by David Merrigan

The amount of the refund is not quite life-changing, but it’s certainly game-changing as far as my own personal finances are concerned, especially since theoretically I should have another refund for similar  mis-sold PPI on another, now paid-off personal loan, due to me in the new year, once I get around to putting in the claim for it.

Now, I’m not going to deny that I’ve initially had a little bit of fun with the cash, by upgrading my camera equipment to help me to make better videos. Since I do that kind of thing as a ‘work’ activity (even though I don’t get paid for it), I think that’s a reasonable luxury I can grant myself. I’m also intending to put aside a little bit of the money so that I have ready access to ready cash in order to not have to always shop first in the reduced fridge at the supermarket – to know that actually, I now can afford to follow some principles in terms of looking at the origin of the piece of meat, and favour ethical production practices over dubious ones.

But the lion’s share of the cash I am indeed being sensible with, by using it to make a significant dent in paying off my remaining personal debt, and reducing the amount of my monthly income which goes into paying off that personal debt.

And that’s where the insanity comes in.

The balance of the loan on which the PPI has been refunded is £1,680, at an interest rate of 15.5%, with six remaining instalments to pay of £290 a month.

That’s not the only debt I have – there’s also three credit cards, one of which has a balance of £5,400 at an interest rate of 25.5%, and a monthly payment of £120.

Can you see what’s silly there?

For 95% of the population, debt is a reality, and not necessarily one to be afraid or ashamed of; few people under the age of 50 are truly completely free of debt, whether it’s a personal loan, a mortgage, student debt, or credit card debt.

The misery of debt is not, for most people, the actual balance of the debt, because that’s something which is purely notional and fictitious – it’s a number on a piece of paper they receive each month. The true misery of debt is not the balance, but the monthly payment required to service that debt – and the difficulty of seeing an end to that monthly payment in sight.

So for me, with a big wodge of wedge at hand to do something about clearing my own personal EU debt mountain, it’s insane to be presented with a choice of either clearing a (relatively) small debt attracting a (relatively) low interest rate entirely, or making a significant inroads into a much larger debt attracting a higher interest rate. The choice between releasing an expenditure of £290 a month or one of £120 a month is an obvious one – take the money, not the car. Realistically, big as the PPI windfall was, the most which could be put aside is £3,000, so actually that becomes a choice of releasing £290 a month or £70 a month.

The insanity of personal credit is how the repayments on credit cards work – not the higher interest rates, but the very mechanism by which the minimum payment – which let’s face it is what most people pay each month – doesn’t actually pay off the debt, it merely pays the monthly interest charge on the debt. The way the debt is structured, the credit card company holds all the power over the credit card owner; there’s no incentive for the company for you to pay off your credit card, because – like a gangland loanshark – the longer you remain in debt to them, the more money they will make out of you, way in excess of what you’ve actually borrowed from them. There’s no incentive for you yourself to pay off your credit card, because to do so will make little difference to what actually matters to you – your monthly outgoings.

This surely should be an area where government intervention should come into play?

It seems to me that the legislation around credit cards should be modified so that the customer is incentivised to not build up such a high credit card debt in the first place, to ensure that the monthly repayments are structured in such a way that the minimum monthly payment ensures they are always paying of a certain minimum amount of what they actually owe rather than just paying the interest, and that if the customer comes into a cash windfall, the monthly payment they are paying is sufficient that it will always be worth their while to pay off more than even the increased minimum amount.

If the customer then spends into that repayment the next month, then that is their concern – but the debt should always be structured in such a way that the balance of power of repaying it is put in to the hands of the customer, not the credit card company.

And in the meanwhile, if you’ve had a loan and paid payment protection insurance on it, consider the possibility that you too might be entitled to a refund; the classic reasons why you would definitely be entitled would be if your employment status was temporary, or self-employed at the time of the loan – but even if you were fully employed, being able to demonstrate that you were told it was an automatic part of the loan will be enough to get you a refund. You’ve got nothing to lose by making a claim! You don’t need to engage the services of a dodgy no-win-no-fee claims management lawyer (who will take a sizeable cut of your refund) – I just went into the bank and said ‘I want to make a complaint’, gave them the details, and six weeks later the money was in my account.

And of course, I’ve paid off the loan first.

The item mainly talked about how rubbish as a car it is, going on to become an item about what kind of car you could get on the second hand market for that kind of cash.

Coincidently, this lunchtime I called into the bike shop to get some new tyres for my bike, the current ones needing replacing partly because off-road tyres are a bit silly for somebody who never goes off-road, but mostly because they’re getting a bit ripped to shreds on the sides. Seeing the cheapest tyres that were any good came to £20 I did that sharp intake of breath thing, deciding that i didn’t feel like ponying up £40 at once instead getting just one tyre, to replace the other one next month.

Standing by the till waiting to be served, I saw this bike in the rack for sale:

I did manage to stop myself from saying out loud that for that price, I’d expect it to come with an engine attached.

Mock-up final NOTW front page by Adam Westbrook

With yesterday’s announcement that the News of the World is going to be printed for the last time this coming Sunday, now I’m outraged.

There’s a disgusting irony in that the closure of the paper – with the loss of 200 direct jobs – has been prompted by the sustained campaigning of the political left; the people who have a political mission to save jobs have caused a whole bunch of jobs to be lost. Not just any jobs, though – innocent jobs. Remember, the phone hacking scandal took place 5-10 years ago – none of the people who are losing their jobs this weekend were responsible for what took place back then, indeed, of the people losing their jobs this weekend only about five of them (according to the News of the World’s outgoing political editor) were even working for the paper at the time of the scandal. 200 innocent jobs are being scapegoated in order for The People of Twitter to feel like they’ve secured an historic victory, sticking it to The Man.

Yes, 200 innocent jobs – one thing I missed out of my post on Tuesday was my increasing cynicism about being told to be outraged by Twitter; more often than not (and I’ve been guilty myself), when Twitter tells me to be outraged about something on the Monday, information which comes out by the Wednesday reveals that there are other important aspects of the story which put a different slant on the outrage. So whilst this Tuesday, Twitter was effectively calling for the News of the World to be shut down, once it secured its victory we learn that different slant. Whilst the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the News of the World at the time the criminal activity started who must surely have not only been aware of what was going on, but must have signed off on it, escapes (so far, at the time of writing) completely free.

The 200 jobs which are being lost on Sunday were not responsible for the phone hacking scandal – those 200 jobs were the people responsible for uncovering Sarah Ferguson’s flogging time with her ex husband Prince Andrew to people hoping to gain business advantages as a result of such meetings; they were the people who proved corruption within FIFA and who uncovered the corruption within Pakistani cricket.

As an educated middle class left-leaning person, I’ve never been a fan of the News of the World’s editorial style or stance, but one less newspaper for sale on Sunday is hardly of benefit to our society. Much as my hyperlocal blogging friends like to see themselves as plugging the gap left by the gradual withdrawal of the mainstream media from local journalism, a few possible high-profile examples aside, keen amateurs simply don’t have the skills or resources to undertake the kind of sustained investigative journalism needed to keep those in power accountable to those who aren’t – and to those who are calling for more statutory regulation of the media, do you really think a State-regulated press is healthy for democracy?

There’s also the question of the wider effects of the News of the World’s closure – although a mere 200 people were directly employed by the paper (some of whom may get the opportunity to apply for other jobs within News International), the paper has been reported as being the most widely read newspaper in the English language; as well as the direct employees, there are also the indirect employees – the paper suppliers, the distributors, the newsagents and other shops – who will lose a significant portion of their livelihood overnight.

So, do we feel proud of ourselves?

Venn diagram by Mr Wowser

What’s that, you say? That since I don’t normally buy the News of the World (or subscribe to any other Murdoch media products), and my rubbish isn’t taken away by the council anyway, that me proudly declaring my boycott of them is a completely empty gesture?

Well, quite. And ultimately, that is why boycotts fail, and why calling for boycotts is usually an empty gesture – because the people who call for them are far more often than they aren’t not actually customers of the Bad Company(tm) in question in the first place, and if they’re customers of another company in the group rarely do they extend that boycott to their own purchasing when to do so will cause themselves more than the slightest inconvenience. I suspect many of the people calling for a NOTW boycott – who are also extending their outrage to the whole of News Corporation and calling for Rupert Murdoch’s intended purchase of the remainder of BSkyB that he doesn’t already own to be blocked – are also Sky subscribers. For their outrage to be genuine rather than empty, they’ll also be cancelling their Sky subscriptions and suffering a bit of personal inconvenience – that’s what a boycott is about, not about telling other people not to do what you don’t already do anyway.

Similarly, those who call for a boycott of companies involved in the disputed territories of Israel/Palestine actually have it quite easy – there’s bugger all that they might want to buy in a shop which is actually produced there, so ultimately the boycott of standard retail goods boils down to looking at the label to see where one’s avocado comes from. And not buying SodaStream any more, for anybody still living in the 1970s. If one really wants to take a stand, if you live in a municipality which uses Veolia for rubbish processing you’ll opt out of the council’s rubbish collection and take personal responsibility for disposing it elsewhere (and probably not to the council tip, because that itself is probably operated by Veolia as well). I will however allow them to continue to have their sewage taken away by t’Corporation (even though a lot of the specialist valves used are manufactured in settlements in the disputed Golan heights) – emptying my own toilet myself on a twice weekly basis is one of the few aspects of my own lifestyle I wouldn’t wish on others.

As an aside to the boycotts issue, I must confess to be now suffering from Twitter Outrage Fatigue Syndrome; I’m sure back in the olden days of Usenet outrage was there (especially in the darkest corners of the talk.* hierarchy), but it seems practically a day doesn’t go by without half of Twitter telling me to be outraged about the latest outrageous thing. Frankly, I think the phone hacking scandal is a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s an outrageous thing. The arms trade, the ongoing banking crisis, and our government’s continued eagerness to spend money on wars which should be spent on the NHS, they’re worthy of outrage. I’m even inclined to be more outraged that two Birmingham MPs are campaigning to relax the ban on smoking in pubs. Dodgy practice by a handful of journalists 5-10 years ago is not remotely on that scale.

Now, being in the making-things-and-trying-to-sell-them game myself, I’m certainly not going to defend the big corporate borg with fancy expensive lawyers ripping off the little person who, if they making a living selling their work at all, they’ll only just be making a living and almost certainly unable to afford to take a multi-national to court over it.

However, we have been here before. In February 2010 the internet rip-off scandal was about how Paperchase had ripped off another indy designer‘s artwork to put on some notebooks and carrier bags.

But when the bottom of that story was reached, it turned out that Paperchase had done no such thing, themselves – instead, it was a designer in an agency contracted by Paperchase who had done the ripping off. And so it’s highly likely that Urban Outfitters themselves didn’t rip off tru.ch, rather one of their suppliers did the ripping off. This is how multi-national corporate retail works – just as Nike don’t actually make their trainers any more, Levis don’t make their jeans any more, Paperchase, Urban Outfitters, and all these similar shops don’t actually design and make anything – they just buy product in from third party suppliers.

So whereas of course Paperchase and Urban Outfitters should be the first port of call for the aggrieved designer to say ‘oi!’ to, immediately organising a mass internet campaign for a boycott is a bit silly – Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t do the ripping off, they just accepted what they were given by their suppliers with the reasonable assumption their suppliers were providing them with legit product. In the Paperchase case, they – albeit after some time – investigated and pulled the product, which Urban Outfitters will almost certainly so do as well.

Now you might think it a bit off that both Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t immediately pull the product after the first email from the designer, but let’s be realistic – how realistic really is it for a multi-national megacorp with hundreds of branches in nearly every country in the world and at tens of central administrative offices to receive an email from anybody off the street and just take action on the spot? Whoever receives the first email has to work out who to forward it to, then that person has to read it (in between however many meetings they have that day), then delegate it to somebody else to read again and possibly do some research to verify the truth of the original complainant, write a report making a recommendation to the buying committee, wait for that committee to meet (assuming the report gets on the next agenda), etc. You’ll be lucky to get just those steps achieved in a month, let alone whatever else needs doing.

And the tru.ch vs Urban Outfitters case turns out to contain more story than the original blog post let on – news and aggregator websites Apartment Therapy and BoingBoing took up the story, only for both articles to be filled with comments from people claiming to have seen stuff like the disputed items for five, ten, twenty years, suggesting that tru.ch was hardly selling an original idea in the first place. Indeed, Regretsy has even found examples of other people selling the designs before tru.ch did anyway.

The moral of this tale is – when somebody on the internet tells you to be outraged about something, always pause and check some facts first.

It had a good innings – nobody can complain about a run of 856 years and it being curtailed; I remember when plans to demolish the 1960′s market and shopping centre area were being consulted on how most of the traders predicted the market wouldn’t survive, but – the soul having been ripped out of the place notwithstanding – most of the stalls made it through that redevelopment.

Then there are the current fears that the move of the Wholesale Markets from right next to the Bullring Market will cause major hassle – Jon Bounds has commented on the silliness of the image of traders wheeling trolleys full of cabbages half way across town half way through the trading day, but there’s the very real concern of how produce will be then transported, coupled with the new uncertainty surrounding when the move will actually happen.

But to me, what has finally killed the market is the combination of the serious drop in quality of the produce on sale, combined with the scourge of the man from the weights and the measures, the Poundabowl.

Now don’t get me entirely wrong – where the typical shopper might think more in terms of a number of items rather than a weight of items, there’s nothing wrong with it; but it still makes price comparisons difficult, because you don’t know how much you’re getting for your pound from different traders – you may well even be getting a different amount from the same trader each time you buy!

Until recently, produce from the market always tended to have what supermarket fruit and veg well and truly lacked – flavour. I still remember like it was yesterday my reintroduction to the market (after being horrified by reading Felicity Lawrence’s supermarket exposé, Not on the Label) and rediscovering that an onion is an actual real vegetable with a texture and a flavour, rather than some white thing which goes in the dinner for I’m-not-really-sure-what-it’s-adding. The market produce was the blemished, funny shaped stuff which the supermarket bland-o-matic rejected as being Not Possible To Bland.

But of late I’ve noticed that the flavour is less noticeably different from the supermarket, but more critically, the quality has gone right down the pan. It’s no use buying four or five peppers for a pound rather than three or four peppers for £1.50 if you only get to actually use two of them because the rest have become a putrifying blob of mush after a couple of days. I already decided a couple of weeks ago to stop getting my onions from the market because basically half of them were rotten even on the day I bought them.

Today, when I went to my usual stall for getting peppers, I was saddened to see they too have gone over to poundabowl. Rather than hand-picking the precise peppers I wanted (ie, the ones which looked the least off) I would have been forced to accept the ones in the bowl. I usually get a mix of colours, but these bowls were all monochrome – when I asked the assistant for a mix, her reply was “no, I’m not allowed to do that”. So I walked away and found another stall.

The other stall was also poundabowl, but at least when I asked if he could do a mix he said yes. When I checked in the bag to see how mixed he’d done it (just one red to five greens – I wanted three reds and three greens), I saw that two of the peppers were a putrifying blob of mush already.

If I can’t even rely on what I buy being of merchantable quality on the day I buy it, I’m not sure I can be bothered going all the way down there to buy in the first place. So for that reason, I’m out.

I have to admit I’m a little ambivalent as to whether or not I want to join in with the city outrage on the matter; on the one hand, indeed the factory is a Birmingham icon and too many Birmingham icons have been trashed in the last five years, 125 people will lose their jobs, and as a correct-thinking leftist liberal I of course should oppose all that is bad in Corporate Greed(tm).

On the other hand, the 125 people do have until next May to find new jobs (how many other people get the luxury of a full 12 month notice period of redundancy? When I was made redundant from Oakwood Village we were warned of the posssibility on the Friday, and then told to clear our desks on the following Monday), and as skilled workers will probably have little trouble finding replacement employment. And, the economics are clear – the factory as it is only operates a part-time week anyway, and since Heinz is, after all, a commercial entity with a need to make profits for the benefit of shareholders rather than an agency of the benefits service, it is a little difficult to blame them for wanting to combine production with a similar factory in the Netherlands which also only operates a part-time week – if one of the two factories has to go, what does make the Birmingham jobs more important than the Dutch jobs?

The story today is that HP Sauce’s long-time rival in the brown chip dressing department, Branston, is to launch a legal action to try to prevent HP from using the Houses of Parliament (after which the sauce is named) motif on the bottles once production moves, on the grounds that if the product is no longer British it will no longer have the right to use British imagery on the packaging.

The irony of this, of course, is that when the Aston factory closes, production of Lee & Perrins Worcester Sauce will return to its original factory in, erm, Worcestershire.

Last Tuesday evening from Spar I bought a box of Stowell’s Tempranillo (a light red wine, for those not in the know). I got it to the boat, poured a glass, and it turned out to be quite disgusting – a bottle of it I might have forced myself to drink, but a whole 3 litre box costing £18, I draw the line at; I’m not that much of an alcoholic. As well as being disgusting, in the glass it was cloudier than New Brighton beach on a wet sunday morning, and left a sediment in the glass worse than the Severn Trent sewage reprocessing plant. I’ve poured better home-brew down the sink.

Last Sunday afternoon I bought from Sainsbury’s supermarket in Selly Oak a bottle of chocolate schnapps (amongst other things). When I got home I went to open the bottle (a screw-top affair), and half the bottle came off along with the lid. Soon in the booze department, luck has been lacking this week.

This morning I took the box of wine back to Spar (when explaining the problem to the person behind the counter, one of the responses was “what’s sediment?”), and discovered in the process that it had a Best Before End date of July 2005. When the manager came out from the back of the shop he asked if I had the receipt – my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”, and I pointed out that it was over a year past the BBE date. The manager said that without the receipt there was nothing he could do, so a bit of a discussion followed in which I mentioned the magic words “Trading Standards”, and he eventually went into the back room to look through the whole of Tuesday evening’s receipts to find the sale for the box of wine, and after 20 minutes came back having found the evidence of the sale (during which time I’d discovered another box of the same wine still for sale, also out of date) and grudgingly agreed to a refund.

This evening I took the bottle of schnapps back to Sainsbury’s, was asked if I had the receipt, and again my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”.

“Good point, fair enough” was the reply – and the person behind the counter instantly went to the till and pulled out a refund in cash to give to me, without any further discussion.

Now, the man from Sainsbury’s could quite easily have argued with me on the grounds that, after all, from his point of view I could have broken the bottle myself accidently and tried to pass it off as faulty. So why did the man from Spar, when there was clear proof and evidence that the actual product wasn’t fit for sale, that it was out of date, and that there were more goods still for sale also out of date, decide to make an issue of it? And eventually lose the deal, waste half an hour of mine, his, and his assistant’s time, and leave a customer with a bad impression of the shop.