Recurring theme:
Why are Maplin and Halfords so crap these days? I remember when you could go in and ask for a splined widget to attach to your kanarkle and they’d pause and say “lungified or unlungified? We have both in stock if you’re not sure”.
Maplin staff are generally lacking in clue, but the award today went to Halfords. I admit it was hopeful but I went into their miniscule motorbike section to look for a switch for the ‘zed. The ‘zed has a standard moped brake light switch. Not seeing one (but seeing other more obscure bike bits) I thought I’d ask.
I collared one of the staff who was carefully avoiding looking at any of the customers and queried whether they sold one. He looked clueless for a second and then took me back to the motorcycle ‘section’, looked around ineffectually and said ‘hrm, if it’s not here, then no, they probably don’t sell them’.
Well, ta.
A few minutes later I thought ‘hrm, I might be able to revive mine with a few squirts of contact cleaner’. So I thought I’d ask about contact cleaner.
“Uh…What’s it for”.
“Cleaning electrical contacts on well, cars, bikes, anything”
“Um. Is it a liquid or a paste or….?”
“It’s a spray, normally”
“Um… I don’t think so, I’ll ask”
*wanders off to little gang of ‘staff’*
Conversation ensues and then he wanders back
“Um, we don’t stock it, unless it’s over in these sprays here…”
*points at shelf full of a variety of sprays and looks very ineffectually at them*
*I pick up can cunningly described by marking it ‘Electrical Contact Cleaner’, a Halfords own brand product*
“You do stock it then, it’s here”.
*Wanders off shaking her head*
I don’t expect everyone in the store to know everything, that’s fine. But jeeze, between the 4 of them *one* of them might have had a fricking clue. It’s a parts shop, ostensibly, so they ought to know at least a little bit about parts.
But I guess it’s all about “Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing” these days. As long as it’s covered in stick on plastic and got a big spoiler it can run like a bag of spanners but they don’t care.
More rants coming, incidentally, on the wrongness of the scrappage scheme (and how to fix it) and how Nikki’s (and Electric Dreams – the book she suggested I might enjoy has) bloody broken my view of petrol engines.
