My thinking is that my gift card can be much more useful if I have money off vouchers (and this Privilege club replaced the old Clubcard scheme which enabled me to build up nearly £40 so got to be worth it) and for joining you get £20 worth of vouchers followed by additional vouchers worth £10 a month, so I get the email with my vouchers and you can understand my disappointment when I see that the I would have to spend money on certain products to get the discount. I am not going to be spending £15 on stationary or cards just to get £5 off and how on earth do you spend £25 in store when you can’t buy mobile phones, CD’s, DVD’s, consoles or games (the only things left to buy are sweets, drinks, books or magazines and let’s not forget stationary or cards!!) however if you do get up to the £25 you can get £5 off. Don’t think I will be taking advantage of any of these vouchers as you can go into any large supermarket and have a wide selection of books that are already a lot cheaper than WHSmiths.

So my view on the Privilege Club is that it is a crafty way of making customer think they are getting a discount, what would be better is a number of vouchers that gave you money off if you spent a certain amount. I however had the Privilege of printing these useful vouchers off.

I shall be using my gift card as soon as possible as it will be worthless when WHSmiths ceases trading!

For those of you who have no idea who Jade Goody is you should be thankful, she is someone who found fame on Big Brother a few years ago for being ignorant (and that is put kindly) she has been in and out of the papers since that time for various reasons. However she was diagnosed with cancer and has been told that this is terminal I suppose this is unusual for someone as young as she is (27).

From that time it seems to me that she has not been out of the press, her publicist Max Clifford must be congratulated for a job well done. Fair enough she wanted to get married before she dies and used the opportunity to strike a deal with a celebrity magazine for the photos (so that she can provide for her children after she has gone) but when I see a news report a few days later saying that she is now organising a christening for her children I begin to feel that someone was trying to milk that good old cash cow.
Between the wedding and the christening you would have thought that the news stories about her would stop and for a little while – and they did when everyone’s attention was focused on the works pension given to the former boss of a bank that had to be bailed out by the Government but no we get treated to a report that Jade has taken a turn for the worse and has gone into a hospice and since then there had been some mention of her daily. I am sure there are other young people who have suffered from cancer and they have not had the luxury of having fame and being able to sell photos to magazines to support family left behind and they don’t have an opportunity to warn other about cancer.

So please I for one don’t care anymore and news organisations should deal with other stories.

Last year Harveys promoted along with other things the Santiago which is a three seater leather sofa with two recliner actions which is a fantastic price of £299 and the second product is the Lima 2 door slider robe which is on offer for £299. Guess what they are being promoted this year for the same amazing price so what a sale it lasted for so long that it never really ended. I have kept a record of the prices for these two products over the last twelve months – Harveys sales test so remember no matter how pushy those sales people maybe they are only trying to get your money!

It was also at this time last year that I complained about those companies that buy in products for the January sales, one of the companies I was talking about was Woolworths which would always have pyrex dishes on sale – in fact they were going to wheel them out this year but because they are closing down they were put on sale early. I do wonder how many other high street names would have vanished from our streets by this time next year?

I am not some desperate bargain hunter so I popped in to the local Woolworths late this afternoon to see just how good a sale they were having as some news reports had mentioned customers being unhappy at going to the shop expecting a bargain and finding the prices not as fantastic as they had been lead to believe. One thing I will say is that the local store was busy, in fact very busy with long queues at the till points and those queuing had baskets full so they must have thought they had a bargain. However I am always a little cynical about these sorts of sales. I would have thought that the administrators would be trying to reduce the debts of the business and not add to them with expensive point of sale material, this seems a little too organised to me and and I am sure that many people would have gone to a local store and been carried away with the buzz surrounding the sale and not actually thinking about what they are picking up and the price they will pay for it.

I can remember when I worked for Harveys back in the day when it was considered more of a linen store than a furniture store we had a closing down sale, the smaller shop that I was based in was closing as the new larger store had been established (and the lease was up on the building). Now there were no fancy posters advertising the fact that the shop was closing supplied by the company – in fact I made up the posters myself and the sale started off with a lowly 10% as the amount of discount increased the better stock was transferred to other stores meaning that customers were not able to get a "fantastic" bargain. As the discount got up to the 50% mark and the shelving was cleared and removed I found myself blocking off areas of the shop, this created the impression that the shop was indeed going to be closing and to stop customers seeing all the stuff already packed up to go to other local shops. The auditors came in and must have written off over £3000 worth of stock and binned it.

It will be interesting to see how the sale progresses but I would have thought that the tills at Woolworths have taken more today that they have in a very long time.

This new Privilege Club sees the members getting an email each month with offers, so I guess the cards will go and and people will get random offers that you are not interested in, in recent weeks I have seen so many offers on in my local store that I don't consider to be good value so will these vouchers be the same?

Now it has been a little while since I have had to buy anything in a WH Smiths as it is nearly always better value to shop at the local supermarkets or online. However there was a time when the scheme started when I would buy a lot of videos at WH Smiths and had built up quite a few points, so reading through this leaflet yesterday about the new Privilege Club you can imagine my horror when I saw that all points currently on the old Clubcard had to be used by the end of February 2009. I have nearly £40 that needs to be spent or will be lost but the most annoying thing about this is that I had no idea that within the next few months I could be losing nearly £40. I have looked at their website and can find nothing so it looks like they are trying to do this on the quiet. You can go into a store and get a balance on your cards if you are unsure of how much you may have on the cards.

Homeowners could ensure that leaves are collected from their property and local authorities could ensure that problem spots are identified and kept clear. Of course if it was this simple there would be no need for me to mention it!!

So my point being, everyone in the UK knows the type of weather we have and being November I would expect a little rain, now a shock for me would be snow in July or August.

It would be rather naive of me to think that only people over the age of 18 would be smoking but whatever happened to underage smokers sneaking off for a quick smoke behind the bike sheds, when did it become acceptable to just stroll about in public smoking.

I have tried to find out what the legal age is for smoking, all I can find in the legal age for buying tobacco products which is a different thing (common sense would dictate that if you were not legally allowed to buy a product you were not legally allowed to use it), I know you are not allowed to buy alcohol if you are under 18 but you can drink it at home. So maybe those children were doing nothing wrong if they were given those cigarettes by their parents – I still think it is wrong.

Both DVD's have no extra features and no fancy boxes but for the price that I ended up paying for them I still think it was good value. I just wondered what others thought of these sorts of offers are they good value for money or should newspapers stick to writing about the news?

So three shops and still my watch is not working and it is rather annoying, I will be going back to the second jewelers next week to see if they have the right battery in stock but part of me is wondering if it would be easier to just change the watch!

Now anyone who has gone into a store like this is guarded for the sharks sales people who circle potential customers waiting to draw blood. It was not bad in Currys I looked at the freezers and pretty much decided on the model I would eventually get and walked out the store. Wanting to check out the competition and to find the best deal for me I went into the Comet store. I don’t know why both these stores have to hide the fridges and freezers at the back of the store but needless to say I was not impressed with the selection they had on offer and as I was leaving I noticed the display of televisions and as my television is getting on I thought it would be worth a look. (Cue Jaws theme tune) Don’t ask me where he came from but before I knew it the dreaded sales person had struck – he can’t have been very experienced at sales as I was able to get rid of him with ease. I spent a few more minutes looking at the televisions and video recorders before making my way to the exit and safety.

My next challenge was ScS I have no need for a new sofa nor do I have the need for a sofa or any furniture full stop so there really was no need for me to go into this store other than to just have a general look around. From working for Harveys I had a dreadful feeling that I would be pounced on as soon as I entered the shop and sure enough a sales person was trying to engage me in conversation within minutes of me entering the store. I know from past experience that many shops that rely on sales people selling goods have policies in place to acknowledge customers within a certain amount of time and as most of these sales people rely on commission to bolster there wages you can understand the cut throat mentality of working in this sort of environment. Not wanting to have this guy waste his time trying to sell me something I have no intention of buying I tell him that I am just taking a look around (I did not want to be too honest and tell him I was wasting time), however this guy was good and did not take that as an answer trying to find an “in” that he could use to take control. He soon realised that I was either a WOT (waste of time) or not in a position to buy a sofa as he rattled off the normal spiel. Knowing this would not be the end of it I carried on walking around the store and have to admit it was a decent set up, not wanting to encourage the sales staff I did not actually sit on any of the furniture as that is a sure sign you are going to buy!! Even on the way out another member of staff tried to engage me asking if I was looking to furnish a new house as I was at the door I felt safe enough to talk to him and got the conversation off me and on to the store and its local competition.

Some people would love to feel like they were getting this sort of first class service, going into a store and having an attentive sales person listening to their needs and saving them time by taking them directly to the item that suits those needs. Others would get so annoyed that they would just turn around and leave the store.

I am thinking I might carry out an experiment to see how pushy sales people can be by visiting a number of retailers