Cafedirect, so you can do your shopping at speed. We particularly liked the charity gifts section, allowing you to donate mosquito nets, seeds and solar-powered water purifiers to the third world any time of the year, not just at Christmas.

GuardianEcoStore is a re-branded eco-outlet running under the banner of the UK’s most stylish newspaper. Pricing is available in pounds, euros and dollars, but this is more than a money-making affiliate store, as direct links to Tread Lightly, where it encourages readers to make a weekly eco pledge, shows that the environment really matters to this paper.

Ecotopia Eco shop has some wonderfully quirky products, like the return to sender labels specifically for junk mail, mens’ solar shavers and bags made in the Philippines from gathered rubbish. The only thing we don’t like is the delivery charges that apply on orders up to £100 (as with GuardianEcoStore). At Nigel’s Eco Store it’s only £75.

Technorati Tags:
ethical+shopping

Chicken Out campaign

Nik — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:41:13 +0000

The UK is going contented-chicken crazy right now. For three nights this week, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall took over prime-time Channel 4 to show how cruel so-called ‘standard’ chicken farming is, in Hugh’s Chicken Run.

It made for uncomfortable viewing, not because he crammed 2,500 chicken so densely into a barn that they had no room to move, but because he was technically doing nothing wrong. He was following accepted guidelines for ‘standard’ farming and showing the conditions in which 95% of all chickens eaten in the UK are reared.

The trouble is, this was ‘standard’ farming, not battery farming, which is a whole different matter. Battery hens, which are used to produce eggs before being slaughtered for meat, are kept in tiny cages. Up to five at a time will be crammed into a space just 20in square, giving each chicken a space around three quarters the size of an A4 page. They have no room to spread their wings, no room to move, and usually don’t even see the eggs they produce, as they fall down a chute and roll off to be processed.

Fortunately the European Union is looking to outlaw such conditions, and the UK is signed up to be among the first states to shut down these intensive egg farms. They should all be gone in time for the Olympics.

The public remains split between those who want cheap meat and those who want happy hens, but at least the supermarkets are getting onboard. Sainsbury’s, Morrissons, Waitrose and Marks and Spencer are moving to remove battery-produced eggs from their stores.

Meanwhile Asda, quoted in the Yorkshire Evening Post, stated:

All our standard fresh Asda chicken is British and clearly labelled with the little Red Tractor logo guaranteeing it meets strict farm assurance standards. They are reared in barns that provide warm, dry housing with straw or wood shavings bedding, heating and fresh air controlled by ventilation systems, and have full access to food and fresh drinking water.

We also sell free-range and organic chickens, offering an extensive range to meet the palates and pockets of all our customers.

But that statement is ambiguous. Pretty much all hens kept in barns, even if they are packed in so tight that they can’t move, will have the ‘dry housing with straw or wood shavings bedding, heating and fresh air controlled by ventilation systems, and have full access to food and fresh drinking water’ that Asda claims its chickens have. All of those things are necessary to create plump birds that will attract a good price on the shelf.

The Times reported that ‘Asda insists that it is “working hard” to phase out the use of eggs from caged hens, but has not set a deadline.’

Last year, however, The Poultry Site reported Asda’s justification for continuing to sell eggs from battery hens on the grounds that ‘Caged eggs are cheaper than free range eggs. Many of our customers only have £46 left at the end of the month, and the way they choose something is down to price… Free-range eggs sales are up by 16 per cent year-on-year at Asda, but our customers want value in terms of price.’

At least we can be thankful that, according to the Telegraph, ‘Asda said it stocked only one line of eggs from caged birds, the economy Smart Price eggs, and there was no deadline to end that.’

The only thing for consumers to do is to buy free-range out and out, whether it’s eggs or meat, which is why Blagger has signed up to the Chicken Out campaign that aims to convert consumers to the benefits of less intensive farming.

You can do the same here.

It’s also time to start looking out for the RSPCA’s Freedom Food logo on the food we buy, which indicates that it was produced on farms inspected by the RSPCA and found to be in compliance with its strict higher standards. Full details can be found here.

Technorati Tags:
farming, ethical+shopping, battery+farming, ethical+farming, intensive+farming, chicken, hens, chickens

Unusual Online Seed Stores

Nik — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:29:12 +0000

For this week’s Five Friday Favourites, we’re continuing the theme of planning for the food growing year ahead by picking five of the UK’s less common online seed outlets, whose catalogues may have passed you by.

Chiltern Seeds (actually based in Cumbria) sells over 4,500 varieties of rare or old seeds, covering both flowers and vegetables. With so many to choose from it has several varieties of each kind of vegetable on offer, so easily puts your local garden centre to shame. Its web site is informative, giving you a little background on much of what it sells, and delivery is very reasonable at £1.50 in the UK, and £2.50 for Europe.

The Real Seed Catalogue concentrates solely on kitchen garden seeds, so there’s no need to click through page after page of flowers and shrubs to find what you want. Its site is very personable and approachable, with ‘Ben’ and ‘Kate’ testing all of the seeds that they sell by growing them themselves and only selling the varieties that produce the best results. So, while the range is smaller it’s probably a good choice for the nervous first-time gardener.

If you love cooking Italian food then Seeds of Italy has definite bookmark potential. The tomato section alone makes it worth a visit, with specific varieties for making tomato sauce and others for preserving. It has an extensive selection of mushrooms, which will be a sensible step up for anyone who has started with a DIY or garden centre mushroom growing kit, and even truffle trees for a bit of luxury at less than restaurant prices.

If selling heritage seeds on a modern medium like the web sounds like something of a jarring contrast, then pop along to Thomas Etty Esq. Not only is the layout old-fashioned, but the pages of its catalogue are presented as attached PDFs, while a retro take on the ‘under construction’ banner flown on developing websites asks ‘May it please you to note that we continue to modify and improve this electrical website, and we crave your indulgence whilst this neccessary work continues.’

And for readers in Ireland, there’s Brown Envelope Seeds, which has excellent indoor and outdoor sowing grids on the seed description pages. More extensive information for growing each vegetable and saving its seeds for later re-use is provided in an associated wiki, linked from each seed page. Pricing is in euros, and payment handled by PayPal.

Inclusion in the above list does not imply endorsement.

Technorati Tags:
garden, gardening, vegetables, seeds