Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments A princess is AWOL, the government refuses to admit defeat, and now pastry purveyor Greggs is unable to process card payments. How many more national crises can the Great British public weather before the streets burn? The hungover masses on routine trips to fetch a sausage roll and/or other beige-colored "food" were stopped …
They were a bit like frankfurters but redder. They had lots of tiny vertical cuts along one side. During the cooking process, the sausage would curved into a C shape. The ends didn't actually touch.
Came as part of a "grill". May have included beans, a fried egg, chips and beans - can't really remember.
More like an all day fried breakfast.
They seemed unbelievably exotic when I was a child. To be fair, I have never seen their like anywhere else.
Perhaps it was just a way to get a sausage to fit onto a small plate?
"A princess is AWOL, the government refuses to admit defeat, and now pastry purveyor Greggs is unable to process card payments. How many more national crises can the Great British public weather before the streets burn?"
If the streets weren't soaked of rain water collected by all the potholes we'd be in an inferno by now.
Wasn't there a river that was so polluted it caught fire?
Yes, the Cuyahoga, running through the post-industrial rustbelt hellhole that was Cleveland, Ohio, in the seventies. I am not insulting it, I lived there.
I am told by people who remained that it is much nicer now.
The river was so polluted that one could ignite the sludge floating on the "water" below by almost any ignition source, like the metallic sodium wrapped in chicken fat said to be used by bored science nerds. The fat would dissolve in the sludge just as the sodium hit enough water to make it go exothermically boom.
Yes, the Cuyahoga, running through the post-industrial rustbelt hellhole that was Cleveland, Ohio, in the seventies. I am not insulting it, I lived there.
Also, the Schuylkill River in Philly, back in the 1890's. Killed some fishermen when the kerosene on the river caught fire.
Then, there was Love Canal, NY, where a school was built on top of a chemical dump site and the creeks notoriously caught fire when kids threw stones against the gravel of the banks.
"The difficulty in these situations is that many companies don't ever give a detailed technical breakdown of glitches."
But we do know one common factor: single point of failure. Bean-counters want cheap, little if any redundancy and then get taken by surprise when the beans stop arriving.
"But we do know one common factor: single point of failure. Bean-counters want cheap, little if any redundancy and then get taken by surprise when the beans stop arriving."
Frankly, sounds like a common vendor, making the same mistake of not testing updates before pushing them out.
Or a Typhoid Mary employee, sacked for bollocksing one update, hired on to bollocks up the rest of the universe, one employer at a time.
In each case, they seem to be saying they installed an update and borked their systems. Now it could be an update of anything (maybe they changed to decaf in the IT room coffee machine), but is there any one program they all happen to be using for purchasing, that sent out an update to be installed this week, and they have all got around to installing it at different times...
Nahh... It was Putin... He wants riots on the street in the UK, and knows just how to accomplish it... If Wetherspoons goes down tomorrow, war will be declared by the end of the week...
This is down to North Korea acting on Chinas orders and using Russian hardware. Is it a coincidence that none of those countries have Greggs? I think not.
It's going to be some dependency somewhere that's changed or been whacked by something else changing.
I thought that at first but they would all go out at the same time and they didn't. My guess is other transaction service providers catching up on the shit show with the essential security updates or what not, maybe. It's more than likely a POS issue as a media release said techs at the store could fix it. Greggs probably don't have the same IT management tools as the big boys and had to go store to store. I'm assuming a lot here so I may be wrong.
I'm with you on the always carry cash. The push to a cashless society is a road I don't want to go down.
"...none of these countries have Greggs..."
Long before Y2K there was a meme holding that McDonald's had civilised the world because "no two countries that have a McDonald's have ever gone to war". I happened to walk down Calle Florida in Buenos Aires a little while after the Falklands show and gazed at the McDonald's in some surprise. Just imagine.
Come on then.
Out with the massive list of promised Brexit benefits that have been realised Grumpy of TB?
I definitely won't be holding my breath.
btw ... a democracy votes and changes it mind all the time ... its not a one off point in time. But you type never understood that.
And now ... I await your vast list of Promised Benefits Realised ....
(and with blaming anybody else if they haven't been ... With you lot, its "always somebody else fault" ..Immigrants/Woke/Tofu .... you have been in power for 8yrs since Brexit... Own the Sh1tSt0rm of Failure & incompetence you cuased!)
> Somebody lied that Brexit had harmed economic growth, I pointed out that that is factually and demonstrably untrue.
That's not what wrote yesterday... and the OBR claim it lowers GDP by four percent...
I can tell you it is truth that our growth in 2023 (0.5% GDP) is lower than the European average (0.7% GDP) - source: Statista.
Also, in Q4 of 2023, our GDP was 1% higher than it had been in Q4 of 2019, whereas the Eurozone GDP was 3% higher than it had been in Q4 of 2019 - source: UK Parliament Commons Library.
We may be outperforming Germany, but the majority of other EU countries are out-performing us. Given that we don't have a crystal ball to see how we would have performed if we hadn't left the EU, it's difficult to say if we would have performed even worse. However looking at the EU as a whole, we are being out-performed by them as far as growth is concerned.
We've been through this a million times. Yes the UK briefly had better growth than some EU members because our economy crashed further and there was the inevitable rebound. Known in the economics trade as the "dead cat bounce".
But growing from much worse to slightly worse is still pretty grotty and over the period from before Brexit to now the UK has fared far worse than most EU competitors and will continue to do so until we eventually and inevitably rejoin.
But prove me wrong, state one thing that is better for the majority of UK citizens that's a direct result of Brexit. Just one indisputable benefit.
Ho hum, one hour in, 3 downvotes but not a single reply to my question: "state one thing that is better for the majority of UK citizens that's a direct result of Brexit."
Come on, if you downvote please explain why we are better off in the sunny Brexit uplands.
Let's face reality, as far as anybody can tell there is no benefit and it's time the Brexit cheer leaders either come up with some genuine benefit or finally admit they were wrong.
Wow! Talk about projection.
I'm more than willing to discuss this but I am still after all this time yet to hear a single fact that explains why we are better out of the EU. It's the people who fell for the lies and unachievable promises and were suckered into voting for Brexit who have their fingers firmly in their ears and you are right, it's tedious.
So once more, tell me a single benefit of Brexit.
I'm not an extremist, I wanted to maintain the status quo which by definition is the very opposite of "extremism", the extremists were the people who got us into this mess in the first place.
"So once more, tell me a single benefit of Brexit."
The brits will cause no further harm to the union. That said, the harm they caused may prove to be lethal. First in my mind is the push for expansion with countries not really union minded. But: not a single decision was made with which not all governments agreed. So we can't really blame the brits. They've outsmarted us.
I'm suffering from an earworm now: "You don't get me I'm part of the union, You don't get me I'm part of the union, Till the day I die, till the day I die."
Should have been "We'll get them we're ...".
Possibly but my question was for an effect that benefits UK citizens. Changes to the EU as a result for better or worse don't affect us directly because we are no longer members.
But we need to trade with the EU so we are still subject to some of the decisions made. Of course as members we had a lot of influence on those decisions, something we no longer enjoy so in that respect at least we lost some of the nebulous "sovereignty" Brexiters are so fond of (but seem unable to describe).
Well Martin,
if you are a girl, of suitable age and temperament you may screw me. It's a kind offer but on reflection my wife would probably not allow it. But thank you for the thought. I'm sure, in time, if you persist enough you will find someone of a suitable gender for your personal preferences who will live a happy and fullfilling life with you. But whilst you are searching, ixnay on the exitbray. It;s a very polarising issue. Good luck.
Ho hum, one hour in, 3 downvotes but not a single reply to my question: "state one thing that is better for the majority of UK citizens that's a direct result of Brexit."
I'll give you 2 things-
Restoration of sovereignty, and no longer at the mercy of the EU's 'exclusive (in)competency'.
Not having to give the EU billions every year.
Of course the downside is we've replaced EU incompetency with our own shower of shite. Now, where's my sausage roll!
Sovereignty - A total red herring, Shared sovereignty is not lost sovereignty. In that respect we are worse off because we no longer have a say in the decision making process but if we want to trade with the EU we have to obey their rules.
For incompetency, give me a Brussels bureaucrat over a Whitehall one any day of the week. Anyway we are hardly blameless, we supplied a lot of the EU bureaucrats.
Money, ho hum. We no longer get billions in regional development grants. We now have to pay for our own standards bodies rather than spreading the cost over the EU. Customs and import/export costs we previously didn't have to pay a penny for now will cost hundreds of millions. Overall the spend to replace the services and grants we used to get from the EU would if they bothered with regional development far exceed our contributions to the EU. Of course by abandoning the development grants we will be a bit better off unless you live in an area that needs development (anywhere north or west of Oxford) in which case, move while you can because there isn't going to be any money to help you.
While all bureaucracy is inherently inefficient as far as these things go the EU was better than most, certainly better than our collection of Oxbridge idiots. Don't forget most of the stories in the UK press about the lunacy of EU regulations were either complete fabrications or misrepresentations by "journalists" like Boris Johnson.
Also many of the EU institutions were modelled on long established UK institutions. I'm not going to comment on if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Neither point really represents a benefit to the majority of UK citizens, probably the opposite. So thanks for playing, nice try but no cigar.
Sovereignty - A total red herring, Shared sovereignty is not lost sovereignty. In that respect we are worse off because we no longer have a say in the decision making process but if we want to trade with the EU we have to obey their rules.
So you're not a fan of democracy then? We have complete say in the decision making process now. We elect MPs to represent our interests, not the EPPs. We can attempt to create trade agreements with any nation, not just the EU.
Money, ho hum. We no longer get billions in regional development grants
But we no longer have to pay tens of billions to the EU. We can decide what and where development grants go, not the EU.
We now have to pay for our own standards bodies rather than spreading the cost over the EU
We pay for those anyway, but can decide to develop UK standards, if that's in our interest instead of having EU standards imposed on us.
While all bureaucracy is inherently inefficient as far as these things go the EU was better than most, certainly better than our collection of Oxbridge idiots.
If you want bloated bureaucracy, look no further than Brussels. If we're unhappy with our Oxbridge idiots, we can vote them out of office. We can't do that with the EU.
Neither point really represents a benefit to the majority of UK citizens, probably the opposite. So thanks for playing, nice try but no cigar.
You lost, you can't get over it so are still whining about it. But howasabout this. Remember the Panicdemic? HMG ordered a pile of vaccines. The EU dithered, got butthurt and threatened to seize vaccines that the UK had ordered. Whether that's a real benefit or not is debateable, but the UK had the ability to act faster. Then of course there was the way Ursula von der Liar personally 'negotiated' the EU's contracts..
You really don't understand the real world at all do you?
As an island nation we rely on trade and if we want to trade with the richest trading bloc on the planet who are conveniently on our doorstep then we are bidden by the rules of that bloc, we can of course choose not to trade with them but that would be economic suicide. Once upon a time we had a say in those rules but not any more so explain how that gives us more power. We cannot enact laws contrary to EU regulations if we want to trade. So in that respect Brexit created a loss of democratic power.
Development grants will not happen, we don't have the money and Westminster does not care, do you really think given the choice between spending a billion on redeveloping somewhere in North Wales or something like cutting inheritance tax that Wales would stand a chance. Under the EU a proportion of funds was earmarked for development and regions could lobby for consideration. Now there are no funds set aside for development. In that respect we are far worse off.
The point about "standards" is they are, well, standard. Introducing different ones would be absurd. The only logical option is to adopt the standards from the leading agencies which all just happen to be in Europe, many used to be in the UK like the NPL.
What world do you live in? You cannot unseat a bureaucrat, they are not voted in and out of office. The EU ones are fixed term appointments so they do get shifted out unlike our ones who have jobs for life. So the truth is pretty much the exact opposite of what you say.
But we have to leave the best to last. You do understand that when the UK ordered up every possible vaccine at about 10x the market rate we were still under the EU rules, Brexit made no difference to that decision, we could have done exactly the same as full members of the EU. So like every other supposed benefit it is utter bullshit. The short advantage we had was squandered almost immediately as crap policy from №10 ruined everything the NHS was trying to do and we paid far more than everybody else because of stupid no penalty for failure contracts.
As an island nation we rely on trade and if we want to trade with the richest trading bloc on the planet who are conveniently on our doorstep then we are bidden by the rules of that bloc, we can of course choose not to trade with them but that would be economic suicide.
Err.. right. The EU once was the richest trading bloc on the planet, but then came the EU's exclusive incompetence on energy policy, and a dash for Energiewende. Then came Crimea, and the EU deciding to sanction one of it's largets trading partners. Or just the way originally joining the 'Common Market' hammered Commonwealth nations like Australia and New Zealand. Now, we are free to buy NZ butter, if we choose to instead of subsidising French farmers. And we can also choose agricultural policies that suit our agricultural sector, and we're not forced to follow the EU's policies that are currently causing mass protests in Germany, Poland, France etc that our state media (ie the everuseless and clueless Bbc) isn't bothering to report.
Oh, and if we want a trading bloc instead of an ever closer political onion and federal superstate, there's always the option of joining BRICS.. Now that really would make heads explode.
Development grants will not happen, we don't have the money and Westminster does not care, do you really think given the choice between spending a billion on redeveloping somewhere in North Wales or something like cutting inheritance tax that Wales would stand a chance
Wales and the other regions have their own governments and the ability to invest as they see fit. If they invest in white elephants, that's their problem and their MPs can be voted out. You don't seem to understand economics, so think giving the EU say, £40bn a year and them giving us back £10bn is a great deal.
The point about "standards" is they are, well, standard. Introducing different ones would be absurd. The only logical option is to adopt the standards from the leading agencies which all just happen to be in Europe, many used to be in the UK like the NPL.
Sure. Those world-class standards like low power vaccuum cleaners, or 1kW kettles. Or my favorite-
https://health.ec.europa.eu/other-pages/basic-page/salt-campaign_en
First they come for our hoovers, then our kettles, but they WILL NOT TAKE OUR MARMITE! But there's also a big, wide world outside of the Federal Superstate to trade with. Those define global standards, not just ones companies lobby for in Brussels..
What world do you live in? You cannot unseat a bureaucrat, they are not voted in and out of office. The EU ones are fixed term appointments so they do get shifted out unlike our ones who have jobs for life. So the truth is pretty much the exact opposite of what you say.
The real one. Not the Remnants anti-Brexit / pro-EU bubble. I talked about holding MPs to account, which we can do. You, of course shifted the goalposts to 'bureaucrats'. They also have apparent jobs for life inside the EU, whether that's a slightly used Kinnock or a better paid one like Ursula von der Liar. How would the UK remove her? The EPP selected her, and keeps her in the style to which she has become accustomed.. But there's no EPP represenation in the UK. Plus UK bureaucrats can be fired, or shifted out, if their services are no longer required, ie downsizing/merging/closing government departments that are kinda useless. Hasn't happened with our Climate Change Committee (or quango) yet, but it could.
You do understand that when the UK ordered up every possible vaccine at about 10x the market rate we were still under the EU rules, Brexit made no difference to that decision, we could have done exactly the same as full members of the EU
I understand that per the Withdrawl Agreement, we completed that on 1st January 2021. von der Liar's EU megadeal happened in April 2021 and resulted in this-
von der Leyen took a personal role in negotiating the largest vaccine deal for the EU. If fully exercised, the deal is estimated to be worth around €35 billion and would cover the purchase of 900 million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, with an additional 900 million doses available for purchase. Millions of COVID vaccines are currently unused and awaiting disposal in warehouses throughout the EU. Negotiators are trying to persuade Pfizer to make a compromise in order to halt or cancel some of those deliveries, with little success
But it doesn't change the fact that the UK, actiing independently got contracts and vaccines well before the EU deal happened. Hence them getting butthurt and threatening to seize doses destined for the UK. With 'friends' like that, who needs enemies?
Honestly @Jellied Eel, if I could applaud you and give you a sh*t ton of upvotes, I would.
I just don't understand why Remoaners still try to bang what is a thoroughly worn out drum. This is 6 year old news. It happened, move on. I just don't understand why folks spend their life looking back and moaning about it. The future is in front of us. Is everything perfect, not a chance. Did any of the lies spread by both camps come true? Nope. Were the lies even relevant? Who knows.
The vote can't be reversed and I truly hope no future Government approaches the EU to "re-join". Like that will work out well. Mind you, under a near future Captain U-turn coming to power, all bets are off, based on the prevailing wind direction and that terrifying prospect just keeps getting more alarming.
It's easy without a crystal ball (as already mentioned) to make guesses as to whether we are worse or better off, the "give me the benefits" from either side. The simple fact is no-one can actually define that, so it is all just beer talking supposition. So what to do? How about recognising it happened (whatever your viewpoint) and working with the cr@p we have, rather than stirring the pot with all these "what ifs".
</rant>
Dream on.
Hardcore brexiters are just a bunch of rabid and fearful under-educated folks sh**ing their pants every time they come across a foreigner. Unfortunately, they managed to leverage the congenital frustration of enough British voters to tip the balance their way and take the Island on the wrong path. Every serious economist taking a look at the numbers today, can see that Europe is coming out of the covid crisis and that Britain is still stagnating. Whoever claims the opposite is just downright lying or doesn't know what they're talking about.
It won't be more than 10 years before these disgruntled British voters learn their lesson the hard way and the UK reapplies to EU membership. Except that, this time around, there won't be any Thatcher-like rebate and full membership will require full budget contribution. In the meantime immigration will still be there and stronger than ever. Even with the UK outside of Europe. QED.
Maybe quite a few brexiters need to realize that if "foreigners take their job", it's because they're just f*g lazy and not worth their end of month paycheck. Irrespective of whether the UK lies within or without the EU.
I never noticed that the Brexit vote was about "foreigners taking our jobs". It looked to me to be about our political destiny whether under the totalitarian control of unelected EU politicians, or back with the UK. That was good or bad depending upon your viewpoint. You can trace all this back to Mr B Liar putting the UK in the EU in the first place, without any public input.
I was marginally leaning towards the leave vote right up to going to the polling booth, but then I voted remain, simply because whilst I agreed with the overall principle, I just couldn't visualise how it would work. It looked too big a mountain to climb and the full consequences were unknown. The EU made an example out of us to deter anyone else thinking of getting out and I think many were duped in to believing it would be a friendly separation. It could easily have been, but the EU were p1ssed at losing all that money (we were a net contributor) and I don't need to remind anyone of the incompetence our politicians, government and the lords made of it all.
It was never about "foreigners taking our jobs". Don't lie.
It was *partially* about importing millions of unskilled workers and using them to drive down wages.
That's why our productivity is so low ( why make capex investments in more efficient machinery when you can hire a Pole for minimum wage? ).
One has to admire how you manage to cram all you usual boogeymen in each rant/post. Only the sequence and the words in-between vary. This post is a textbook example. They're all there: sanctions against Russia, renewable energy, the Germans, the vaccines, the EU, the BBC, the "superstate", and of course... climate change.
You remind me of Trichogramma who have less than 10,000 neurons but compensate this scarcity by having them hyper-connected. "So it's easy to understand, people: everything is connected."
The problem is, Trichogramma's design is only good for a few days lifespan. Losing a few neurons per day is more penalizing for them. Thankfully, with the NHS out of the grip of Europe, dementia test delays are a bit below one year in the UK.
One has to admire how you manage to cram all you usual boogeymen in each rant/post. Only the sequence and the words in-between vary. This post is a textbook example. They're all there: sanctions against Russia, renewable energy, the Germans, the vaccines, the EU, the BBC, the "superstate", and of course... climate change.
Seems reasonable to me, but then I'm more intelligent than an amoeba. Those would still probably defeat you in any debate. Oh, and I haven't blamed the education system, but that churns out thousands of people like you every year.
But things are sometimes connected. Much of the rot within the EU comes from the EPP. They have a strangehold over the EU. One of their key policies is 'renewables', and given their powerbase, Germany was the first to be experimented on. So Germany 'invested' billions on energiewiende-
In 2019, Germany's Federal Court of Auditors determined the program had cost €160 billion over the last 5 years and criticized the expenses for being "in extreme disproportion to the results." Despite widespread initial support, the program is perceived as "expensive, chaotic, and unfair", and a "massive failure" as of 2019.
Russian fossil gas was perceived as a "safe, cheap, and temporary" fuel to replace nuclear power in the initial phase of Energiewende, as part of the German policy of integrating Russia with the European Union through mutually beneficial trade relations. German dependency on Russian gas imports was presented as "mutual dependency.
And of course it's only got worse since. 'Renewables' increased dependency on gas, neo-luddites shutting down nuclear power for fear of tsunamis lead to the need to build new coal power stations. Energy costs have rocketed, and German industry is collapsing. Then to add insult to injury, the EU decided to sanction Russian oil & gas, despite the dependency and cost of alternative suppliers. Oh, and of course someone blew up Nord Stream in Europes largest act of economic sabotage, and nobody knows whodunnit. So Germany's in the process of collapsing, and it just happened to once have been the EU's cash machine. Oops.
Oh, and of course much of this insanity has been sold as 'fighting climate change'. The idea of improved relations and trade between Russia and the EU made sense. But then the EU was already a larger economic block than, I dunno, the US. With Russia, it would only have grown. Of course thanks to the regime change in Ukraine, that ship has long sailed and the EU is slowly imploding, as have most empires throughout history.
Vaccines were just an example of how a sovereign UK was able to make a decision for itself, and act faster than the bloated EUrocracy. The Bbc has always hated Brexit, and loves climate change and acting as a 'renewables' lobbyist. It's reach and influence probably helps explain why so many people like yourself are deluded. Propaganda does actually work. And of course the superstate is still a thing. Just ask Hungary or Poland what happens when they defy their masters in Brussels. Oh, and during Brexit, there were claims that an EU army was just a conspiracy theory, yet the EU is trying to create one.
It is a lie to pretend that money was promised to the NHS. It was a strong suggestion that if we didn't send the EU money, we could spend it elsewhere - the NHS perhaps.
The NHS got that money by the way. T.May boosted the NHS funding by over £350m/week. That's partly why NHS spending is higher in real terms than it has ever been.
The sunlit uplands? Our politicians being directly accountable for how badly we are governed *is* the sunlit uplands. So is the CPTPP. So is not being part of the EU "regulatory superpower".
Where's the catastrophe that you pretended was going to happen?
The problem was all Remain had was to retain the status quo, the advantage of staying in was we wouldn't get all the disadvantages that leaving would present but the Leave side were adamant that all would be lovely and exaggerated everything Remain said as "Project Fear".
The vast majority of the press were complicit too in that they parroted the Leave lies and misinformation with zero fact checking on top of their 40 years of casually denigrating the EU with "inaccurate"‡ stories that Boris Johnson and his ilk were writing.
‡ For "inaccurate" read "totally made up" or "seriously misrepresented"
Surely you know that is untrue. And surely you know that I know that that is untrue, so why post that lie?
All broadcast media was firmly against brexit to the point of repeating even the obvious lies by Project Fear ( what happened to WW3 that you promised us if we dared vote against your little political club? )
Cor, I still don't understand what world you live in because it's not the one everybody else does.
The Mirror, Guardian and FT were reasonably honest, but the Sun, Mail, Telegraph, and pretty much every other paper, especially the Red-Tops were vehemently in favour. But I suspect in your book if a paper printed a mild criticism of some point of Brexit that meant they were completely against it even if everything else they said was to promote it. From what I've seen of your posts, you treat anything other than 100% obedience to the gospel of Brexit as an evil heresy. But you are still unable to describe the benefits instead coming up with the empty phrases employed by the Leave campaign like all the sovereignty nonsense, we have no more or less sovereignty in or out of the EU - once again sovereignty shared is not sovereignty lost but you actually need to understand now the EU is structured to appreciate that, something you'll never do as you seem to prefer the comfortable lies that reinforce your prejudice.
The Mail I suppose is an extreme example but in a survey of stories in it on the EU in the years before Brexit was announced revealed that 95% of their stories about the EU were untrue, ranging from slight exaggerations to complete fabrications.
Both OED and Google NGram have marked 21st of March 2024 as the day when The Register contributed the spelling "consipracy" to the English language. Appears nearly 50 times. And counting. With zero appearance of its now obsolete spelling of "conspiracy".
Am I missing out...? The last time I visited the UK and tried a Gregg's after all the invariable hype in the British Newspapers, I must say I was underwhelmed. Slop in some "pastry" and certainly nothing to get me wanting to run back to.
And I do like good sausage rolls and Cornish Pasties too. Even chip shop pies from the 1980s have fond memories when I lived in England.
But Gregg's...
Where you went wrong was assuming that Britons care about the actual quality or flavour of their food. As with so many things on this island, we accept - and celebrate - produce that would barely pass as acceptable for most nations. As a bakery, Greggs - and most high street independents - wouldn't be fit to fill the bins of their continental equivalent. And yet people here fetishise its wares.
I was referring to bakeries - it's a few years since I was in Germany, but I'd assume sausages mostly come from butchers.
There is nothing short of self-described "artisanal" bakers in the city I live that can hold a candle to a typical European high street staple. Crappy Victoria sponges (slathered in cheap icing and layered with "creme"), low quality bread and the aforementioned beige pastires are celebrated almost as gourmet by people who - literally - don't seem to know better.
I've travelled extensively across the US and Europ and it's not me fetishising foreign - most US food is similar slop, majoring on quantity over quality. Our neigbours in southern Europe still have a bit of dignity about what they put in their mouths, though they seem to be following us down the greasy slope, albeit at slower rate.
Sponge cake, correctly described, bravo.
it sucks the saliva out of your mouth and makes you feel like you're eating an actual bathroom sponge. Horrible stuff. I did discover at an early age that it will dissolve in tea. You eat sponge cake, then drink tea, that gets rid of it. Repeat until gone. Then say thank you to the ancient aunt you never knew you had
Sausages are one of the few things we still manage to get right although you'll have to go to a proper butcher because the supermarkets have lost it and they're getting rare.
Most of the food here is shit though compared to almost anything (outside the places the English tourists frequent) on the continent, especially if you head out east. I can even stomach the railway food over there.
That's not saying bad food isn't available on the continent, just that you don't even have to try over here if you want to find it.
As a nation we get breakfast right. And chips. That's about it.
And beer.
We only do peasant food really well because our self-appointed "betters" have always wished they were French.
British sausages are underrated, Lincolnshire sausages are miles better than any plain pale German offering. Obviously British beer doesn't need me or anybody else to stand up for it.
( PS: The French call us Rosbif's for a reason - I assume it's because they are jealous of a people that every Sunday eat gravy with a knife and fork )
British sausages are underrated, Lincolnshire sausages are miles better than any plain pale German offering.
I'm a fan of diversity. Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy etc all make a wide range of sausages*. Some good, some bad, some just confusing as to whether you're meant to boil, grill, try and remove casings, or just use to apply BFT to a Frenchie. On which point, I can't quite remember if France makes any decent sausages, but they probably do. But to make authentic British delicacies like bangers & mash, or toad in the hole, one needs proper bangers. Downside is the usual supermarket one, ie British sausages are now mostly Lincolnshire, Cumberland or pork-ish. And thanks to supermarkets, it's increasingly hard to find a proper butcher who'll make proper bangers.
Luckily there are still solutions, like making our own. Get casings, get a mincer with a sausage stuffing option and have at it. It's not that hard and the results are generally a lot better than supermarket junk. Also good for making your own mince, burgers etc.
*Was chatting with a Texan friend last night who keeps goats. She'd just made a batch of goat sausages, and can't remember if I've ever tried those.
I assume it's because they are jealous of a people that every Sunday eat gravy with a knife and fork
I think it's mostly Yorkshire Pudding envy, along with just being French.
Most of the food here is shit though compared to almost anything
You've obviously not been eating anywhere where they actually cook the food themselves rather than relying on a franchise system of "here's your grey, soggy and overprocessed food"..
The UK in general has some *really, really* good small food providers, gastro pubs and restaurants. Sure, we have nonsense like Greggs et. al but so does every country I've visited. The labels might be different but the methods (cheap food, indifferently cooked) are the same.
*Proper* UK cuisine isn't bland pap like foreigners imagine (generally on the basis of howe things were post-WW2 when food had to be nourishing and cheap and little attention was paid to flavour). As someone pointed out on a wine course recently (specifically about wine but the same is true about food) - the UK has the widest availability of foods and wines round the world. In France, you will find French food [1] and wine. No curries (or at least, very rare), no British [2] cuisine, no Scandanavian cuisine etc etc. Likewise in Germany (curries there are mostly inedible - what a German curry-house considers hot a baby in the UK could eat without even a twinge).
So take your "food here is crap" and shove it where the sun don't shine. The food *you* eat is crap because you don't bother to look for stuff that isn't.
[1] I've had good French food in France and I've also had terrible French food in France.
[2] Yes, there is a distinctive, emerging British cuisine. It's not all roast beef and Yorkshire puds (not that there's anything wrong with those) any more and only idiots think there isn't. Idiots and people just looking to bash the UK for spurious reasons. You want to bash the UK, fine - do it for something *we* are guilty of - like electing a self-serving wannabe facist Government time and time again. Or selling off national resources to the lowest bidder just so that our political and wealthy classes can get richer.
"British food is crap" is further manifestation of the Orwell quote 'almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save The King than stealing from a poor box.
It's been fashionable for a very long time for that sort to hate their country and everything about it and wish that they were French.
It marks the speaker out as somebody without an original thought in their head but still considers themselves better than you or I.
The tongue-in-cheek hysteria is a symptom of an inexplicable national fetishization of Greggs that has, to this writer's mind, appeared from nowhere. There is nothing particularly grabbing about the bakery's food
Before Private Equity near-killed it, the West Cornwall Pasty Co had much better pasties... They were even acceptable to this Cornishman's palate.
"the West Cornwall Pasty Co had much better pasties..."
They did, but they were much more expensive. Their breakfast butties weren't bad either!
As regards Greggs, the main selling points are the ubiquity of their shops and low prices. They wouldn't be my first choice of chain bakery shops, but their products are tolerable if nothing better is available, especially given the prices.
McDonalds on the other hand - not been in one of them for years!
But never Ginsters!
But sadly, Ginsters won the pasty wars and got their product PDO and I think TSG status, along with an effective monopoly over mass-produced 'Cornish Pastys'. Can't remember, but I think that also means a Cornish pasty maker can't make Cornish pastys if they use a top fold. So a food product that could originally be carried down t'mines transformed into something that barely holds together from cold shelf to checkout. Luckily superior pasties are still available.
Vaguely adjacent to being on topic, but I'll tell you something that is better than I thought it would be:
Rustler burgers ( and similar chicken subs, etc )
They aren't spectacular but they are better than you'd think, especially if you follow the "advanced" instructions and toast the bread separately as it suggests. For something that cooks in a couple of minutes in they are surprisingly good.
The worst part about them is they have about 6 million calories in a single burger.
One of my kids, who had real food preparation qualifications, ended up working at a Greggs as a sandwich maker after the restaurant he was working at shutdown because the owner wanted to retire.
He wasn't happy at Greggs. Exacting instructions about how the sandwiches should be made, and the work rate meant that he came home every day in a really bad mood (he could either do it right, or he could do it fast, achieving both was very demanding).
He gave the job up when he was offered an apprenticeship in railway engine maintenance, and he's now happy bashing, cutting and heating metal while fixing steam engines! What a switch of profession!
Unlike others, they have a decent relationship with their worker's Union, which should be applauded.
https://www.retail-week.com/people/greggs-workers-accept-pay-deal-for-biggest-increase-in-12-years/7045255.article
"Over the past two years, the union has negotiated wage increases of over 15% with Greggs, meaning every staff member has seen a rise in basic pay."
When I was a kid, 50 or so years ago, and Greggs Of Gosforth was a small but becoming ubiquitous bakery chain in the Tyneside area, spreading as far afield as Sunderland on Wearside, they were pretty good. In more recent years, starting 20+ years ago, they've been expanding, initially by buying up other local chains further afield, often retaining the local names but branding in Greggs colours and retaining the local "specialities" (still do to some extent, stotties in the NE, barm cakes in the NW etc). The quality eventually started to go downhill, but then they decided being a bakery wasn't enough and they had to be a "destination" for snacks. What they sell isn't bad per se, but it's a smaller, yet at the same time wider range of goods aimed at the quick sell populist market. I don't think they even sell loaves of bread any more. They used to have a range of loaves from cheap and cheerful everyday to some really quite nice stuff. Their current range of sandwiches are the usual triangular offerings with "exotic" fillings and the currently popular, unfullfilling "wraps". Gone are the days of the "half stottie" with the filling spilling out. You can't even get the traditional NE ham and peas pudding half stottie there these days unless you beat the lunchtime rush, something they used to be famous for :-)
(1) get rid of all that encryption kerfuffle used for payments
(2) replace with good old EBCDIC (mmmmmm....maybe UTF-8.....maybe ASCII) 80-column stuff
Less code, smaller network traffic, simpler hardware (you know 8086 and 16 bit assembler).........
No huge costs for "the cloud".......less money for Jeff Bezos.......
Simples!!!!
Oh....and the SW1 contingent behind the Online Safety Act 2024 would just LOVE THIS SUGGESTION TO DEATH!!!!!
If a POS system fails, the retailer may not be able to process transactions at all, regardless of the method of payment.
Once you've used up your in-hand cash reserves, how do you replenish them? If you withdraw cash from a cash machine or over the counter, there's YOUR direct reliance on computer systems. If you get paid cash in hand, redirect this question to the person paying you, and so on and so on until, somewhere in that daisychain of money exchanges that end up with a crisp new tenner in your pocket, you WILL find an indirect reliance on a computer system for your ability to obtain that cash.
So unless you're the Royal Mint and are printing your own money, don't think that using cash in preference to electronic forms of payment removes your reliance on computer systems entirely, it merely reduces your personal exposure to the risk of a failure somewhere.
The general point is true but with cash the counter is no longer tightly bound to the computer so the system is tolerant of quite long outages unless..."If a POS system fails, the retailer may not be able to process transactions at all, regardless of the method of payment."
There you introduce a tight binding and if the PoS depends on a PoS at head office (or The Cloud) then when (not if) that goes out so does the entire business. If individual tills at the counter only need intermittent connection to head office, say to report the day's takings, then the rest of the business continues. In fact, if there's more than one till available even that branch's business continues. At the very worst tills depending on a single branch server only result in loss of the branch in the event of a server failure.
Tight integration may not be necessary for day-to-day business but it is for business-wide failure. Designing a system that way for a business with a national or international chain of branches is an abominable mistake.
These overly-tight and fragile systems were developed and pitched to executives as giving them "Instant information at your [their] fingertips!" Those executives bought the premise, and the systems, without carefully considering (or without considering at all) their disadvantages.
shhh... no one tell them about all the things that depend on electricity (IT, lighting, heating, refrigeration, locks....) and that single point of failure that it is, or they'll be demanding that every light has its own battery backup and every shop on the high street has its own backup generator and two independent supplies all the way from different power stations
Every (necessary) light does have its own battery backup. It's called emergency lighting and it's a statuatory requirement in non-domestic buildings under BS 5266-1.
Heating and refrigeration is sealed so it can deal with failures. Locks failsafe to mechanical operation (unless you are a fool and breaking fire code also).
The real single point of failure is the folks in charge of property maintenance/compliance with these codes. As someone that's worked in a lot of those businesses.... they are not as on top of it as you would hope.
I live in a small tourist seaside town in Somerset, UK. Some years back (quite a few, actually) there was a total shut down of data and voice services across the whole town on a Saturday afternoon in the summer, when the town was most busy.
Complete breakdown in retail. Shops and food outlets couldn't take cards, no cash machines were working, internet was dead, and not even the POS systems that used dial-up services were working!
Most shops continued to take cash, but if they didn't have a stand-alone till, they resorted to writing down the sales on paper. There was also a very rapid shortage of change.
Fortunately I had cash in my wallet (something I always try to do), and did not need to buy very much anyway, so wandered around town observing the mayhem. The strangest thing I saw was when some shops started digging out their old mechanical card swipe and sign machines. I did wonder at the time whether the banks were still able to process such transactions, but as I said, it was a while ago.
Although it shouldn't happen nowadays, as some outlets use mobile networks, and we're no longer totally reliant on one provider for other data services, if there was a more fundamental breakdown, it could happen again, and probably be even more disruptive.
We are blindly walking into a potential major disaster.
Originally, the 'tokens' as you put it had value in their own right, as either gold, silver or other precious metals or stones.
Because these had value in their own right, there was nothing, short of physically stealing them, that other people or circumstances could do to stop them being used for their purpose
If you read up on it, gold coins were often 'clipped' by unscrupulous traders, and the clippings then melted down to make new tokens, while claiming that the original still had the same value.
The concept of representative tokens of no real value, backed up by a stash of a valuable commodity kept by a Royal house or other, sometimes more trustworthy, organisation (like a bank) came much, much later, so people were already used to trading tokens for goods.
The choice of token is important however, as the Golgafrinchans from the 'B' ark found when they adopted leaves as money, leading to a program to increase scarcity to improve their value by burning down the forrests! (Thanks for everything Douglas, RIP)
"The concept of representative tokens of no real value, backed up by a stash of a valuable commodity kept by a Royal house or other, sometimes more trustworthy, organisation (like a bank) came much, much later, so people were already used to trading tokens for goods."
And then fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking came along - meaning that currencies are backed by nothing more than confidence in the economy of the country which issues them (or group of countries in the case of the Euro).
And even more recently came crypto, which is based on nothing at all other than confidence that it will maintain or increase in value (Crypto formally issued by a country would be closer to a standard fiat currency, but that doesn't apply to Bitcoin and the like).
"Originally, the 'tokens' as you put it had value in their own right, as either gold, silver or other precious metals or stones.
Because these had value in their own right,"
Yes. And no :-)
At some stage, someone had to decide that the "token" was valuable in some way and then convince others that it would be valuable to them too. "Precious" metals or stones are only precious if others agree with you or they have an intrinsic and practical use. A diamond or a piece of soft, malleable gold isn't much use to a farmer 5,000 years ago if he can't find someone else with time on their hands to make themselves look pretty and therefore might like that diamond or gold in exhange for something useful to the farmer, but a lump of iron, tin, copper etc might be useful to make stuff with, but not in the small amounts used as coins. It's possible that accountants might be the second oldest profession and predate monetary tokens since there's evidence of "tally sticks" going back 30,000+ years, which could explain a LOT about bean counters :-) (It might even be that the ladies of the oldest profession invented the tally stick by marking up the customers bills on the bed post and so moved into accountancy :-))
Re the imprint machines.
Maybe ten to twelve years ago (at most) a new Boots opticians opened up in my town, about 18 months later a friend went in and got a new prescription and glasses, apparently the card system was down and they don't take cash, but the older assistant went rummaging through the storeroom and came out with a what was by all accounts a brand new imprint machine in it's wrapper and showed the young assistant who'd never seen one in use (I'm sure doctors, police and shop assistants get younger every year) how to process a payment with the paper system. My friend was most amused by the youngster's reaction to something that he had seen introduced and used for decades.
So by the sounds of it the system was still usable as a backup and being supplied to at least some stores as recently as something like 2010-2012.
Of course now that more and more cards don't have the embossed numbers etc on them this is no longer an option, even if the banks/card processors did still accept them.
I always try to keep some physical cash in my wallet, if just because at times i've been the only one in a taxi with cash when the driver's card reader wasn't working or whatever, and I've seen the chaos that happens in a large Tesco when the internet line they used for payment processing was down (pretty much every isle had abandoned trolleys, despite there being 3 cash machines just outside the doors that were still functioning and obviously on their own connection).
A reasonable stash of cash means you are immune to payment issues when shopping (so long as establishment takes cash).
Being a wage slave, I do majority of shopping at the weekend, visiting a few shops to give an overall "big shop".
I always take more than enough cash to cover the shopping costs, & a few times that has been very useful due to various payment issues over the years and paying cash has enabled me to buy stuff (much to the irritation of some other frustrated shoppers).
Always keep a decent "float" of cash at home, taking some when I shop, (cash "float" for same reason, only visit ATM at weekends, and sometimes ATM is broken / out of cash, so need to have a cash reserve to cover that scenario of no cash available at the weekend).
So, I always enjoy reading about payment system screwups, as it pisses off those "cashless society" people who look at me with scorn / contempt when I pay cash instead of using card, app, smart watch etc.
Plus cash has other benefits - e.g. when we go out for a meal, cash tip to waiting staff all goes to them to be divvied up between them, a tip by card is reliant on the manager / owner to fairly distribute the cash (a place my daughter briefly worked at was terrible, owner kept all tips and used it for staff end of year party - a party which cost far, far less than all the card tips that came in over a month, never mind a year.)
it merely reduces your personal exposure to the risk of a failure somewhere.
This mitigation is what we end-users are aiming for. (As for the Royal Mint, in older times there were some chancers who had operated their own, "unofficial" mints, producing coins with significantly-less intrinsic value than stated on the coins.)
As we found out here when Ulster Bank went AWOL for a few weeks after a software upgrade.
Sainsburys got credit card payments back on line fairly quickly, but Smart Shop was offline for quite a while.
What sort of fool updates supermarket software on a Friday night?
“Once you've used up your in-hand cash reserves, how do you replenish them? ”
The same way we have for as long as people have been running shops. You start with a float suitable for the days trade.
30 ish years ago when I pumped petrol (gas) as a student the day started with a float of £50 in change. That was enough to get you through a days takings. At the end of the day you would count out another float from your cash pile for the next days trade.
Young ‘uns of today, trying to come up with problems that were solved milenia ago!
Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate this card (it read). I ate my fast food, took the punched card I was given, and gave it to the lass at the payment register. She scanned it through her reader. "Minus £23, 21p!" she exclaimed.
"It appears you owe me a refund," I replied. Somewhat dazed, she handed me the money and I left the shop. (Many punch-card-based systems used an overpunch to indicate a negative number, versus an explicit leading "-". No security in that.)
Mine's the one with the manual cardpunch in its pocket (https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?max_w=800&id=NMAH-DOR2012-2424).
The first bank card I had could only be used to get cash out of a machine at the bank after banking hours. It was approximately the same shape as a modern card, but the information was encoded on it with holes.
It appeared that what was encoded was the PIN number that you had to use to, and after dispensing a fixed amount of money (IIRC it was £10), the card was retained by the machine and posted back to you a few days later, as long as you were still in the black. Was useful on a Saturday night when an extra tenner made a difference between paying your way, or sponging off your mates (at the time, I could buy a pint at the college bar for 35p!)
Because I was not a typical student and remained in the black for the entire time I was at Uni. (by having summer jobs and at one time a term time job with the Uni. itself), the bank trusted me with two of these cards!
I wish I still had one (and knew the PIN) because I'd like to see whether I could work out exactly was encoded in the holes.
To be fair, I remember a 1980s video game called Paperboy, simulating a step before supermarket assistant on many people's career path.
After a period as a delinquent brawler (Streets of Rage) I held the post of town planner (Sim City) before rising to the post of Emperor of the world (Civilization), which is about as high as I can rise without going full Molyneux.
Considering an Oracle Payment system used at a business I used to work for, fell over completely if you upgraded Java beyond it's mandated horrendously out of date version, this doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It was also hosted on the shittiest machine that passed for a server. It's not important until it goes down, and it was a single point of failure too, just to add insult.
2,450 stores.
An iZettle costs £149 and no ongoing fees (just a handling percentage of 1.75%). Not counting that you could probably get a bulk discount or better deal elsewhere.
For £365,050, not one of your stores would have to close or turn away customers ever again. And you could take 98.25% of their money (not counting the fact that you are probably taking that hit on card payments anyway AND you could maybe negotiate a better deal).
Greggs made £188m in 2023. That's £515,068 profit every day.
Are you telling me that it's not worth spending ONE DAY'S PROFIT (not even income, just profit) on equipping all your stores with a secondary, backup, independent card payment system that you only dig out when absolutely necessary, that will last at least 10 years, rather than have to shut up shops for the entire day and turn away customers?
I simply do not understand why companies of any size keep falling for this, when if I had only ONE shop, I'd have a backup card device under the counter.
Its just the C-level game of "pass the parcel". Decision too difficult and expensive? Delay it three years (normal amount until bonus payable and/or shares vest). Staff require training (costs money) ... delay three years. Hardware requires upgrade? Maintenance? Redundancy? Delay three years. No comprehensive security policy and department ... delay three years.
Delay three years and let your successor deal with this. Meanwhile, all the money costing decisions all contribute to the C-Level bonus. Or indecision or non-decision, as the case may be.
They're all banking on the bomb not going off on their watch. While they prepare to jump on the next pony.
A friend setup an independent shop. They used a cloud service for their PoS system. (It was just a web app) When their broadband went down, the shop had to shut. If the system went offline out of office hours, they had to shut the shop. (Saturdays are a very busy trading days in towns)
Eventually they invested in a stand-alone card reader with a GSM SIM.
Eventually they invested in a stand-alone card reader with a GSM SIM.
Often there's no need to do that. There is/was a UK router vendor who specialised in retail (solutions!) and made an xDSL router with built in GSM. Can't remember the name, but it was about a third of the price of a Cisco. Helps solve the connectivity problem, but not when PoS is tightly integrated. But there were also large retailers that ran their systems using synchronous replication because they knew it was rather business-critical to keep services running. Even simple stuff like manual processes resulted in pain, like reconciling off-line transactions, and having to do a manual stock check because the automatic stock checks & re-ordering was down for X hours, or days.
But then of course along came cloudybollocks and 'we can save money!', except when the skies clear, the cloud vanishes and you can't trade..
"I simply do not understand why companies of any size keep falling for this, when if I had only ONE shop, I'd have a backup card device under the counter."
I'm thinking that the till does more than the money. Perhaps stock control and logistics depend on knowing what has been sold that day? But then there could be emergency forms to print out and biros for staff to tick the boxes, so I imagine it is all down to how much you budget for a 1 day in a thousand occurrence.
Icon: the green grocer I got sent to as a boy had a wooden till with a brass handle. The shopkeeper added up the costs with a pencil on a corner of a brown paper bag. The veggies came from a market garden a few miles away.
"I'm thinking that the till does more than the money. Perhaps stock control and logistics depend on knowing what has been sold that day?"
It's quite likely that that is true. it's not exactly a new idea. In fact it was the entire reason for development of the first ever commercial computer used for business, LEO, to support the Lyons Corner Houses empire :-)
Ok, they phoned the data in verbally at the end of the day, so could still trade, so long as the next days orders could be processed. I have no doubt they had a manual back up system in place though, such as simply repeating the previous days orders if the system went TITSUP (Total Inability To Supply cUPcakes)
The keep falling because shareholders are only interested in the next dividend / share price and everyone has lost the ability to think beyond a quarter's results. Even developing and maintaining a separate process costs and it's not valued until things go tits up.
The best backup for a retailer and the public is retaining the ability to work with cash and what happened to those old manual card readers where you slide something across with carbon paper - showing my age! Always keep some cash because as Werner Vogels says; "things fail all the time".
PayPal is not an organization I'd trust, given their arbitrary actions toward individuals' and small business' accounts with them. Further, they are not considered a bank, and escape the rules and regulations which govern banks.
When I worked for a computer builder/retailer in the 1980s, we had a simple system. Cash? No problem. Credit card? We checked the card # against a hard-copy list of stolen cards; if it wasn't on the list, we called the credit-card company and spoke the details to their clerk over the telephone. At the end of the day the General Manager fired up Pacioli 2000, our DOS-based accounting software, balanced the books, took money from the till, zipped it into a rubber envelope, filled out a paper bank form, drove to the bank, and put it into the "Night Drop" box.
If the power went out, our "backup power" was a 120 VAC inverter running off his car, which was parked in front of the store, near the front door. This inverter had enough output to power our IBM XT running the accounting software. We had large front windows which brought in enough light for customers and the clerk to see.
It wasn't perfect, though. The computer repairs room in the building had no windows, and no backup power. The back "room" was a cavernous warehouse, for which opening the large rear doors admitted more than enough light to see by. So, we could physically build new computers (which happened in the warehouse area), but we couldn't test them or install software on them until electrical power was restored.
"Further, they are not considered a bank, and escape the rules and regulations which govern banks."
In the UK, and the wider EU, Paypal is literally regulated like a bank - they just don't offer most banking products. In the US, it's very different.
Cash - "balanced the books, took money from the till, zipped it into a rubber envelope, filled out a paper bank form, drove to the bank, and put it into the "Night Drop" box." - all of which has an associated and insurable risk and requires hiring a single trustworthy person to do or oversee all the above rigorously and accountably at great effort and expense - and which can also be a chargeable cost in modern business banking.
Additionally, the credit card fees are almost perfectly pitched to match the exact same incurred costs of doing so, because credit card companies aren't dumb, and otherwise no business would accept credit cards.
Cash is no longer a backup - and during COVID you were twice as likely to be refused to allow payment in cash than credit card. Not least because of the extra handling, but also because it was difficult to get to banks because they were also closing up through understaffing - and that's a trend that's been occurring for decades and still continues long after COVID isn't a business issue any more.
Cash is not a panacea to anything nowadays. In fact it's inviable to operate a cash-only business in many major cities for a lot of retail types. It is not, however, such an issue to operate a card-only business. Hell, you can't even park your car without a card nowadays, and because it costs nothing to obtain one and one is given free with any bank account, basically everyone has a card. Even my young teenager does, because it just doesn't make sense to get her used to handling cash without also teaching her how to manage a card in the modern age. By the time she's in the workplace, and certainly by the time she is middle-aged, cash is likely to be dying further or actually dead.
I've been corrected about this by a friend whose grammar is much better than mine. He told me that a company (such as Greggs plc) is singular, which made sense once he had explained it.
I generally think of a company as the people who it employs, which is why I often catch myself using the plural, even knowing that my friend would disapprove.
Taking "company" as a collective noun (the company is the collection of those who have investments in it) we can turn to Fowler* for advice. The advice there is that consistency is essential but either usage is acceptable. So you and your friend can both be right.
Fowler falls foul of Muphry's law in giving an example of incorrect usage:
"The government is pressing ahead with their policy or privatization"
Note the "or".
* Yes, I have a copy tucked away in the "Misc user guides" folder on my desktop. Why do you ask?
I can tell you've not ventured out to a High Street for many a year. Bank Branches! How quaint.
I've no idea where my nearest branch is any more, 5 years ago 5 banks had branches in the town where I work, now there is one building society with an ATM and the post office will process payments and also has an ATM. And that is the banking provision for the area.
Greggs is fine. It's nothing special, but not terrible. And sometimes I really do fancy a cheap sausage roll - and a good quality one doesn't taste right. I think it's the mixture of the bland sausagemeat, the hot fat and the flaky pastry.
When I lived in Belgium there were cheap lunch places of a similar quality - and then there were some bakeries that were absolutely amazing. Belgium has excellent food - and I could go to some great bakeries and patisseries. Not to mention the chocolatiers. Yum! Did I mention all the lovely beer and chocolate?
On the other hand the supermarkets were a lot less good than British ones. With much less variation. You couldn't get nice yoghurt or decent fruit juice at all, and even foreign stuff like peanut butter was hard to get and expensive, let alone the makings of a decent curry or chinese food. Much of which I can pick up in the main supermarkets here. But they had good bread and own brand chocolates to die for. Even the cheese selection in the supermarkets was worse than the UK - although you could go to a nice fromagerie and fill your boots.
I think the author is both wrong and right:
an inexplicable national fetishization of Greggs that has, to this writer's mind, appeared from nowhere. There is nothing particularly grabbing about the bakery's food, though it is certainly in line with Britain's extremely bland palette.
It wasn't a thing until a few years ago. But I think people partly only continue it to annoy the kind of peole who get all smug and superior and bang on about how poor the food is there.
And Britain's extremely bland palette has been widening massively since the 1970s - and food here is vastly more diverse than it's ever been. With loads of artisan options easily available, as well as pretty good variety in the supermarkets - but there's still plenty of cheap bland crap out there. As there is in every country. The food culture in Britain has changed beyond all recognition in the last 30 years.
"[1] note lack of t' before North: for real Greggs appreciators, anyone who uses t' is a Southie!"
Yeah, that leading t' on words is defiantly a southern thing, all the way down in Yorkshire. Bloody southern softies t'lot of 'em :-)
Proper northerners live north of the most southerly point in Scotland while still being in England!
(Have you seen how far south Scotland reaches? It's nearly as far south as Yorkshire, but on the west coast!)
Greggs used mostly to be a traditional bakery in the north-east of England but has gradually evolved into a supplier of baked take-away food maximising the return from relatively small premises. The thing you need to understand about Greggs current operation is that it's largely structured around a VAT loophole. If you buy (most) food from a supermarket it does not attract VAT (akin to sales tax). If you serve food in a restaurant or sell hot food, then it attracts a tax of 20%.
Greggs (until recently) sold mostly cold and "ambient" food. A lot of their food is originally hot, taken directly from ovens on the premises. However, it is then placed in unheated display cases where it gradually cools down to the ambient temperature. Provided it is consumed off the premises, this ambient food is free of tax and therefore can undercut food that is deliberately kept warm, or cooked to order. They will ask you when you order whether you intend to eat the food on or off the premises and may adjust the price or their profit margin accordingly (depending on what you've bought and how their deals are structured).
It's a lottery whether the food you buy is scaldingly hot (straight out of the oven) or a frigid congealed lump, but they try to minimise the product left lingering on the shelves. But it's a lottery in which the taxman usually loses, which may account, at least in part, for its popularity.
Back when I worked in Newcastle in the early '80s, I used to frequent the Greggs near the Haymarket (partly because of the comic shop 'Timeslip' that used to be almost next door).
I used to buy their sandwich loaf on a regular basis, so can confirm that it was a regular bakery that also had a hot food counter. As a result, I consumed far too many of their corned beef pasties (back when they were called pasties rather than bakes - and they were bigger!)
But I also bought the split-tin loaf from Carricks (another local bakery I passed), and I thought their hot food was better!
It's a good thing that I walked a lot to and from the Metro stations to get to work, because otherwise I would have put on weight (that happened later), what with the pasties, stotties and all other manner of calorific lunch items that I used to consume!
At one time, Carrick's had waitress-service restaurants and were quite posh, but they struggled to adjust to the self-service era, though they had the "light bite" format for some time: the Greggs opposite the Central Station in Newcastle at the bottom of Pink Lane used to be a Carrick's Light Bite. They were bought out by Bakers Oven (Allied Bakeries) and Bakers Oven was in turn bought out by ... Greggs.
That Greggs opposite Newcastle station also used to stay open quite late (might still do) so was handy if changing trains and wanting sustenance, and the station had turned into a ghost town (as it tends to on weekday evenings in winter).
Incidentally, have any of you noticed that Greggs do regional specialities too? You can get stotties in the ones in the North-East, and Scotch pies in at least some of those in Scotland.
"Bakers Oven"
I used to love their vegetable pasties. I'm not a vegetarian, and have no idea if they were actually vegetarian (probably not, due to the fat used in making the pastry), but they tasted like Batchors Scotch broth soup but, obviously, not as runny :-) When Greggs took them over, that pasty went off the menu for some reason. With the current fad for vegetarian/veganism, mayby they should bring it back?
"I used to frequent the Greggs near the Haymarket"
It;s still there. It's hard to walk more than 5 minutes around the centre of Newcastle without seeing yet another branch of Greggs. There's even one inside Central Station now, literally just across the road from the one at the bottom of Pink Lane!
But they definitely get one thing right: they know what is in their products (and will cheerfully tell you)[1] and they do not randomly change the recipe from one week to the other.
This is an absolute godsend for anyone with food intolerances[2]: SWMBO knows that she can always get a mushroom bake or a sossie roll and know that we won't have to worry about unpleasant-but-not-life-threatening repercussions.
[1] and do NOT mention "oh, the law says everyone has to tell you about ingredients now": what that has done is replace having a list of the actual ingredients, *all* of them, with a laminated card that only lists the items specifically mentioned in the legislation! That does cover the bulk of the life-threatening allergies, which is good, but most places can no longer tell you anything about the presence of, say, alliums.
[2] hopefully also for those with proper food allergies, but I'll not risk making claims on their behalf
I'm a Londoner, but I've lived outside of England for many years. I had seen the Greggs name in UK news media long before I encountered an actual outlet. Which I did, for the first time, in East Midlands airport en route between Paris and Edinburgh.
We don't get much proper pastry fayre in France, so I had to take a look. The first noticeable thing was that they had some stuff labelled as suitable for vegetarians. The second was how unexpectedly cheap it all was. I mentioned this to the guy on the till. He explained that the prices in the airport were exactly the same as on any high street. To be honest, this impressed me. Subsequently they (famously) introduced a vegan sausage roll. So I'm a fan. Can we have one on the rue de Rivoli?
-A.
They are also in many if not most motorway services these days, however on the rare occasions I've used them, the prices there are higher than the town/city street branches. Not hugely more expensive like most motorway fare, but enough that it might make you think twice about it being cheap.
《the special section of his tray, the high-class one that contained sausages whose contents were 1) meat, 2) from a known four-footed creature, 3) probably land-dwelling. 》
《He liked anyone who had money, regardless of the colour and shape of the hand that was proffering it.》
Same problem here (AU) when the payments systems went down.
I have always wondered by an autonomous micropayment system hasn't been implemented - rather like the bus etc electronic ticketing except you can use it for any small purchase and reload at atm or 7/11 stores. I think Bruce Schnier in one of his earlier books mentions a trial by AT&T of such a system in a small town about (now) fifty years ago.
A stored value card if you like. The payment terminals could be truly standalone - the merchant could take the terminal (or part of) to the bank to retrieve the funds stored from payments. :)
Russia/China/Iran/NK/whoever, it's one thing taking out a bank but when you take out Greggs, you upset thousands of Geordies and that is a dangerous thing, have you ever seen a horde of bare chested obese Newcastle fans descend on a van carrying sausage rolls, meat squares and doughnuts, it's not a pretty sight and a complete massacre, no military in the land can defend you from such barbarity and rage !
P.S I'm one of them !!
There's a rumour going round some of the good bits of Reddit that Princess Kate moonlights as a Python developer, and spent January building 'something'. The rumour continues that she is now frantically trying to fix that 'something', which coincidentally has been the cause of these outages.
It would explain several things in on fell swoop, and thus passes the Occam's razor test.
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