Saw IV
No, not the "torture porn" film that's out at the cinemas tomorrow, I just used that sexy title to lure you into reading another blog entry about supermarkets. Sort of. The reasons are not interesting, but I needed to buy a hacksaw the other day, as the thing I asked the man at the wood-cutting desk in B&Q wasn't able to do it. He directed me to the saw aisle where I found it affixed to the backing card, above. I bought it. It is a small but effective metal hacksaw. And it cost ...
78p. That's seventy eight of your English pence. Now let's remove B&Q's mark-up from this and wonder how much it actually cost to manufacture. 40p? 30p? Remember, it may only be two bits of metal joined together, but it's still a precision tool that has to work, and yet it costs mere pence. Somewhere down the supply chain, somebody is being exploited for this item to be so cheap, surely. It's like the loss leaders in Tesco, the toilet paper and the milk and the bread. Unless you know something about hacksaw manufacture that I don't.
I should have bought a more expensive one, just on principle, but I thought I could at least make an example of it on Britain's premier political discussion forum.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 5:46 PM
27 Comments
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27 Comments:
But does it 'work'? As it has been manufactured cheaply without care or skill, by an exploited worker, I doubt that you will be using it for very long (unless we both don't know something about hacksaws).
We buy things to use once and throw away because, at the point we buy (not in the long term), it is cheaper. We all have things we'd rather spend our money on than a hacksaw or we're just short of cash. We balance it against the harm it does and often find in our own self interest, not surprisingly. I've done it too.
I think this is an example of how the free market can pander to our thoughtlessness.
Yes the big stores are much, much, too powerful and are corrupt, but with freedom, rather than much stricter regulation, comes responsibility as consumers.
Environmentally and ethically we should think twice before we buy.
it probably takes 3 seconds to make though
Just because the workers are exploited, doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a crap hacksaw. Jesus, this is a boring thread.
The saw won't so much be a product of cheap labour but of cheap automation, I'd have thought. In fact, chances are you'll have been the first person to actually touch it. Probably a few people have picked up big boxes of saws and loaded them into containers somewhere along the way, but that's as close as it'll have got to actual human beings, skilled, exploited or otherwise.
They underprice the saw to get you in to the store. Then once you're there you remember you need expensive...hammers.
So if the manufacture of the saw is entirely mechanised, that means old-fashioned saw-makers have been forced out of business by the inudstrial revolution, which can't be good.
I never really expected the 78p hacksaw to generate the 65-plus comments the torture one did, but this is a blog, and one must blog whenever one sees fit, mustn't one?
I didn't buy an expensive hammer. I only went in to get a bit of wood cut professionally, and he couldn't do it, so I ended up spending 78p, helping support the free market, and going home to saw it myself with my new saw, which certainly worked twice. (Is the "junior" part of junior hacksaw a reference to its size, or the fact that it's for kids?)
"Junior Hacksaw"?
Are you sure you weren't in Toys R Us?
Aren't hacksaws supposed to be used for cutting metal, not wood? I bet if you used it for cutting metal you wouldn't get too many uses out of it.
And I bet you can't replace the blade in it, like you can a proper hacksaw, which is therefore more environmentally friendly.
Well, I don't think you can beat a chocolate toolkit, the sort those of us of a certain age used to get for Christmas. The joy of biting into a nice choccy hammer or hacksaw....mmm, hacksaw.
The bulk of the saving comes from economies of production and distribution. The exploitation really isn't necessary any more, but if Tesco does it then we'll go to Tesco to save a penny, then Sainsbury has to do it, then Tesco discovers they can save another penny by working people to death and splicing their corpses together into enormous, super-efficient zombies, so Sainsbury has to do it too so they don't lose customers, etc. It's called a race to the bottom, and is why, essentially, capitalism doesn't work. There was supposed to come a point where the top guys had 'enough' and the benefits filtered down to everyone. That kind of hasn't happened, although proponents would argue that it has and we just have to allow more time for it to work in the rest of the world. It all depends on your perspective.
I believe the "junior" refers to the size. It is designed to be used on metals, rather than wood.
You could have made one yourself Andrew, as I did during my apprenticeship. You only need a small block of aluminium filed and rounded to size and a piece of steel rod bent into shape.
It only took me 2 days to make and it still works today, some 20 years later! And the handle is made perfectly for my hand.
You're using a hacksaw to cut wood?
At 78p I can see your thinking, but are you sure it's the best tool for the job?
Instead of having a go at B&Q for making a profit (which is what they're there for, isn't it?) I'd like to take this opportunity to praise them for their policy of hiring the more 'mature' employee.
The B&Q nearest to me (in Aintree, Liverpool) has wonderful staff who know where everything is and will happily help you get everything sorted out.
Some of the other DIY stores in the area suffer from the usual 'can't be arsed' surliness that Liverpool shops seem to specialise in.
Big up B&Q, even if you are capitalist oppressors.
Sorry, Jude. I'm not a miracle worker, you know.
I'd second the point about cheaper in the long run. I wanted to make some shelves a while back, but my electric saw was broken. Being a cheapskate, I spent maybe six pounds on crappy saws (all of which broke quite quickly) before paying fifteen for a nice new electric saw that was just much, much better.
I'd also second the point about B&Q's employment policy. It is so very nice not to have to deal with surly, foot shuffling teenagers.
Both Jesus and Chris Burgess must be lucky with their B&Qs as the staff in the Milton Keynes one are terrible. For example:-
Me: (holding up a tube) "Do you know where I can find one of these pipes?"
16 year old: (looking at me with sheer contempt) "Yeah"
20 seconds of silence........
Me: "Could you tell me then please?"
16 year old: "Yeah"
20 seconds of silence.......
Me: "Go on then"
He then pointed to an aisle about 40 feet away without moving from the spot he was standing on (and without really moving his arm much either), and then went back to discussing souped-up cars with his 16 year old colleague while I had to look through approximately 27,000 types of pipe to find the bit I needed. Lovely.
Zoe
Is there any evidence that by doing the decent thing, and buying an organic/fair trade/£5 hacksaw instead of the rip-off/degrading/70p hacksaw that any more money was going to the impoverished qualified craftsman hacksaw manufacturer? Maybe B&Q just pockets £4.50 if you buy a more expensive one, and laughs at you as you leave the store.
I agree with those who approve of B&Q's old-people employment policy. If I want help with DIY, I'd like to consult somebody who's done some DIY.
I once asked a very young assistant in somewhere like Curry's about whether a bread making machine worked with non-wheat flour, and he looked at the side of the box to find out, something I'd already done - and it didn't actually specify. Rather than open the box to look at the instruction booklet, he suggested I buy the bread machine, take it home, open the box, read the booklet, find out if it did work with rye flour or not, and if it didn't, bring it back for a refund. I did. It didn't. I did. Cheers.
Last week I tried to buy a lamp in a lighting dept. of an Oxford St department store, and the young man I approached said he'd have to find the person who looked after the lighting dept. He went off, came back, told us that this person was on a break, and that he couldn't help us. We sent hm off to find a supervisor, or somebody who could help us. He did, and came back with an identical message. In other words: we couldn't buy a lamp from this dept. store on Oxford Street on a Saturday. Where was his initiative? What was he doing letting customers leave the store without buying something?
Yes, yes, I expect he wasn't well paid. But nor was I when I worked in Sainsbury's as a teenage Saturday boy, but if somebody asked me something and I didn't know the answer, I'd make it my business to find out from somebody.
I think this is the failing in this country, pride in one's job.
Even if I was employed as a toilet cleaner, I'd want to make sure I was the best goddamn toilet cleaner in the country.
Having said that, I am posting this during office hours...ooops.
The thought that B&Q have 'loss leaders' is quite amusing in itself.
Look everyone, come snap up our cheap U-bends, walk away with a barrel-load of cut-price crosshead 2" screws...
I used to use the West Norwood store, which was also pretty useless, but then hasn't everyone got a 'rubbish DIY store employee' story?
People in shops generally couldn't care less about the customer. And I should know, I worked in a shop for a year in the late Eighties and I was foul to customers. We would have contests to see who could be rudest and get away with it.
I'm not proud of it, especially when the best you get is a grunt out of a shop assistant thesedays. It's not big and it's not clever.
However, is this something peculiar to these shores? Here it seems anyone who works in any sort of service industry is unhelpful by default. They don't like to serve you because it means somehow they think you think you might be better then they are in some way.
Blimey, sounds like you lot are all just saw losers.....
AnonoNick
I just saw what you did there, Nick!
Fnarp!
In the interests of balance, and that all important sense of humour, here is another retail of woe.
It was cutting edge humour...!
AnonoNick
Alright, cut it out now.
Incidentally, did anyone see The Handsome Family on the Culture Show last week, with a guy playing the saw?
They may sound great on record, but visually they are quite unnerving...
What annoys me most about all this is the necessity for the cardboard backing to hold the hacksaw. Aaaaargh! Tesco's policy is to make an average profit of 1p for every product it sells, and is THE retail success story, so it's no surprise if everyone else copies this strategy.
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