Black Friday – another step along the road to madness.

So in previous years, it seemed to me that Black Friday and all that it entailed was an American thing. I could always enjoy stories of fights in queues and punters being maced all for the sake of grabbing the last 50-inch plasma TV in the shop for a third of the usual price, and then feel slightly superior in that typically English way that makes so many others hate us.

But this year, the UK press and UK retailers have managed to induce Black Friday madness in earnest in our fair isles. There goes my snobby smugness – we in the UK are now as possession obsessed as those ‘Mericans ever were. It’s another step along the road to spelling colour without a u, allowing any inbred mook to own a gun and shoot black people, or voting for the party actively trying to be the dumbest in elections (although with UKIP's recent frightening gains, we might already have that one in the bag).

All hail our headlong rush into oblivion!

Service. Or lack thereof.

You might have noticed a minor interruption in content this last month or so. Well, you see, my laptop developed a fault some time back. Problem with the screen – couldn’t see anything but flickering static when online. Since I bought the thing from a leading retailer I’ve been forking out money each month for a sort of insurance thing where they would fix anything or replace that which proved unfixable.

So, off I pop to hand the thing over. Turns out it’ll take nine days before I get it back. That’s quite a bit longer than expected, but maybe they’re busy. I hand it over and leave, muttering a little under my breath.

Nine Internet-free days go by. By now the number of funny cat pictures I’ve missed must be astronomical. The previous day (that is, after eight days), they figured out that the laptop is still under the manufacturer’s warranty so they need to return it to them to fix –they can’t touch it. Eight days. To figure that out. So that’s another week to wait. And the monthly payment turns out to be wasted money because we would’ve got this anyway due to it still being covered by the manufacturer.

We wait another week, through gritted teeth. We head on in. It was picked up yesterday. So once they knew it needed returning to the manufacturer it took six days to arrange a pick up. So that’s 14 days so far, and now they’re telling me it shouldn’t be more than another five in a tone that suggests I’m expected to be impressed by this. The pleasant person behind the counter telling us this didn’t seem to understand why we found this surprising and frustrating. Where in the world would this be considered decent service?

We finally get the laptop back almost three weeks after bringing it in. We’ve learnt a few things in that time. We’ve learnt that we are cancelling the payment we’re currently making in case anything goes wrong. As the laptop is junk anyway, we’ll be glad of an excuse to get a new one. And we learnt that there is a major retailer of electronic goods and services that will have to manage without any more of our money. Not that that’s likely to bother them much, but even a minor protest is still a protest.

The view from the fence.

As the recent public sector strikes help to turn private sector against public sector, thanks largely to the hideously biased media, I find myself in an odd position. After leaving college I worked in the retail industry for nine years, on and off, fitting a degree course in between. After the company I worked for went under, I found a job as a civil servant. Nothing particularly admirable or heroic – I’m no teacher, nurse or police officer, just a sit down job in an office.

Working in retail can be quite a bit more exhausting than it might appear. Presenting a helpful smiling face to your customers day in, day out, regardless of how you feel, or how much they make you wish you could simply spit in their eye and walk away. Christmas was ridiculous, and could involve working 80 hour weeks with no more than your regular 37.5 hours of salary to show for it. You had no real weekend, working almost every Saturday and many Sundays. Flexi-time? Don’t make me laugh. It was more difficult to be competent at that job than you think.

When I first started my public sector job, I could scarcely believe it. A canteen. A gym.  Childcare facilities.  (All subsidised, but none even close to free.)  Never being expected to work more than your contracted hours – such a thing is actively frowned upon. Every weekend off. Flexible working patterns. More holidays. Slightly higher pay. A pension.

With it still being quite new to me, I can with a certainty understand fully the frustration of people in the private sector, angry that us, who are so privileged in comparison, are protesting changes to our pensions. Asking someone who has worked a manual labour job for minimum wage their whole lives with no pension beyond the state one to feel sorry for a teacher on a decent salary annoyed at losing a part of a generous pension is a bit much.

But. And it is a big but. The argument that you should not fight to protect what rights you have simply because there are many people with fewer rights is not a sensible argument. It is an understandable frustration, but being angry at striking public sector workers for refusing to accept diminishing terms of employment, bringing them more in line with what you’ve lived with all your life is pointless. If a starving homeless man told the manual labour worker that he shouldn’t complain and should live hand to mouth on the streets like him, the argument would not make sense. A better option, surely, would be to improve the starving man’s standard of living.

Obviously, I make no claims of expertise, but surely it should not be impossible to improve working standards within the private sector. The relentless drive for profit above all is damaging. Instead of looking to prop up shareholders and CEOs, the money could be channelled into providing pensions, increasing low wages, easing long working patterns. Not that our current economic climate is geared to that sort of thing, obviously. Putting people before companies, profit and production is at the moment too fundamental a shift to really be feasible. But it could be done. It should be done. If a company cannot be profitable without providing decent working conditions it is not a sustainable business venture. So, while the anger toward the apparently privileged public sector is understandable, it is sorely misplaced and better directed at the small minority of very, very rich people getting richer off the back of others who are willing to put up with crappy working conditions for the security of a small regular wage.

Goodbye old friend, you’ll not be missed.

It turns out that this year a certain entertainment retailer is planning to close several of its stores. For some reason, I can't quite find it within myself to be sad for that, and the reason for that is that generally, my local store is pants. And the online version is mega pants. Perhaps if it was less pants, I might have been able to summon up a little more care.

The last time I was in the store, I bought a music DVD. When I got it home, it turned out that Rach had already got it for me from Amazon. The special edition, no less. It's unopened, with receipt, so I assume they'll be no problem getting a refund on it. I used to work for said retailer, and I know that big releases like this one would be on 'sale or return', meaning they can return any they don't sell to the supplier for a full refund.

But no; the Saturday kid, who looks like she must be about 12, tells me uninterestedly that it's not their policy to offer refunds unless the item is damaged or faulty. I can exchange it or get vouchers, but that's it. But, it's perfectly re-sellable, I have the receipt, there's nothing wrong with it. In the words of The Dude, no-one's trying to scam anyone here, man. "Sorry, it's not our policy" repeats the dead-eyed bitch behind the counter over and over, like a robot with a damaged subroutine. It seems odd that disrespect and terrible customer service should be a policy, but maybe that's one reason they are closing stores this year. I turn down the vouchers and exchange it for a couple of things I don't really want, because I don't want to go back and buy anything else from the pricks ever again. Congratulations Amazon, you will now be selling me all of my DVDs, Blu-Rays and CDs from now on.

I don't know if my local store is on the death list, but apart from the sad fact that some people I still count as friends will lose their jobs (the annoying brat who 'served' me is strangely not included on that list), I wouldn't be sorry to see it go.