CUNNING WHEEZES

[Tizer]

Tripps, offer them an app to download to their mobile phones that will record their business meetings, water cooler discussions and details of their pay rises and bonuses and automatically publish them on the Internet.

[Stanley]

Noticed another CW on a Sky advert for various 'bundles' of programmes. The blurb said 'From £5 a month' Note the 'from' many would read it as 'for' and assume you got the whole list for £5. I doubt it! One word makes such a difference.

[Stanley]

I've commented elsewhere on Wonga but surely their ploy of sending out fake solicitor's letters to clients behind on their payments qualifies as a Cunning Wheeze'! Even more so, charging them 'administrative fees' for doing this! The CEO says "it is a bad day for Wonga". Indeed, they were caught with their fingers in the till. Question is, who sanctioned faking the letters and sending them out? If the CEO didn't know about it, how much control has she got over the lender?

[Tizer]

If the CEO didn't know about it, how much control has she got over the lender?

This is similar to my concerns about Rebeca Brookes - she was chief executive officer of News International from 2009 to 2011, having previously served as the youngest editor of a British national newspaper at News of the World from 2000 to 2003, and the first female editor of The Sun (related to NoW) from 2003 to 2009. If she wasn't aware of the phone hacking then she wasn't fit to be in the job. She'd been with News International since 1989 and I find it hard to accept that she didn't know all the inner workings of the company.

[Stanley]

Indeed. That's the root of my problem as well I think. Lots of selective memory loss one suspects....
This is why I refuse to conduct serious conversations with large bodies on the 'phone. I do it by letter so there is an audit trail. They know this and are more circumspect I think. (They hate Registered Mail!)

[plaques]

Possibly falling into the same category as Stanley's 'from' advert. This one involves weight loss and body shaping, (without surgery). A young lady lost 4st 7lbs with 17 weeks of treatment. No mention of what constituted a 'Treatment' period and whether the 17 weeks were a cumulative sum of all the hours of treatment. ie: if a treatment was counted as one day then 17 weeks worth could be 17x7 = 119 visits, possibly spread over 3 years. On the other hand she may have lost this weight in 17 weeks. Nearly 3 3/4 lbs per week. Rather her than me.

[Stanley]

P, quite right. Then there is the way Wonga flash an interest rate statement of almost 4000% in small print at the bottom of their TV advertisement. Loreal claim poll results from users in the same way. Very often on small samples. No explanations who they are. Employees in the office?
Copy writing for adverts is almost all Cunning Wheezes.

[Stanley]

Only a minor one but re. copy-writing. The use of 'three' in voice overs on adverts enunciated so that it sounds like 'free'. If your hearing is slightly impaired it gets you every time!

[Tripps]

I got a gift from my son yesterday of a tin of Uncle Joe's Mint balls. Much appreciated, and since both my sons were born in Wigan, there's a bit of a sentimental link.

I've been using the last one as a pen holder, and put the new one next to it. It is identical.
Except the net weight of the old tin indicates 200g, the new tin states net weight 120g.

I've looked on their web site and there is only a 120g tin listed.

Uncle Joes Mints

I know various manufacturers have been doing concealed price rises by this method, but a 40% reduction in product seems a bit steep. I shall speak to them - if only to say that they haven't fooled all of the people.

[PanBiker]

I used to use a tin as a money box Tripps, still have it somewhere bet that's a 200g job.

[Stanley]

The CW departments are still operating at full throttle. I noted a offer of 'free broadband' last night for a year plus a £125 voucher for Sainsbury's. The eventual yearly contract was priced at £7.50 a month which for a year is less than the voucher. Too good to be true and so it isn't, there is a CW embedded in there somewhere!

[plaques]

Not being that sort of person who wears a watch or carries a mobile phone unless its absolutely necessary, has anybody else noticed the absence of clocks in superstores and Banks. I suppose the stores just want us to drift round endlessly not realizing how much time we have spent. With Banks its slightly different, having a customer clock would tell the poor sucker how much time they spend queuing. That would never do!

[Tizer]

Same reason they don't provide anywhere to sit down, they want you to circulate, see more things to buy, not take up their space! And yes, CW is at full throttle; like the internet and phone scammers, the retailers are getting more sophisticated and clever and it's increasingly difficult to spot the trickery. I notice some companies are claiming to be giving away Ipads for free but it's because they want to tie you in to their product or service through an app.

[Stanley]

You may remember that a while ago I was questioning 'free' games like Candy Crush. We know now that it and others like it sell 'upgrades' to unsuspecting kids and can be very expensive indeed. It seems to me that the main thrust of people like ISPs and streaming TV providers is to tempt you into upgrading to a 'free' product but at the same time getting you back on contract. Talktalk are bombarding me at the moment but I prefer to remain a free agent until we see what the eventual market looks like.

[Tizer]

Paul Lewis was one of the people asked to speak on the latest `More or Less' programme on Radio 4. He gave details about the amounts of money being paid out by all the big UK banks as compensation for mis-selling payment protection insurance (PPI). It's still running at an enormous figure and only about 40% of people have been refunded so far. The banks keep claiming that it's easing off but it isn't. Paul Lewis drew attention to the fact that the banks pay out these astronomical sums of compensation every year and yet still manage to make massive profits. PPI was being run as nothing more or less than a national scam and the bank executives responsible for overseeing it should be in court instead of enjoying big bonuses and fat retirement packages.

[Stanley]

It';s a depressing picture isn't it. The one thing that is certain about deception is that eventually it is found out, you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Problem is that in the end it is the source of the money, the customers and ordinary tax payers, who carry the can. The problem is that the financiers rule the world, the government daren't attack them because they are the source of party funding and the phantom money that keeps them in power.

[Tripps]

Prompt reply - so that's Ok then. . .

Hi David and many thanks for your e-mail. As you may have noticed the actual individual wrappers on the sweets has changed and this change meant that we could no longer fit 200g in the tins comfortably.
The new pricing does reflect the decrease in weight.
Hope this explains.

Anita Taulty, Sales & Marketing Manager

[PanBiker]

Individual wrappers must be big Tripps. 80g taken up in wrapping that's over a third of the capacity of the tin! What was wrong with the old wrappers anyway? Just a neat cellophane job from memory, what are they now?

[Stanley]

Creative writing in the Customer Service Department... As long as a reply has been sent and the box ticked that's a successful response. Jobs depend on it. Very closely related to copy writing for the adverts. The worrying aspect to me is that it is retreat from reality Consumers are less likely to engage their critical faculties (if they have any) to examine and analyse statements and claims.
When I did the Open College courses at Nelson and Colne College one of the first modules we were taught was 'Study Techniques' which was brilliant and a revelation to me. Over many years I had got lazy and took things at face value but after doing the module which showed you how to assess evidence and form your own opinion I was asked what I had learned. I said that I could never listen to a political speech again without laughing. We need to teach this at an early age in schools. Thankfully I note that many of our members don't need help, they have got there under their own steam!
I've just remembered a very similar circumstance. When the police changed their way of communicating and moved answering calls to police stations to a central call centre at Burnley I took the trouble to go down there and question the Inspector in charge. It transpired that their self-assessment of the service counted a call answered as a success, no score was given to whether the caller was satisfied with the response. The process was more important than the outcome....

[Tizer]

One of the biggest Cunning Wheezes in recent history must be the selling of electronic gadgets that can only be bought with a subscription contract. It probably started with mobile phones and internet connections and then blossomed with the introduction of smartphones etc. The marketing and sales people realised they could tie customers in for a period of time so they couldn't easily defect to the competitors. Microsoft had tried to hook people by selling licences but Bill Gates must have kicked himself for not having thought up the subscription contract wheeze! (Although he was probably doing it with commercial contracts.)

[Stanley]

Dead right! I have noted that one. And the big advantage is that if the contract contains the necessary fine print the charges can be increased once the customer is on the hook. I'm out of contract now with my ISP and they bombard me with offers of 'free TV streaming' and a lower charge for broadband but it would involve a new contract and I don't trust them....

[Tizer]

Two email messages arrived about an hour apart yesterday. The first from a holiday company:
`Beat the January Blues and plan for 2015 now!'
and the second from Nationwide Building Society:
`Beat the January Blues - great travel offers just for you..'
Coincidence?

We're being pounded with daily emails from M&S too, everyone with `offers'; they must be desperate. It tells you something about the state of the country.

[Stanley]

I heard the boss of John Lewis musing on the new Black Friday import from the US. His basic point was that early deep discounting like that could very easily backfire in terms of January sales and overall profitability. Sounds like common sense to me.....

[Tizer]

Yesterday I said that M&S must be desperate judging from the flood of promotional emails with `offers'...and this morning, what do we see?
BBC web site:
`M&S sees clothing sales fall over Christmas period'
"Marks and Spencer has reported its 14th consecutive quarterly drop in clothing sales, blaming unseasonal autumn weather. The retailer said like-for-like general merchandise sales - which are mainly clothing - fell 5.8% in the third quarter. Meanwhile, online sales fell 5.9%, despite a revamped website. M&S chief executive Marc Bolland said the company had a "difficult quarter in general merchandise".

[Stanley]

All the cunning wheezes in the world couldn't save Woolworths, Littlewoods, The British Home Stores and now it looks as though M&S are quietly going the same way.... The first high street 'superstores'.