If you have any problems with your mobile phone, or your landline or anything else that you use on a regular basis, there is a telephone number that you can phone to speak to the help desk. This is all good and well, and should in theory be all that you need to get you going again. Yet, almost all of the help lines connect you straight to India or Bangladesh, and you end up talking to someone who more often than not cannot understand you. The issue is not that the help desk is half way across the world, but that there is a genuine language barrier that cannot be ignored. (more…)

Are all the plastic wrappings on products really necessary? When you buy anything from the supermarket these days, the product seems to come wrapped in not one but sometimes two or three layers of plastic wrappings. Have you bought something recently that looks fairly generous only to get it home and to find that it is just a tiny object amidst layers of paper and plastic?

(more…)

Don’t you hate going to retail stores? There are so many annoying things about them that one wants to throw every thing down and return home. There are in fact so many, that I don’t know where to begin.

I shall begin with crowds. These days there so many people at stores that you cannot move or stand still without literally bumping into some person or other. Most of them seem to be utterly clueless why they are there, and what they are supposed to be doing. They seem to be there only to disrupt people who are going about their purchases; you and me.

Then there are the children. If adults are bad, children in retail stores are an absolute menace. Enough said!

Related annoyance is the lines at checkout that crowds create. There is nothing worse than standing at basically the same spot staring at other people’s backs for half an hour or so. Can’t these multi billion dollar revenue generating retail stores increase the number of checkout people?

It is unbelievable, but true; sometimes these checkout people get their sums and product details wrong even with all those computerized checkout machine to help them. Always check your bill.

Why can’t people put their shopping carts in proper holding cages after use? And why is it that store employees never seem to do that? One is almost always forced to look for one and maneuver it back into store to get started.

Most of the salespeople loitering around a retail store are perfectly useless. They are unable to give you a straight answer or recommend products, but stare at you blankly if you ask them a question. Stores seem to recruit the most uneducated people around because they are cheap.

Don’t even think about returning any defective goods, all the trouble and bad blood generated will make it not worth the while even if you succeed in getting a replacement.

That is not all, but for now I will stop at that. Those damn retailers!