Borders Bookshops have gone into administration, and that makes me sad

Went into town today, mainly to buy a new phone (more on that later), and popped into Borders, having heard they are in serious financial trouble. As I walked in there was evidence everywhere I looked that all was not well.

To the right: completely empty magazine racks. No credit means no new mags.
Straight ahead: Yellow 20% off signs plastered everywhere.
To the left: "Closing down - everything must go" posters indiscreetly stacked up next to the entrace in readiness for the fire sale*.

I like Borders. I like the ambience. I like the fact you can sit and read comic books and no one hassles you (although I can see that my selfish comic book reading won't have helped their profit margins at all). They often have books I don't see anywhere else. They have a Starbucks inside the shop. It was the first home for our Book Group. For geeky bibliophiles, there is always something else to make you go 'ooh'.

Although they shouldn't have tried to sell DVDs. They were very expensive. Maybe they should have only stocked literary ones - book adaptations for example. But even then, DVDs are not money-spinners. They are so cheap now in supermarkets I think the day is coming when they won't be available on the high street at all. So, that was perhaps one mistake they made.

One sad thing is that I have already started talking about Borders in the past tense. (I went back and changed 'was' to 'is' in the last paragraph but one.) I have a nagging fear that they are going to be this year's big name to disappear. A victim of the credit crunch. A mundane tragedy, but tragic none the less. In some ways my visit today was a preliminary requiem.

*They looked exactly like the ones that appeared in Woolworths last year as that shopping chain tanked. Somewhere a signwriter is rubbing his hands with glee.

I'm not saying I agree with vigilante-ism

But when a guy who has flushed 24 billion pounds of tax-payers money down the toilet and then retires with a tax-payer funded salary of £700,000 a year, it's hard to feel any sympathy when yobbos brick his house.

Score 1 for the yobbos.

5 most annoying rip-offs

I’ve been thinking about how easily we get duped into paying for stuff we don’t need. Here are five of the things I think are the most annoying ways people try and rip you off.

1) Warranties. I recently went to buy a new TV remote from Argos, because Irony Boy had baptized our previous remote with his cup of tea after his wife unexpectedly grabbed his balls (long story), and the cashier offered me a 3-year warranty. On a £6 remote control.* What is the point of a warranty on a £6 remote? Especially as I’ve banned Irony Boy from having hot drinks in the living room any more.

2) Vitamin supplements. The best description of vitamin pills I’ve ever heard was on The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon described them as “the ingredients for very expensive urine”. It’s true. You literally pi$$ away your money.

3) Those stupid magazine part works. ‘Build a solar system’ by paying three quid a week for two years, by which time you’ll be heartily fed up with your solar system model and will probably have lost half the bits anyway. Seriously, who buys these? The best one I ever saw was ‘build your own medieval village’ - the first week you got two bricks and six roof tiles.

4) Consolidation loans. Thankfully, the adverts for these have virtually disappeared from TV. Three cheers for the credit crunch. But when they were on they gave me the urge to kill Carol Vorderman and end her patronisingly inane ‘maths’. Of course it’s ‘cheaper per month’ to pay a debt off over 15 years than six months. But is it cheaper overall, Carol? Is it? No.

5) Blu-ray or whatever the hell will come after Blu-ray. Yay - go out and buy all the films you own on yet another format. Baa, sheep, baa. The same applies to MP3s. I own it already - give me the new version free, you wallet-raping conmen.

*NB - this is probably my favourite juxtaposition of a long rambling sentence with a short ungrammatical sentence I’ve ever written.

“We’re reclassifying our seat locations”

No more evidence of a global economic crisis is needed than this mini-article from the email newsletter from the San Diego Padres.

Season Tickets at '07 Prices
Guarantee your seats to all the big games in 2009, at 2007 Season Ticket prices! The Padres will not be increasing Season Ticket prices for the upcoming season. Plus, through a reclassification of nearly 10,000 seat locations, about 25% of seats will go
down in price, some by as much as $8 per ticket.

Don't miss out; get your Season Tickets on Monday!

Or, alternatively:

“Oh crap, no one’s got any money any more. Slash the prices quick!”

“We can’t say ‘Prices Slashed!’ People will think we’re panicking.”

“Okay, okay, what to do, I know, reclassify the seats!”

“Yes, sir!”

Have you noticed?

It seems the adverts offering easy credit have disappeared from our TV screens. You know the ones: “Have you been refused a loan elsewhere? Got bad credit ratings? Insolvency and county court judgments? Can’t afford to pay more bills? Come and rack up even more debts with Idiotloans™”

Who would have thought that an industry built on giving money to people who had a history of being unable to pay money back would have been an unsustainable business model? Or that lending money against a house which is already mortgaged to the hilt will result in there being no money to pay you back when house prices start to drop?

(Insider tip - secondary mortgage companies which give you a new massive loan to pay off all your old debts suddenly have no assets to claim. If you can’t pay your bills, your primary mortgage provider gets the money from the sale of your house, and if you’re in negative equity your secondary mortgage provider will get nothing if the primary mortgage provider has taken it all. Which is why 'consolidate your debt' companies are suddenly not touting for business. Their 'secured' loans are no longer secure.)

So I guess that’s one positive thing about the “Credit Crunch”/financial meltdown/death of capitalism - Carol Vorderman won’t be patronising us with talk of ‘one monthly payment’ and pretending that you’ll pay less under the scheme she’s pitching.

Credit crunch? Wot credit crunch?

I know the Credit Crunch™ is about banks loaning money to each other and not about consumer credit, but it still strikes me as funny that in the last couple of days I've received two credit card applications through the post.

Naturally I've given them both the 'Stop Killing Trees' treatment - ripping up all the bumf they've sent me and returning it in their prepaid envelope. The two recipients this time were Barclaycard and Citi. The Citi one in particular came with a load of junk like a booklet of terms and conditions, several smaller leaflets covered in more terms and conditions and their application form.

I imagine the thought processes in the marketing departments are 'everyone's worried about money - it's a good time to tempt them with some credit'. Or possibly 'oh crapola, people are starting to realise they can't put stuff on the never-never for ever, we'd better find some new suckers...'

Whichever way, they're getting their rubbish posted back to them.