Internet Buying and Postage

Although you might think these are inter-related subjects, they are and they aren’t – let me explain.

In France, quite a lot of things are very expensive, certainly compared to the UK and so for the last few years, nearly everything we buy, apart from food and DIY stuff, is purchased on the internet.

Virtually all the kid’s clothes are bought on-line with t-shirts flying in from the far east and shoes and trousers coming from a variety of sources. I’ve given up trying to find decent and reasonably priced clothes over here and thank the day that M&S started shipping their online catalogue to Europe.

Of course, we, like virtually everybody else use Amazon but tend to find that Amazon UK is cheaper than Amazon France (for the same book), even when you include the postage costs (Amazon France is generally postage free) and you may have read on my blog that I’ve been buying tyres and other car parts on the net and quite a few of these are coming from the UK as well.

And I reckon I’ve worked out why things are cheaper to get from the UK and that’s because postage charges in France are exorbitantly expensive.

A couple of postage stories – it takes maybe ten days for my insurance company in Nice to send me a policy in the post (well they blame the post) whilst J has had rather large parcels delivered from Kenya in a couple of days which I can’t quite work out given that the parcels eventually get handled by La Poste when they reach French soil.

Secondly, I’ve just had some brake parts delivered from the UK for my BMW. Postage costs were £14.95. The company concerned take back your old parts and give you a rebate for them, which at £30 a time is not to be sneezed at. And so when I picked up my new parts the other day from La Poste, which, amazingly was open for once, I asked the girl to put the package back on the scales to see how much it would cost to send back to the UK because I reckoned I would just put the old parts back in the same box and ship it back for my rebate.

Of course, confusion reigned. ‘You’ve not even taken delivery of your parcel and you want to send it back?’ she queried.

‘No – I just want to see what it would cost to send it back to the UK’, I said.

Well, the discussion and explanation went on for a couple of minutes much to the annoyance of the usual queue in our Post Office which is a space of about 8 feet by 2 feet (I kid you not). Eventually, I managed to get Mrs La Poste to understand that it wasn’t the incoming parcel I wanted to send to the UK but one of exactly the same dimensions and weight.

She plonked it on the scales and said, ‘Cent Trente Neuf Euros.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘One hundred thirty nine’, she said in almost perfect English. ‘And that’s normal post, it’ll be more if it’s express and more if you want it signed for at the other end.’

‘One hundred and thirty nine euros – that’s about £120’, I said. ‘It only cost £15 to send them from the UK.’

She shrugged. I shrugged and in an instant worked out why French things are expensive to buy, and get delivered, on the internet.

PS – on a similar subject, we ordered a new PC battery for Guy off of eBay. It was ordered on 7^th December, the money was debited via PayPal a day later and ……. yup – it never arrived.

By the time the ‘retailer’ in Hong Kong (I should have smelled somefing velly funny) had ‘investigated’ the non-delivery, it was too late to complain via eBay and now the retailer’s e-mail has ‘ceased to exist’. Beware!!

'Bigger Than Mickey Mouse'

I got J an iPad for her Xmas. I know I should have waited until April when the new super-wizzy version with a larger screen and a camera is apparently to be announced but you can wait for ever for these new versions so I took the plunge, ordered it off of the internet, it was delivered in good time, all beautifully wrapped and it was put under the tree and eventually gratefully received. Not ‘eventually’ in that it took my wife ages to acknowledge the gift but that it was delivered early and lay under the tree for a couple of weeks.

Despite not having the usual Windows applications such as Excel, Word or Powerpoint, the iPad comes into its own when used simply as an internet access device. Despite costing twice what a good laptop would set you back, the touch-screen interface to the internet and e-mail is brilliant. Before I got J the iPad, I’d read that once you use an iPad to access the Net, you never want to go back to the mouse based system, and it’s true – as soon as J puts her iPad down, either me, Guy or Kitty are racing to get our hands on it.

It’s not without its faults though. Like the iPhone and the iTouch, there is no ability to run Flash so I cannot watch some videos and cannot see any Flash based football games on it. It doesn’t have a file input device such as a USB port or Bluetooth – everything you want to get on your iPad has to go through iTunes which is a bit of a nuisance. Still – its good points outscore the bad.

As soon as we, sorry, J had the iPad we were looking for the best applications. Very quickly Wunderadio (a digital radio app which gives J her Classic FM and me, my Talksport), Accuweather (for beautifully presented weather forecasts) and Jukebox, were downloaded, soon to be followed by a few free games such as Casino, Paper Toss and a paid one, Angry Birds.

I hadn’t heard of Angry Birds before, I guess Guy downloaded it but it is horribly addictive, encouraging you to play for hours trying to get from one level to the next. It was only developed as an ‘App’ in 2009 but two years later, Angry Birds has become the iPhone’s most popular App, in other words, the piece of software that has been installed on the most number of handsets worldwide (quite an achievement when you consider that it’s one of 300,000 applications on offer) and has quickly spread to Apple’s iPad and other types of phones as well.

The game has been downloaded 50 million times. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, has admitted to a mild addiction, as have a variety of other supposedly busy people, from Dick Cheney to Mad Men actor Jon Hamm. Last year, two brothers, Rodrigo and Gustavo Dauster, competed against each other in a two-month marathon session to see who could score the maximum number of points.

In total, the game notches up 200 million minutes of play time every day, which is close to the number of minutes viewers in the United States spend watching the average prime-time television programme. Versions of the game are being developed for the PlayStation, Xbox and Wii. There is a line of Angry Birds soft toys, Mattel is working on a board game and before long there will be a cartoon series, and, if all goes well, a film.

Rovio, the company behind the development of Angry Birds, certainly doesn’t lack ambition. At a conference in Munich last month, Peter Vesterbacka, the company’s head of business development, boasted that Angry Birds was “bigger than Mickey Mouse”. He was referring to the number of times the two terms were searched for on Google.

It’s certainly the most addictive way to pass some spare time, and that’s how it was developed – for people standing at a bus stop waiting for a few minutes and wanting something mildly amusing and challenging to play on their smart phone, with the ability to pick up where you left off, either the following day, or if you’re like me, as soon as you can find a quiet corner.

Try it - but heed my warning – you will not be able to put it down.