How the disabled are ripped off

charles wrote:

Not necessarilly. We had a thriving newsagent/tobacconist beside the
railway station. The owner decided to sell on health grounds. The new
owner went bust in 6 months - he confused turnover with profit. It's now
(30 years on) a thriving take away coffee business. It opens at 5.30am!


Quite often when Asians take over a shop and start their own business,
they are prepared to work all hours for not much profit as they build up
the business. That's very different to the previous owner, who was
probably at or over retirement age and wants to slow down.

Bill

James H wrote:

MY Satnav and speedo' both give different readings. I suspect the Satnav
is most accurate.

I have two satnavs in use occasionally and they always agree on speed,
and always say I'm doing a bit less than wot the speedo says.

Bill

In article , Bill Wright
wrote:
charles wrote:

Not necessarilly. We had a thriving newsagent/tobacconist beside the
railway station. The owner decided to sell on health grounds. The new
owner went bust in 6 months - he confused turnover with profit. It's
now (30 years on) a thriving take away coffee business. It opens at
5.30am!


Quite often when Asians take over a shop and start their own business,
they are prepared to work all hours for not much profit as they build up
the business. That's very different to the previous owner, who was
probably at or over retirement age and wants to slow down.

No Asians involved - though we do have Asians (from Ceylon) running the
Post Office.

--
Please note new email address:

On 25/09/2015 16:12, Bill Wright wrote:
GB wrote:

I don't know much about golf buggies, but you can't compare generic
with manufacturer's spares. Even if they are the same product. That's
because they haven't got to have the same wide inventory for generic.
So, if you buy a battery for a top brand golf buggy from one of their
dealers, how much does that cost? Otherwise, as you say, it's not
comparable.

So basically you are saying that a battery made by Exide, for instance,
and bought by a golf firm for fitting in their buggies, is in some way
different to the next battery off the line, which is bought by a
disability outfit to fit in their products?

No, that's absolutely not what I said!

I said that if you buy a 'genuine' part from a dealer network (for
virtually anything) it will be more expensive than the same part from a
generic parts dealer. Apart from anything else, the
dealers/manufacturers have an obligation to provide a wide range of
parts for a period of years, whereas the generic shop can simply ignore
any low turnover parts.



We are talking absolutely identical products here.

Even so.


Bill

In article ,
Indy Jess John wrote:
A business vacates a shop and another takes it over. The first thing
they do is take out all the fixtures and fittings and put new ones in,
and some perfectly serviceable stuff gets smashed up and put in a skip
outside.

That cost money. And while it is going on the shop sells nothing and
gets no income, so the shop refitting is done with loans. Small wonder
that some fail. And then somebody else comes along and removed the
previous fixtures and fittings that might be only 6 months old, to put
in new ones.

Why don't they reuse what is there?

There tend to be quite a few 'hobby' businesses round here. Called
something like 'The Lucky Parrot' or whatever and selling the sort of
'novelty items' a department store wouldn't stock. And only last a short
while. But as you say cost a fortune to set up. Same with restaurants. Far
too many for all to be profitable.

--
*The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
Rod Speed wrote:
A business vacates a shop and another takes it over. The first thing
they do is take out all the fixtures and fittings and put new ones in,

Not necessarily, most obviously with petrol
stations

Petrol stations round here get closed and houses built in their place. And
all petrol stations have to be refurbished by law within a timescale.

So absolutely nothing like shops.

Of course it is likely very different in the outback.

--
*(over a sketch of the titanic) "The boat sank - get over it

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Martin writes:

Not necessarilly. We had a thriving newsagent/tobacconist beside the
railway station. The owner decided to sell on health grounds. The new
owner went bust in 6 months - he confused turnover with profit. It's now
(30 years on) a thriving take away coffee business. It opens at 5.30am!

Lots of successful pubs go the same way.

Both of which imply that fault lies fairly and squarely with the new
owners. If the previous owners were running a successful and profitable
business (and sold because of ill health, retirement etc) then there
should be no reason why the new owners should not be able to continue to
run it as a going concern.

On 29/09/2015 11:47, Martin wrote:
On Tue, 29 Sep 2015 10:56:38 +0100, wrote:

Not necessarily. We had a thriving newsagent/tobacconist beside the
railway station. The owner decided to sell on health grounds. The new
owner went bust in 6 months - he confused turnover with profit. It's now
(30 years on) a thriving take away coffee business. It opens at 5.30am!

Lots of successful pubs go the same way.

There was a pub like that near me. It was a proper local, with
regulars, and facilities for the local darts league, a skittles team and
a venue for the local 8-ball pool league. Also the pub was on the CAMRA
pub crawl list.

There was a core of five regulars who were there every single evening,
with their two pints a night spread over several hours. But their
friends and relatives would often drop in for a natter and buy their
drinks, and a local charity ran a quiz night once a month, with the date
chosen to avoid darts, skittles and pool matches. As a pub, it did
well; not spectacularly well but well enough to keep everyone happy,
until the pubco got into financial difficulty.

Then the pubco who owned the freehold decided to close it and sell it on
with planning permission for conversion into flats. The flaw in the
plan was apparent when the council refused the planning permission and
insisted that it stayed as a pub.

The pubco had no real Plan B and asked the former landlord to open up
again, and naturally he told them to get stuffed. So they then found a
young couple to take it on. Enthusiastic and clueless in equal measure,
they made every mistake in the book. They changed the name, they took
out the pool table and the dart board to get more tables in so that they
could offer fancy, overpriced food. They installed TV screens for Sky
Sport viewing, and installed piped music. They discontinued hosting
skittles teams and offered the alley as a function room instead. They
told the regulars that they were after younger clientele and as the
regulars were not drinking much they might like to go elsewhere to mix
with people their own age - which they did, taking all the friends and
relative drop-in trade with them. They discontinued the guest ale,
because students who now frequented the bar drank keg or lager more than
real ales, and CAMRA dropped them. They survived until August, when
their treasured student clientele went away at the end of term and
almost nobody went in. The enthusiastic but clueless couple did a
moonlight flit owing lots of money.

The one thing they accidentally got right was their decision that they
didn't want to live above the pub and they let the upstairs flat on a
two-year lease. So when the pubco tried to sort out the mess they found
that the tenants upstairs were staying put for the remainder of their
lease, which rather limited the pubco's options for the pub itself.

The landlord of one of the pubco's other more successful pubs heard
about the problem and negotiated a deal with the pubco that he would
take over the failed pub, but only on condition he could buy the
freehold (which got it out of the pubco's price controls), and he would
continue to keep the pub he currently ran operational for a fixed period
of time (coincidentally the remainder of the upstairs lease on the one
he was buying). That way he continued to live above his current pub,
and he installed a friend as temporary manager so that he could get away
with the time to sort out the one he had bought.

So back came the original name, back came the real ales, back came the
skittles alley and dart board. The pool league didn't return: having
found somewhere else, they were sticking with it. So the room which
would have been for pool became an eating room, as he made arrangements
for the local chippy which was take-away only to use that room for its
eat in customers. The pub customers order their drinks at the bar, and
also a chip supper if they want one. The bar uses a walkie-talkie call
to the chippy to pass on the order, and the chippy delivers to the pub's
back room. Win-win, assuming that the pub has some sort of commission
deal with the chippy. When the flat upstairs became vacant, he moved in
and gave up the other pub. His pub is now once again a "local", and is
back on the CAMRA circuit.

Jim

On 29/09/2015 13:16, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

There tend to be quite a few 'hobby' businesses round here. Called
something like 'The Lucky Parrot' or whatever and selling the sort of
'novelty items' a department store wouldn't stock. And only last a short
while. But as you say cost a fortune to set up. Same with restaurants. Far
too many for all to be profitable.

My area seems to have reached saturation point for eateries. Every time
a new one starts up, either it doesn't survive for long, or it becomes a
viable business and another one nearby goes to the wall.

Jim

On Mon, 28 Sep 2015 22:36:53 +0100, Johnny B Good wrote:

On Mon, 28 Sep 2015 17:22:49 +0100, [email protected] wrote:

On 27/09/2015 23:08, Indy Jess John wrote:
On 27/09/2015 22:18, Tough Guy no. 1265 wrote:

It's speed limit +10mph.
Not everywhere. There are some speed cameras that register an offence
if you are doing 34mph or more in a 30mph limit. Some were in north
Wales.

Jim

They can do you for 31 in a 30 limit if they want to.
The evidence needs a bit more effort with calibration, etc.

The allowance is just to ease the job of the police.

As I've already explained, the +/-10% allowance isn't for the benefit of
the police, it's for the benefit of the equipment makers (and the hapless
motorist dependant upon an instrument he is forced to place his trust
in). It's the +/-2mph that's for the benefit of the police, provided they
can prove the calibration worthiness of their measuring devices along
with their correct usage.

I thought car speedos were only allowed to read over and not under? Why is the same not true of radar guns only reading under and not over, then they don't need any allowances.

That **** of a North Wales Chief Police Constable, determined to drive
the more wealthy tourist away by the stupidity of "A zero tolerance"
speeding ticket mentality" was not doing his fellow North Welsh citizens
any favours let alone the visiting tourists he felt obliged to attack
when they came up against a confusing plethora of seemingly random and
arbitrary speed limits along largely open country non-urban roads[1].

What's worse is that the magistrates colluded in this 'zero tolerance'
nonsense when they failed to demonstrate good common sense when presented
with a case involving a speeding offence where the recorded speed was a
mere 35mph in a 30mph zone (right on the +10% +2mph allowance limit).

In the days before the curse of speed cameras (yes, I've been riding and
driving the roads for *that* long!), any motorist who managed to get
caught speeding only had themselves to blame for not paying enough
attention to the task of driving safely let alone for failing to spot the
police car in their wake in ample time to make sure they were driving
within the speed limit of the section of road they were on. I think I've
only had to blame my own self negligence twice in almost half a century
of riding/driving the nation's roads. :-)

[1] The tone of this missive quite clearly indicates that I've suffered
from this victimization campaign. I'm not one to hang around but neither
am I one to drive recklessly (as a rule) and take heed of the speed
limits, particularly when travelling on the highways and byways of North
Wales, so I was particularly surprised to receive a NIP for exceeding the
30 limit on a trip back home from North Wales, a journey I remember
taking particular care to avoid breaking the random collection of speed
limits placed along my homeward route.

Since they'd only managed to clock me as doing 35mph (probably in the
first ten yard stretch after the 30mph limit sign by means of a a hidden
mobile speed camera), I was given the option of doing a speed awareness
course in lieu of a fine and 3 points. Just coincidentally, the cost of
the course happened to be the same as the fine (£60) but it was a no-
brainer to take this option since it saved me accumulating 3 points on my
licence.

But you got brainwashed. You only take those if you think you risk running low on points.

--
Why do they call it a TV set when you only get one?