Handwash - Liquid Gold
In previous posts, I’ve alluded to both fancy coffee and good quality organic food as being two prominent examples of expendable commodities that’ll be benched in the midst of the current economic downturn. I steadfastly refuse to cast aside these essentials though.
But now my old friends at the Co-operative bank (eco-friendly, ethical investors lest we forget) have provided a definitive list of the top twenty items UK consumers have been forced to forgo due to belt tightening and budgeting exercises. The data was accumulated from a YouGov survey of 4000 shoppers.
Here are the top 20 items that the economic slowdown is preventing you from buying.
Cue Jimmy Carr:
(1) Flowers
(2) Magazines
(3) CDs
(4) Bottled water
(5) Posh handwash
(6) Quilted toilet paper
(7) Candles
(8) Branded washing up liquid
(9) Organic produce
(10) Branded food
(11) Fresh coffee
(12) Uncut bread
(13) Nail polish
(14) Fake tan
(15) Multi vitamins
(16) Fabric conditioner
(17) Teeth whitening toothpaste
(18) Wine
(19) Desserts
(20) Napkins
So, my two suggestions made it onto the list at 9 and 11, not as high as I would have anticipated.
Ditching flowers, magazines, CDs and bottled water makes perfect sense to me. Flowers schmowers, magazines come free with the Saturday and Sunday papers, CDs can always be found cheaper online than in shops (ridiculously cheap on Amazon marketplace) and bottled water is just plain silly.
But handwash? Posh handwash? Who even decided to prefix ‘handwash’ with ‘posh’? Handwash isn’t posh, it’s a necessity. Without handwash, your hands get covered in germs and smell bad. Are we, as a nation, shunning handwash en masse? If so, I didn’t get the memo, and handwash is still an integral part of my ablutions.
Casting an eye over the rest, candles I can live without (not just during an economical slump, but forever), don’t need fake tan, Bold Ultra has a built in fabric conditioner and if you’ve got a good knife and fork technique then the need for napkins can be circumnavigated.
Take away my nail polish however and I’ll make you wish you were never born.
My name? It’s Oli….i mean Groucho
Friday 23rd May, 2008 - £9,361.55 in debt…
I can’t tell you exactly what I’m doing next week as it’s a top secret mission involving espionage, stealth and quiet browsing. Don’t tell anyone, but Olivia Buck is entering the clandestine world of the mystery shopper. Sshhhhhh…
I’ve always thought mystery shopping would be a bloody good thing to do, especially if I were required to mysteriously shop for some amazing shoes or a new car or something. But I also thought it was a bit too good to be true.
Then yesterday, by chance, I was visiting a friend when she got a phone call from a company called Retail Eyes. She took some notes, asked when the assignment had to be done, put the phone down, donned a panama hat and aviator-style sunglasses, asked me to look after her children “if anything happens – you know…”, and left the house with a £5 note and a look of blind panic.
Who wouldn’t want to be a mystery shopper? The excitement; the glamour; the promise of £7.50 if you hand in your report by 7pm… I wanted a slice of her lifestyle and, by golly, I was going to get it.
The sign-up procedure was simple – a huge contrast to those of the online survey companies and, I suspect, far more worth it in the long run. From now on, I just have to keep up-to-speed with the assignments available (by checking the website) and make sure I can absolutely, definitely complete any assignment I sign up for. Otherwise I will be hunted down and shot in the knees (or so the terms and conditions seem to suggest).
My first assignment is on Wednesday of next week, but obviously it’s all very hush hush. I’ll be paying with unmarked notes and covering my tracks by zig-zagging wildly up the road before entering the shop. Can’t be too careful.
Any advice? Have I said too much? What’s a reasonable price to pay for a bullet-proof vest? Over to you…
