Complete and Utter Zebu

Although it’s almost over. Debenham’s “Summer Spectacular” caught our eye for several reasons. The first, clearly, is the title. By what stretch of a retailer’s imagination can May possibly be called summer, particularly given that the past few days have been the coldest in May for many years?

It isn’t that, however, that got our goat. Nor is it the discount of “up to 25% OFF”, with the “up to” in small type. No, what staggered us is the boast of “FREE DELIVERY”.

Look at the top and you can see what “Free Delivery” actually means. There it says “Free delivery when you collect from store”.

That’s right. You have to wait till you get a confirmation email and then, providing you collect it within 14 days, you can have the goods you paid for without paying anything more, providing you go and get them yourself. Wow! We can hardly contain ourselves.

Debenhams got a mention in Complete and Utter Zebu for letter it sent its customers about a sale with “15% Off Everything All Weekend”. Debenhams, however, had a weird understanding of the word “everything”, for it did not include cosmetics, wine, kettles, toasters, blenders, mobile phones or many other items. In fact, the Advertising Standards Authority later rules that the store had been misleading people.

The offer of “free delivery” has the odd exception too. “This offer is not available on debenhamskitchenappliances.com, debenhamselectricals.com, debenhamscurtains.com, debenhamspersonalisedart.com, Debenhamsentertainment.com, Debenhamstailoredshirts.com, Debenhams Flowers, Debenhamsdesignerflowers.com, Hallmark.co.uk/debenhams, Debenhams Gift Vouchers and Gifts Cards, Debenhams Personalised Wedding Stationery, Debenhams Wedding Gift Lists, Debenhams Wine and Champagne, Debenhams hampers and Financial Services”.

We look forward to their Autumn sale, which is probably happening any day now.

How splendid, given the way most ebay sellers over-egg whatever particular pudding they’re trying to con you into buying, to come across a listing that tells it like it is.

605impala certainly does that in trying to shift a copy of one of his mother’s old books, Linda Goodman’s Star Signs:

“This is a wonderful book. If you enjoy talking to Flying Spaghetti Monsters before you drift off to sleep, then this book is for you. There is no dust sleeve included with this 549 page book made exclusively from the Scrotal fur of a Unicorn. This book belonged to my mother in the 1970’s.

“There is a pencil scribble on the last blank page. I’m pretty sure I did that. At 4 years old, I think I was trying to spell “bullsh1t.” Cut me some slack, it ended up kinda sh1tty looking, but I knew that what I was writing was true to my 4 yr. old heart.

“Anyhoo, this completely bogus piece of crap astrological book from 1968 is up for auction.
If this hunk of sh1t sells, I will donate 1/2 of the proceeds to the charity of your choice!”

At the time of writing, there were no bids. Perhaps, on ebay, honesty DOESN’T pay.

See the listing. (If the listing has expired and I forget to replace it with a web archive I’ve saved, please let me know)

Do you ever wonder whether those oh-so-clean-and-tidy people in company literature and advertising really work there or are simply models who have the sort of appearance companies WISH their employees would have?

There’s a brilliant blog from Fair Trade Photographer which shows just why we should assume the latter. The pic above, for instance, has been used all over the place. Chris Barton, who writes the blog, found instances of its use as far afield as Germany and the Far East.

And in Complete and Utter Zebu, there’s a wonderful example of an ethnically diverse group of people in an online advert for Microsoft’s IT tools. When it came to advertising in Poland, however, the black guy was edited out in favour of a more typically ethnic Pole. If their Photoshop artist hadn’t forgotten to change the colour of his hand perhaps nobody would have noticed.

Fair Trade Photographer: Microstock: why would a reputable company do this to themselves?

Clearly it isn’t only in the West that contempt is shown towards consumers and viewers. Keep your eye on the scissors in this Russian shopping channel demo and note how the sharpened scissors are swapped for a completely different pair. Of course, it could be argued that if you’re daft enough not to notice, you deserve what you get.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. We hope to get back on track again soon.

Professor John Bridgeman, the former Director-General of the Office of Fair Trading, has laid into supermarkets – particularly Asda and Tesco – for giving a misleading impression that they are cutting prices across the board, when the reality is very different.

In a full week just before Christmas, Asda cut nearly the price of almost 800 products. However, for two-thirds of those items, the cut was only 1p. At the same time, it put up the price of more than 850 items, with over half of those going up by more than 10p.

In that same week, Tesco cut the cost of over 900 items but over two-thirds of them saw only a 1p price reduction, while over a 1,000 products saw their price rise, 60% by more than 10p.

Professor Bridgeman calls this practice “price flexing” and, reported in The Guardian, he claims that it shows “a cynical manipulation of the language of value…They are not in reality cutting prices but flexing prices, making them go up and down and destabilising the price structure. All they are doing is introducing so much volatility no one can tell whether prices are going up or down. It can only be to consumers’ detriment and it does their image no good.”

“The most dangerous thing [for] competition in this sector is price volatility. It confuses consumers, deters investors and has driven corner shops out of business because they don’t know what price they have to compete on.” – Professor John Bridgeman

Research by Loughborough University confirms that average price rises are far larger than price cuts among the big four supermarkets, which also includes Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. By far the most common price cut made in the past four years is just 1p which, as Loughborough’s Professor Paul Dobson points out, makes little difference to the bill at the checkout but enables the supermarkets to make the benevolent claim that they are cutting “thousands of prices”.

See: The Guardian report

Swedish photographer Chris Maluszynski was surprised by the garishness of the carpets in the casinos of Las Vegas. Until, that is, he realised that they had a purpose – to stop the punters feeling sleepy because sleepy tourists don’t spend money. If your eyes stray to the floor and see one of these monstrosities, you are likely to be jolted awake again.

A collection of his photographs of these extraordinary carpets, quite unlike anything you will find anywhere else, is on The Daily Telegraph website. If you’re feeling sleepy at your keyboard, perhaps flipping through them will work the same trick. This ploy is spoofed in the current family film Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Updating the Greek myths, Percy and his colleagues are detained in a casino by being persuaded to eat lotus flowers. They eventually emerge to discover that days, not hours, have passed.

Retailers use a variety of psychological tricks on their customers too, of course. You’ll find few windows in department stores or shopping centres, though there are usually plenty of mirrors, which serve to slow shoppers down. In fact shopping centres are specifically designed, not for your comfort and convenience, but to confuse and baffle you. They aim to induce a condition known as the “Gruen transfer”, named after the man who designed the first shopping mall in 1856.

The Gruen transfer is the moment when customers suffer “scripted disorientation”. They slow from a confident stride to a baffled dawdle, eyes glazing over as they forget what they came for and realise there are SO MANY THINGS they could be spending their money on. So don’t feel daft next time you lose your bearings in a shopping mall. The bally places are designed to keep you there as long as possible. At least they don’t have Vegas-style garish carpets. Yet.

France’s greatest living thinker, Bernard-Henri Lévy is looking about as great a brain as Ricky Gervais’ podcasting tame idiot Karl Pilkington. In his new book On War in Philosophy, he quotes extensively from the lesser-known philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul. Attacking Immanuel Kant as being a “fake” and “raving mad”, Lévy frequently refers to Botul’s great work The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant. Apparently, he has frequently used him as a source in the past when giving talks, but it is only in his new book that he has done so in print.

A little embarrassing therefore, to discover that Botul never existed. He was created as a gag in 1999 by Frederic Pages, a journalist with Le Canard Enchainé, France’s equivalent of Private Eye. The imaginary Botul founded a school of thought known as Botulism, believing in the theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” or “the Metaphysics of the flabby”. So well known is the Botul spoof that there is even a Wikipedia entry on him.

It isn’t only the flamboyant Lévy – usually known just as BHL – who has been made to look a fool, but all the critics who lauded his book. At least Lévy has had the good grace to acknowledge how daft he’s been: “It was a truly brilliant and very believable hoax from the mind of a Canard Enchainé journalist, who remains a good philosopher all the same.”

The rest of us, of course, know all we need to know about Kant and other philosophers from Monty Python:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table

David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ’bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.


John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
 with half a pint of shandy was particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
 half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
, Hobbes was fond of his dram.

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, “I drink therefore I am.”

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;

A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed.

Related post:
Photo that could have changed history is a fake.

With money tight, we’re all looking to save money. But those who buy cheap perfume or after-shave at markets, online or when abroad, believing they’re conserving cash, may not realise they are actually putting some deeply unpleasant substances on their skin.

Harper’s Bazaar in the United States investigated a range of counterfeit perfumes and found ingredients such as urine, antifreeze and bacteria.

Valerie Salembier, publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, said: “You’re putting something on your face, on your neck, on your wrists. Those are sensitive parts of the body, so, to have active ingredients that could endanger your life is a very serious health risk.”

Dermatologist Jeannette Graf told ABC News, on which Salembier appeared, that while she had never seen a skin reaction from perfume, fake fragrances could cause contact dermatitis or inflammation of the skin in some people.

“They felt burning. They saw redness. It felt uncomfortable, it didn’t smell right. And that’s almost immediate” – Dematologist Jeannette Graf

Although, perhaps surprisingly, the story wasn’t reported in the British press, the findings chime with previous reports in the UK. A while back, for instance, Trading Standards Officers discovered that bottles of Chanel No. 5 eau de toilette on sale in an Oxfordshire market had rather more of the “toilette” about them than usual. In Australia, as well as urine, perfumes have been found which contain a mix of fragrance and pond water.

As the fakes can look so much like the originals, apart from the fact that you seem to be getting a bargain, how do you tell if what’s on offer is counterfeit?

• Look for dodgy spelling, and dodgy people selling it in dodgy places
• If the smell doesn’t last much longer than an hour, it may be a fake. Try spraying some on a piece of cardboard and leaving it for a while.
• If the cellophane around the box isn’t snug, that could be a tipoff.
• And, as with everything, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

According to the Netmums website, over 100,000 women a year are being conned into paying money for useless fertility treatments.

A survey of 2,000 women found that one in three of those trying to have a child were so desperate that they spent over £500 on bizarre treatments. As well as acupuncture and aromatherapy, many turned to clairvoyants and mediums. Some bought fertility statues to be placed in the bedroom and a quarter bought fertility spells. Perhaps not surprisingly, 85% of those would paid for spells did not succeed in becoming pregnant.

Siobhan Freegard of netmums said: “Our team was shocked by how many women are using spells and statues.”

MORE ZEBU
A new book out claims that the responsibility for Britain’s obesity epidemic lies with the Government, which is giving disastrously wrong dietary advice to the public. It isn’t fat in foods that is the problem, claims Hannah Sutter, but starch which, we are constanty told, is good for us, despite our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. She also points out that the Government vendetta against fats is based on highly debatable research, something we covered in Complete and Utter Zebu. The Daily Mail carries an interesting piece on her book, Big Fat Lies: Is Your Government Making You Fat?