Monthly Archives: April 2011

When is a bargain not a bargain?

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When you buy two apparently!

I saw an offer for the 500ml bottles of Pepsi for £0.39 at my local B&M over the weekend and being such a good price I called into the store to buy a couple of bottles before heading down to the beach. On the shelve I notice that they have an offer on for two bottles for £0.80 or £0.39 each – this happens with special offers all the time in most of the major supermarkets, there would not have been a problem if I was only buying one bottle but as I was purchasing two they charged me £0.80. I was half expecting this and when I queried this price I was told that the computer systems recognised that two bottles had been scanned would have over ridden the price and in this case added an extra £0.02 on to the cost.

Surely the store could sort out this problem, how easy would it be to have the till software run a query to check which offers the customer the best deal. Or at the very least switch off the multi-buy offer for the duration of the promotion.

£0.02 does not seem a lot but if you consider the number of people who go into the shop on a daily basis and potential buy more than one bottle you can imagine the extra money being made.

In my case they cancelled the sale and had to put each bottle in separately, so that I could pay the £0.39 each. I did enquire how often this happened and was told that most people don’t notice or don’t want to cause a fuss or delay others who are queuing.

So my advice always check you are paying what you should for goods.

Resturant Review – COSMO Swansea

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Went to the COSMO “all you can eat” restaurant in Swansea on Thursday 21st April 2011. We had pre-booked a table for 6pm for a party of eight, on arriving we were greeting by a queue waiting to get in and this was a good sign that the place was popular.

Like similar “all you can eat” establishments the price depends on the time of day that you visit, we paid £11.99 for the dinner menu but during the day the price is lower. The price of soft drinks were comparable with other pubs and restaurants – they did not offer a refillable drink.

We went downstairs and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised at the style and ambiance alas it still felt that they had jammed in as many tables as possible but then again they need to make some money.

“all you can eat” are great ways to try lots of different foods that you may not normally want to risk and they had plenty of choice and most of the dishes were kept constantly refreshed, one of my colleagues did have to go back for some curry as it was empty when she first went up.

One problem I find with these sorts of places is that you actually have too much choice and end up spending most of the time looking at all the various dishes and piling everything possible on to your plate, it seems a good idea at the time but you do need to make sure you are getting your monies worth.

There did not seem to be any sort of order to how the food was set out, it seemed to be all over the place and it was only on my third attempt to fill my plate did I notice the rather boring salad section. The deserts looked fantastic and there appeared to be a lot of various puddings to cater for most tastes. A lot of these were in very small portions which did not really matter as you could eat as much as you wanted. The only bad point was the ice cream it was rather tasteless.

I was rather surprised to find that we were being asked to leave just before 8pm as they had another booking for the table and looking at the terms and conditions on the website it does appear that at busy times they have a maximum seating time of 1 hour 45 minutes from when the majority of the party is seated. So that is something to consider when you are spending all that time deciding what to eat!

Luckily we have all finished but it would have been more than a little annoying if we had still been eating and eager to refill our plates.

Would I got again – Yes.

always look on the bright side of life…

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I had not realised it had been so long since I last posted anything, looking I had started to prepare entries but nothing actually got published.

I had toyed with the idea of mentioning my thoughts about the illegal immigrant and all the support he had received from the locals who had supported his fight to remain in the country and do have to ask myself how many of those 4000 people who signed that petition wished they could remove their name once it came out that his whole back story was a pack of lies?

Have just sorted out my car insurance for the year ahead, I actually had to change providers as the price they offered had increased by £50. Some shopping around and I was able to find a cheaper quote – I did go back to my old insurance company to see if they could price-match but they would not budge. Anyway I have my insurance which in real terms has only increase by about £15 from last year.

Still an expense and even through I had planned for it along with having to pay for two new tyres my savings have taken a real beating this month. Not helped that I was not able to get the vouchers I use for my fuel for a couple of days and having to actually use cash!

Easter is fast approaching and not really sure what I will be doing, I don’t want money to be an issue but I don’t want to end up sitting in front of a computer either.

Managed to go to the theatre in what must be years to see SPAMalot a few weeks back, have been meaning to write about it but as usual time escaped me. It was a great show and well worth going to see – always look on the bright side of life…