LAMP (30 W) FOR EXTRACTOR 481213418061

Looking to buy a cooker hood, I found this offer of a replacement lamp module at £53.78 including delivery. It's a lot of money for a cheap bulb, a cheap lampholder, and a bit of wire and a plug.

In the vast majority of cases, the problem will be that the G4 20w 12v lamp has blown - and a replacement bulb can be had for 38p at Screwfix.

Pushing customers to buy stuff they don't need is environmentally irresponsible - and greedy too.

Plusnet slow email - 159 days and counting

This is the status as reported on 23 July 2018

Impressive, eh?

Spot the Premier Inn

Wouldn't you think that "making sure people can find your hotel" would be pretty high up the checklist of any competent operator?

Seemingly not for Premier Inn's Stansted Airport hotel:

* Road signs specify other hotels (inc Holiday Inn which turns out to be next door) but do not mention Premier Inn

* The written description ("We are situated opposite Mid-Stay Car Park, adjacent to BP Petrol Station and McDonalds") is far from specific - when you get to that petrol station, the hotel is not visible, nor any signs.

* The entrance is invisible until you are level with the (sharp) left-hand turn - the hotel sign is until then hidden behind a bush. Here is what you see 20m before the entrance:

Can you see any signs to the Premier Inn hotel? Me neither. Looking for the hotel in the dark, we turned around and took directions from Google Maps - which wrongly thinks that the hotel has its entrance on the A120 bypass that runs beside the hotel. [Google provides clear instructions on how to get them to correct such errors - a shame that Premier Inn haven't bothered.]

After a detour of about 11 miles, we were back again, and in desperation drove further forwards this time to see this:

The (illuminated) sign on the left is only suggestion that this is the Premier Inn, and this is only visible AFTER you have driven past it - and you'd only do that if you had already spotted the entrance to the hotel, or were driving into the entrance of the "Maple Manor" car park.

* Google Streetview stops coverage about 100m short of the entrance - not the hotel's fault, but it should be the occasion for extra care in writing clear instructions AND for providing good local signage - like this, perhaps:

What did the hotel management have to say? Essentially that to get the signage fixed would take an awful lot of work, because they would have to work with the local authority and the airport to get the appropriate permissions.

Signage may indeed be complicated to sort out, but so is sewerage. I don't think that Premier Inn would leave their toilets draining into a swamp outside the front of their hotel - they would sort out all those pesky permissions to provide a professional solution. 

So why is it OK to shrug shoulders and give up on the task of helping people find the hotel?

For those trying to find the hotel, here are current (Sep 2017) instructions. Follow signs to "Services and Express By Holiday Inn". As you pass McDonalds, head straight on, with the BP garage (with M&S) on your left. Don' worry that there is no sign of Premier Inn - carry on as far as you can go until you are about to enter the car park for "Maple Manor Parking". At the very last minute, you will spot an entrance on the left (until then hidden by a hedge) with two barriers. Go through the left-hand barrier into the car park, around the corner to the right - and there is your hotel!

Piefest - taking the "P"?

Called in to Piefest in Melton Mowbray on Sat 29 July 2017.

£4 to get in to what was essentially a Farmer's Market, plus a "theatre" area offering talks with poor sightlines (no video) and inadequate audio. The admission price felt greedy for what was provided.

The selling proposition was that one could sample a range of pies. Yes, sort of. Most samples were miniscule, and many stands offered no samples whatsoever.

Leesons Family Butchers offered the most generous samples, and they tasted best too. We bought one of their £5 pies as a present for the friend we were travelling to see (and another for ourselves).

My suggestion? Get the stallholders to provide decent-sized samples at something like 50p a time, (say 1/12 of a £5 pie) - paid for with tokens: include say four tokens with the admission price, then sell extras on site. That way, the stallholders could cover their costs even if they didn't sell a lot of full-sized product, and punters would have a meaningful sampling experience.

Amazon Prime - wrecking the brand proposition

Amazon are tricking customers into signing up for Prime when they don't intend to. So whoever has been given the task of maximising Prime uptake is wrecking the idea that Amazon is simple and reliable to deal with. What do Amazon think they are playing at?

Here is the feedback that I sent them after being tricked into "signing up" for Prime when placing an order.

I understand that you are keen to sign people up to Prime. But you have gone too far. Elsewhere on the site, Orange buttons are the easy option - if I want to do what Amazon wants me to do, which sometimes is what is in my interest and sometimes not. But I understand that. Grey means an option that I may want as an alternative to Orange. Except on the delivery page, where you sneakily make Grey another "do what Amazon wants" option.

To avoid joining Prime I would have had to spot that I needed an uncoloured link. Having made the mistake that you wanted me to make, you then offer no Back or Undo option. If I try to log in and cancel Prime immediately, I cannot - because it is apparently too soon to do so.

As a method of maximising Prime uptake, it is clever.

But as customer service from "Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company" it stinks. It means that I don't trust you - all your hard work in making Amazon the easy-and-quick option is undone because I have to check every screen to make sure that you aren't trying to trick me again. Completely dumb.

7dayshop - how to fail

Once upon a time, Guernsey company 7dayshop had a strategic edge over mainland suppliers, in the shape of a VAT concession. Then the UK government closed the loophole.

Where does that leave 7dayshop? Striving hard to make itself a top-notch retailer who holds their own against mainland competitors? Seemingly not.

I wanted a Bluetooth dongle, and was willing to pay a bit more than it would cost on eBay for the reassurance of a company I trusted. But as I checked their website, I found two dongles that proclaimed support for Windows 7 but were silent about Windows 8. And one dongle where the site was completely silent on operating system support.

So I tried to use their "Live Chat" system. Nobody there, so could I leave a message? Certainly. But nearly one working day later, there had been no response. So I tried the Live Chat again - and got an operator who confirmed that my enquiry was being "dealt with". Impatient, I repeated my question to their Chat agent - who answered:

Have you checked this with the manufacturer as we only receive the descriptions printed on the website from the manufacturers

Don't ask how one is meant to track down the manufacturer for an unbranded item. Nor wonder how a company's buyer can purchase an item for which they have such incomplete information. Just marvel how any company can stay in business when they display such a lazy approach to customer service.

I've been a loyal customer of 7dayshop for many years, but I won't be looking to them for anything at all complicated in future.

BBC iPlayer - behaviour we wouldn't tolerate from Microsoft

I love the BBC. But I despise their attitude to users of iPlayer.

Essentially, the approach seems to be that as long as they deliver for the majority of users (the ones with the new equipment), then it's OK to abandon the rest, at minimal notice.

Early in 2014, you could "Listen Again" to radio programmes using the iPlayer app that worked on many variants of Android. Some time around May, they split off the Radio content to a separate iPlayer Radio - which was only available for Android 4 and upwards. The justification "more than 80%" of users were on Android 4 , so it was OK to abandon those pesky people on older systems.

Early in 2014, those with old-fashioned "CRT televisions could access BBC iPlayer (for TV and for Radio) using a Roku box (also badged as Now TV). In November 2014, BBC pulled the Radio content (again using the "small number of users not worth the bother" argument, as exposed on Feedback R4 21/11/14). And at the same time they changed the screen layout so that CRT users can no longer see the top and bottom menus even for the residual TV programme functionality.

Listen Again for Radio is still supposedly available for owners of older Android devices via the BBC iPlayer website. Except that there is about a 5% chance that pressing "Play" will actually result in your hearing the right programme (and that only with Opera browser). Want to ask the BBC to help? Get ready for two weeks (or more) each time you ask a question, which would be bearable if they answered the questions you asked. But with each response referring to a problem you didn't ask about, I ended up taking many weeks to get nowhere.

How would the world react if Microsoft abandoned those with PCs that they decided were a trivial minority - without public notice?