Zebu hero Paul McCrudden: Charging shops for wasting his time

Have you ever been kept waiting in a shop or restaurant, fuming at the senseless waste of your time? Stupid question. Of course you have. We all have.

Unlike the rest of us, however, digital media consultant Paul McCrudden decided to do something about it. Over six weeks, he calculated the time spent in interacting with companies as a consumer and issued 50 invoices. Even though he charged just a quarter of his usual work rate, the total amount invoiced was £6,250 (click on the picture to see an example).

“The way I see it, my time on this planet is limited and I want to spend it as wisely as possible. It frustrates me that every day I have to waste time standing in queues waiting to buy some product or service that, in the big scheme of things, I don’t really care about.” He bemoans “the lost minutes of my life spent…stuck on the Victoria Line, getting my hair cut, hanging around Preston train station, losing the will to live in the queue at the Post Office and waiting for a guy called Larry in a local hardware shop called Micromend to remember who I am and fix my hard drive.”

“My time on this planet is limited and I want to spend it as wisely as possible.”

What is most astonishing are some of the responses. While many companies simply didn’t get it, including – perhaps unsurprisingly – London Transport, some actually paid him, including Pret a Manger, EAT, Little Chef and Pizza Express. Julian Metcalfe, the founder of Pret, added an extra pound to take account of McCrudden’s time posting the letter, making £62 in all. The CEO of Pizza Express, Mark Angela, reckoned he ought to ask for a pay rise.

Getting into the spirit of the thing, fruit and nut store Cranberry replied by counter-invoicing McCrudden for the time they’d wasted reading his letter and visiting his website: “Hitherto, we thought that the only nuts were on our shelves”. Although the experiment is now over, McCrudden’s website is well worth visiting. Who says consumers are powerless in the face of the big brands?

Meanwhile, last week’s Zebu Hero of the Week, Sir Alex Ferguson, has been demoted. His admission that a referee had been right was clearly an aberration. This week he returned to his usual form of criticising the referee.