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News and Comment February 2024

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27 February (Part 2) - Am I a skinflint?

Amazon binI spent the morning filling my brown bin with weeds and a few shrub trimmings because there are only two collections left before my garden waste subscription expires. I would probably have continued with Bexley Council’s bin scam if it was not for their announcement that they would, in the words of Labour Chancellor Dennis Healey, keep on raising the price “until the pips squeak”. Unless residents take a stand there will be no end to well above inflation price rises.

My subscription expires a week before this year’s price hike but it would still be more than I paid last year and principles must count for something.

I have reached an informal agreement with a neighbour to share but because peak demands will coincide I will have to set up a storage facility so that we might better exploit the winter collections.

Ironically neither of us would need a bin if it were not for neighbours. Mine is a generally good one with a hedge and front garden lawn but are from a culture that sees no point in maintaining a garden. The cul-de-sac layout means that it becomes an eye-sore for me more than him. No one but me has cut either hedge or lawn (daisy patch) since 2006.

The bin sharer has neighbours of the thoroughly unpleasant and abusive variety who 30 years ago planted a dozen Leylandii trees ten inches from his rear boundary. The action of an inconsiderate moron who issues threats whenever the overgrowth is cut back. If it wasn’t for that awful couple I probably wouldn’t have anyone I could bin share with - but might not need to.

The principle/skinflint debate cropped up in Sainsbury’s last week too. Own brand orange juice had gone from £3·75 to £5·75 in a week. I had the assistant remove it from the till when the price flagged up. There is no way I will tolerate a jump which makes it more than four times as expensive as the milk I bought at the same time. Support British farmers not Brazilian ones! (Research told me that bad weather has forced commodity prices up by 115%.)

Then there is Amazon. They jacked up the price of a Ring Door Bell subscription by 43%. (£3·49 to £4·99.) Doesn’t affect me as there have always been perfectly good subscription free alternatives to Ring but 33% extra for maintaining a Prime subscription does - except that I cancelled it on principle.

If I didn’t cough up another £2·99 a month they would shower me with advertisements and take away Dolby Atmos from their audio streams and Dolby Vision from the video. No great loss because it seemed to me that Amazon’s streaming service has rather too much foreign language soft-porn for my tastes.

What have they got from me for attempting to rip me off? Instead of 196 orders in 2023 (many of them multi-item orders) there have been two in 2024. One was to complete a set of identical items which had been delivered last November and the other direct from Amazon USA. A postage free blu-ray disc not available in the UK.

In only six weeks £471·88 has been spent with alternative suppliers plus £54·99 spent in the Broadway, breaking years of never shopping there. Amazon is far too big to notice that trying to rob me of £2·99 a month has cost them £500 in a matter of weeks.

Whether cancelling the Direct Debit to a local charity because I was unable to give them a fairly large donation when I called into their premises last month is principle or the skinflint tendency coming to the fore I am as yet undecided.

 

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