No Such Thing As Free...

There was an offer on the last packet of Cornflakes we ate...get a free bowl...except it wasn't 'free' of course. By the time you'd searched inside the packet for the special code and collected enough special codes and then paid £2 towards postage and registered the entire thing on-line... then waited for up to sixty days for the postie to bring the bowl you'd totally forgotten about in the meantime...

Our local supermarket has a similar sort of thing going on at the moment for cutlery...every €10 earns you a little sticker to put on a special card...when you've earned enough you get a set of latte spoons for €5. Err...but you've spent a €100 getting enough stamps for the set of latte spoons...there's a proper fish knife and fork as well...and pastry forks...who'd have thought to save up stickers for pastry forks.

Who uses pastry forks nowadays...or fish knives and forks...

They're overly fond of Pyrex in our supermarket...there'll be artistically arranged stacks of Pyrex dishes...complete with lids, but not those wire yokes that you put a night-light in to keep your over-boiled Brussels Sprouts hot...don't do those anymore. Then off we go again with the dinky little card and the stamps to prove you've spent oodles of money before you can claim a truly boring dish with an equally boring lid to add to all the other dishes you keep in the bottom cupboard and hardly ever use...

Time was when if something was free, that is precisely what it meant...Gollywog brooches and P.G. Tips books to stick cards into...coupons to collect in cigarette packets to exchange for all manner of goodies...Mother acquired a Kenwood Mixer through saving up Kenitas coupons...her lungs were well and truly knackered, but she had a proper mixer...