Adverts on Tinternet for things you didn’t sign up for drive me nuts. Not just a bar snack size bag of peanuts but a green suppliers cardboard waist-high barrel of mixed unsalted produce of several countries with a good three inches of nut dust at the bottom nuts.
I’m like you, not only do I have no idea what I did with the couple of hours a day I now surf before I got the board and the mouse, I can’t even remember how to eat breakfast without a keyboard to chuck crumbs down. One relief is that, on a slim income month there is no longer any danger of us fading away from lack of food. We just invert the laptop over a biscuit tin and get a spoon, though how the metal zipper pull got in there is anyone’s guess.
I still don’t really know how to work a computer, either, though the desire to flit my fingers over the keys whilst singing ‘Camptown Races’ and nodding ‘join in’ to the audience over my shoulder has faded somewhat. I have also given up on mastery of click and drag, cut and paste, sturm and drang and moving paragraphs around.
Nevertheless I still, despite profound ignorance, expect to exert a degree of control over what’s on the screen. I have no idea how it got there, who made it go or why it may suddenly morph into something else but I get unbelievably affronted at the appearance of gratuitous adverts, whether they flash, scroll, pop-up, or just sit there, looking at me. They give me the utter pip. Top of the pips is the rubbish at the bottom of the scroll ‘people who bought this item – picture for the hard of thinking – also bought * * * * * * *’
Who cares! Not me, that’s for sure. Why the optimized webcam should I give a flying memory card for someone else’s shopping list? How, in the name of all that’s Pause/Break, should the purchasing habits of someone I have never met, do not know and will never have a conversation with, influence my decision to buy anything at all? If I’m Internet shopping for a camera battery, why would I want a gentleman’s diving watch to go with it? When I buy a pair of sandals, what makes anyone think I’m likely to follow up with a speed impulse buy of an egg whisk? Who decided that immediately after finding a jumper in a sale I would be easily persuaded to buy a tartan sleeping bag? It’s beyond illogical.
More annoying, if possible, are the websites who keep a record of my previous purchases and remind me of them in the hope that I am so ditsy I have lost, used up or simply forgotten about the six foot plastic paddling pool I bought as a gift for someone else’s children a week ago. I know I bought it. I was there when I did it. I don’t want a pink one to go with it. I don’t want the bigger size, as well. I don’t, very especially, want a twin pack offer or an automatic once a month repeat delivered to my door at a three per cent discount for a year, with a chance to upgrade my order to a rainwater barrel after six months.
It doesn’t end there, as I dive out they have ‘recommendations for my next visit’, which is odd because I have a recommendation for my next visit too, which is: don’t make one.
Unbelievably there are entire advertising agencies that dedicate their lives to assisting Internet sellers to annoy you in this fashion. Some swine who will sweat in hell, sooner, I’m hoping, rather than later, invented pop-ups. The same git, I’m presuming, invented rolling flashing pop-ups and then retired, rich, smug and cursed around the world. Everybody’s at it; previously respected shopping channels and anyone with an Internet catalogue will grab whatever purchases you last made and endlessly flash pictures of similar items in your face until you give up and log off. What can have persuaded them they would sell more rather than less by pestering you endlessly for money, I cannot imagine. Do they live in areas mysteriously free of double glazing salesmen?
It makes me want to return to good old high street shopping. In this quaint way of shopping, if you went into a shop and left but the shopkeeper followed you and flashed his wares under your nose all down the road, he’d be arrested. If you left the butchers and went into the chemist only to have the butcher pop up from behind the counter and wave a couple of pork chops at you, the chemist would have something major to say about it. And the chemist, I’m trusting, wouldn’t sit next to you on the bus home in the hope of breaking your will and selling you some cut-price drug-alikes before you got to your stop.
I also get madder than mad at people who keep your money when they haven’t got what you want. Most recently this was an online garden centre who didn’t have the plants I wanted so sent me something else and a credit note. Needless to say I will never shop with them again. The utter arrogance of sellers who believe they will sell you whatever they fancy astounds me. I did not want to ‘spend some money with them’ as one put it, I wanted to buy the thing I wanted to buy, which is why I was there. If I go into a high street shoe shop and they haven’t got my size, they don’t take my plastic card off me, run it through the machine anyway and give me a pair of shoe trees and a credit note, instead.
What is it about Internet sellers that makes them think, just because they’ve managed a website, they’ll get money out of you every time you visit, whether you went there to shop or not? Whatever happened to window shopping?
I don’t know about you, but window shopping is one of my favourite things after a good book and a bag of sweets on a rainy afternoon and getting all the stripes on the lawn the same width.
I have loved window shopping through catalogues since I was a child. The first I recall was a fancy dress catalogue advertised in the pages of Exchange and Mart. I bought a Postal Order at the post office (I was eight), I think for nine pence and sent for this catalogue and read it till it shredded and then finally, having saved up, sent off for a hula costume, which turned out to be a raffia grass skirt, cost half a crown, value about sixpence, none of which stopped my obsessive reading of the catalogue remnants. The things I possessed in my head were numberless and the page numbers I held in my heart so I could find any outfit, eventually, by virtual telepathy.
I still love catalogues with equal and opposite force to the way I hate gratuitous adverts. When we initially designed this site we left nice white spaces down the side in case there were going to be adverts but I realised within about a month that the nice white spaces were lovely edges to the reading which would be spoiled by anything else. So, therefore, there will not be be adverts on this site. Apart from anything else, I hate them. The list of links to other sites you may be interested in will always be a click away and all the information about artists and shows is for the joy of telling you about them, artists are weird and interesting, sometimes even me. The catalogue, for all the window shopping, will always be there. I have put in a request to the web manager for a wish list to play with, which may or may not eventuate. What will be coming up in August, however, will be a fantastic offer for the whole of the month. Very annoyingly I’m not going to tell you what it is.
One of the things that gets me also with web sites and postal shopping generally is the P&P, unless you’re reading this in countries where it’s S&H. Either way it’s what it costs to pack something and send it to you. I’ve never really charged for the packaging, whether I’m at a show or posting stuff from home, you have to have something to wrap things up and put them in. So if I’ve done a Miniatura and have some money, I buy some packaging. When it’s all gone I buy some more. I get strong enough to post and sustainably sourced. Postage is something else. When I began doing mail order by printed catalogues, years ago, I took a box with a doll in it up to the post office and found what it would cost to post it to various places, then I rounded it down to the nearest half a pound and that was the charge. When you compare this with, for example, shopping channels, I’m sure they round theirs up to the nearest five pounds or they do that other irritating thing, they price it at £X 99p. Nobody is fooled by this, we can all count and we all know it’s £X+1 really, how daft do you think we are? The other annoying thing about web site shopping is the ones that say it’s postage free when you know they’ve actually figured the cost of postage into the deal. Anyone visiting my show stand knows that the prices of the dolls are exactly what you see here, and if you take a doll to the post office in a box you’ll see the postage costs are, as I say they are, a contribution to postage. That’s the trouble with buying things, you either have to go and get them which costs transport and parking, or you have to have them sent to you which costs transport. However, even with my liberal policy, I do need to upgrade the costs a bit as postage costs rise. Currently everything is under charged by a pound in money and a bit, more for further afield. So the costs of postage will rise on this site, but only by half of the real increase so it’s still only a contribution to the cost because, in an old fashioned way, I am grateful for your custom. The rises will be in place by September 1st.
So what shall we do for August? Would it be nice to have August post free? Completely? Now that’s something you wouldn’t get anywhere else. A whole month of post free postal shopping.
Don’t go mad yet, it’ll have to be programmed by the web master, I’ll tell you when.
Meanwhile, you might like to get a bag of sweets and a book, or just click on the shop button and do some lovely window shopping. (And if you want to do the lawn in stripes while I’m rubbing down all this porcelain, feel free.)
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JaneLaverick.com – about to throw caution to the winds, dear.