Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
We are constantly told that retailers are desperately trying to encourage us all to buy from their stores. We are bombarded with advertisements offering us great deals and bargain prices but the high street stores are facing not only the recession but also the rise of online shopping.
Having spent some time at the weekend selecting a suitable washing machine I was disappointed to be told that this particular model was not in stock and delivery might take several weeks. I left the store thinking I would try elsewhere but eventually returned home empty handed.
On returning home I did some research online and discovered, to my amazement, I could save around £70 on the cost of the same machine by buying online and have it delivered within two days which is faster delivery than was available from the retail store even if they had this machine is stock.
It’s hard to see how it can be possible for high street stores to cover the cost of managing their stores but still match such online prices. They have my sympathy but they won’t get my money and I will be buying from the site below and you might care to check the prices on offer yourself.
In the interests of being entirely open and honest, the ad above is an affiliate link and this site benefits from any purchase made following a click on it but the prices are exactly the same as if you went to the website directly.
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
It is good to see that at long last the bonus culture that exists in our financial industry are being looked at though you just can’t help feeling that a fudging of the issue will be the eventual result.
Humans have always lived by a sort of bonus culture. We take risks and we get rewards. It has been that way since the first caveman hunted a dangerous animal for food. The rewards we can get are what drives us on to achieve and without it we would probably still be living in caves.
The difficulty with the finance industry is that nothing is real and rewards have been given for what turned out to be disastrous actions. You can see the logic that someone makes millions of profits for a bank and gets a reward of perhaps one tenth of one per cent for doing so but what are you to do when you find your reward system is flawed and the over time you find that their actions lost you money. Like any gambler, you are only in profit when you walk away from the table and cash in your chips.
The anger among the general public is clear and it has been rumbling around for years. The fat cats may argue that bonuses are justified and essential to keep the top people working for the banks but it also has managed to encourage company employees to gamble (Let’s call a spade a spade… ) and lose because their personal risk reward ratio favoured gambling rather than cautious investing.
Perhaps we are unfairly blaming only the banks. The whole of society has been looking for and expecting big rewards and we have given up on looking to the long term. Ever since the 1980′s we have been moving towards the situation we find ourselves in today. Short term gains have become the aim and computerisation of markets has enabled trading to be done in the blink of an eye.
Perhaps it is time we took a breath and thought about where we should be heading. Bonuses have a place and success should be rewarded but we should think very carefully before we agree bonuses and ensure they are for genuine and long term achievement and not for the gamblers who have success one day and then failure the next.
While we are at it maybe we should look at executive pay. How do you value a company executive? Should they be worth 10 times the salary of the sales staff or customer support? 100 times or maybe 1000 times? Those at the front line of any company may well work harder, feel more stressed and put at least as much effort into their work as the CEO but their efforts may go unrewarded.
Perhaps the biggest question of all is whether companies pay enough attention to their shareholders. It should be the shareholders, the owners of the company, who decide on any bonus payments. Company management do portray an image of listening to shareholders but the general pattern seems to be that they feel they can do whatever they like regardless of what shareholders think. The problem may lie with the pension funds who control the bulk of most shares in companies and seem all too happy to go along with the management view and avoid rocking the boat. Perhaps if they had kept their eyes on what the banks were doing they might have spotted that things were not as rosy as we were told.
