Went went down to our local market bright and early this morning and bought a head of Calabrese at one of the veg stalls. The price seemed to have risen recently at £1.20 a pound, but my wife handed a smallish head to the stall-holder. "That's £1.27", she said. My wife asked - "was that over a lb?"
The (grumpy) smallholder put it on the scales again and said "it weighs a pound and 3/4 of an ounce". My wife remarked that it seemed a bit odd, but didn't question the validity of the scales.
When we arrived home, we checked the Calabrese on our electronic kitchen scales and it weighed in at 10.5oz. The marketeer's scales appeared to be over-reading by approaching 40%.
What would you do?
a) Vow never to use that stall again and forget about it.
b) Go down next week and helpfully inform the smallholder that their scales might not be working correctly.
c) Take you own scales down and ask if the stall-holder would be good enough to check them for you. [if you see what I mean]
d) Get them checked out by 'weights and measures' (if such an organisation still exists).
e) Report them to the local rag
f) Throw a Molotov cocktail at the stall
g) Something else
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Blimey, he's taking it a bit isn't he?
If you tell him about it he will probably answer rudely. But obviously you won't ever use him again. Got a taxi once that topped up the fare outrageously in transit, the driver then having the damn cheek to say 'on the meter guv' as he named the diabollical sum. We had a loud stand-up row then and there.
Some years ago a former colonial officer I knew slightly, an old Nigeria hand, said in my presence that Nigerian corruption had started to spread to the British. I was quite irritated and asked sarcastically if he thought we British didn't have the nous to think up a bit of corruption for ourselves.
The fact is the influence went from us to them, not the other way round. People like the egregious Patrick Mercer were around in Chaucer's day and have been ever since. Stealing, swindling, bribery and petty fraud were obvious means for colonial grandees, overseas commodity traders and boxwallahs to speed up the acquisition of a fortune. They can hardly have been seen as more immoral than owning slaves. And they were used by many. Their families at home may have been blissfully unaware, but their local workers and business partners would have been in the picture, learning fast.
What hypocrites people are, and what idiots.
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This type of rip-off really jerks me off, HW.
I would go back next week and see if it happens again Don't make the trader suspicious in any way. If the problem is still there hit him with the Trading Standards people.
It's just not right that he/she is able to cream off excessive profit on , probably, every transaction made at the stall.
Many people shop in markets because their budget is tight in the first place.
Ted
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Trading Standards. They will do test purchases. Heard of this happening quite recently.
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Dahn the markit? 'ees doin you up like kippa me ole son, I'd be dahn there toot sweet and have a right ole bull n cow.
Loud words like "feaving git" would be ringing round the markit!
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"Loud words like "feaving git" would be ringing round the markit!"
So I take it, Z, that you'd stop short of the Molotov Cocktail idea?
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c) with irony and sarcasm.
And depending on how he dealt with that, I would then decide between a) on the one hand and d) AND e) on the other.
Conceivably if he managed the rematch well I might continue shopping there providing he never tried it again.
I can't say I have any real or moral objection to people lying to me, but I have no tolerance for people who try to treat me as a fool.
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>>I can't say I have any real or moral objection to people lying to me
Odd, especially when you are dealing in areas where you may have little expertise.
The ability to get redress due to negligence is much lower when you don't know that your doctor/accountant/lawyer/architect/plumber is hosing you.
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Market traders with their rough old greengrocer scales and their odd collections of rusty old weights, everything done briskly with - for regular punters - a 'dear' or 'darling' thrown in. Look, what you want is some potatoes or spring greens or something, and that's what you get, cheerfully in the general clamour, without any nit-picking. As any fule kno the error, which it would be churlish to measure, is likely to be in the trader's favour. It's a privilege well earned in my book by a hard physical life with very early hours and generally good-quality produce which you can examine in advance and prod or poke unless they've never seen you before.
Goodness how I miss the Portobello Road. It was neighbourly, like village life, but with that very acerbic London edge. The tourist and visitor majority and the actual locals were like two different contimuums existing side by side.
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>> "Loud words like "feaving git" would be ringing round the markit!"
>>
>> So I take it, Z, that you'd stop short of the Molotov Cocktail idea?
Much as I enjoy over reaction, thats laying it on a bit thick.
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>> >> So I take it, Z, that you'd stop short of the Molotov Cocktail idea?
>>
>> Much as I enjoy over reaction, thats laying it on a bit thick.
>>
A gearbox oil cocktail should do it, about 0.8L would be about right. :-)
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But you don't have 0.8 ltr left :)
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I have 1 litre scrapped off the front windows.
The rest is soaked into the brickwork....
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>> Much as I enjoy over reaction
MAN THREATENS MARKET TRADERS WITH 'NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON
Dispute over Price of Runner Beans causes Breach of Peace
'... accompanied by what witnesses described as a 'large and ferocious black dog with several missing teeth' and (witnesses claimed) 'ranting like a maniac about old locomotives... '
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What you are talking about is theft. Either intentionally or unintentionally. In a previous life I owned several shops trading within a market environment. Our electronic scales were checked daily, before trading, and at regular intervals throughout. We even had mechanical scales as back up in case of power failure. These were also checked.
Trading Standards would visit, unannounced, every few months. Check our scales, labelling, weight of packaged goods etc to ensure we were giving our customers what they were paying for.
If anybody charged me for goods which were under weight then I would contact TS without a seconds hesitation.
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Ere!! .. Our neighb gives us some veg now and again and sometimes it includes some strange-looking deformed SOAB that goes straight in the bin.
Blimey if it isn't a Calabrese! - I've never in-my-life heard of or seen one before (strange, but true)
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There is another alternative:
h) Check your kitchen scales - if it's you that's wrong it could be embarrassing!
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Give the chap a chance. Lets face it, a massive 40% over-read is more likely to be an error than anything more devious - particularly if the trader is a regular at your local market.
What can you do?
Well, you could try your luck with a couple of pounds of tomatoes next week to see how they look on your electronic scales.
Or, you could buy your fruit and veg from Waitrose in future.
Or, you could drown your sorrows in the Six Bells.
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I weigh stuff the old fashioned way, balance pan and a set of weights. Metric and imperial sets of weights.
Sure, I can't weigh stuff to the neared gram as purported by electronic scales but you don't need that kind of accuracy anyway. But with no batteries to go flat and a set of weights, not much to go wrong either.
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...you don't need that kind of accuracy anyway.
Depends what you're weighing, I suppose, but I really value being able to weigh 32g of coffee beans for the Bialetti pot, or 280g of water for a loaf of bread. And being able to add ingredients, especially wet or sticky ones, straight into the mixing vessel is far less faff than using a weighing pan. They take up far less space, too. No weigh (sorry) back from electronic scales for me.
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Go to Sainsbury's instead.
I don't know what variety of broccoli they sell , but it's 90p a pound, and they won't try to over-weigh it by 40%.
I'm sure the vast majority of market traders are honest, but this sort do the rest a dis-service.
AC mentions traders that let you prod the goods, if you are a regular, well Sainsbury's let you do it even on your first visit.
My wife used to regularly get veg from a stall near where we used to live, and she would dig through the sweetcorn with abandon. She did suggest, however, that anybody with a darker complexion doing the same was immediately barked at by the stallholder.
Sometimes I wonder if people realise that it isn't 1950 anymore. Then people had little choice. Now, you either provide excellent service to everybody and earn their trust, or you'll quickly find all your customers have gone to Tesco.
You'll have to rely upon an ever dwindling number of people who have always bought from market stalls, or just love the atmosphere, or cater for the ever so trendy "farm shop" crowd (just don't tell them that you buy from the same farms as Asda).
Last edited by: SteelSpark on Mon 3 Jun 13 at 09:41
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...it's 90p a pound...
...Sometimes I wonder if people realise that it isn't 1950 anymore.
};---)
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>> ...it's 90p a pound...
>> ...Sometimes I wonder if people realise that it isn't 1950 anymore.
>>
>> };---)
Eh? Because I gave the price per pound rather than per kilo? :)
Last edited by: SteelSpark on Mon 3 Jun 13 at 10:40
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"...Sometimes I wonder if people realise that it isn't 1950 anymore."
I prefer metric too, Will, but I am bilingual. Maybe the preference for Imperial units on the market is another sign that their attitudes along with those of their ageing customers, haven't moved on. As the old customers die, they aren't being replaced by younger ones because they prefer to shop at the supermarkets.
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My fault, I was just converting to give a like for like comparison with the price Haywain quoted. I should have said:
£2.1s.2d per kg
Last edited by: SteelSpark on Mon 3 Jun 13 at 10:48
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Well played, SS!
I can do both too, of course - hard to live in this country and leave furlongs and perches behind altogether, much as I wish we could. But the job would be done now if the Metrication Board had seen it through in 1973, when I was at primary school. Those now-elderly customers who, supposedly, can't cope with metric units had to and did adapt to decimal currency. What's the difference?
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"Those now-elderly customers who, supposedly, can't cope with metric units had to and did adapt to decimal currency."
I wonder how folks would cope if the move went the other way?
I joined the agricultural chemical industry in 1975 at the point just after agrochemical application rates had been shifted from Imperial to metric. Until that point, chemicals had been applied as fl oz or pounds/oz of formulation in x gallons of water applied to y acres/sq yds. etc - often by people with little idea of algebra. It became ml or g per litre of water per hectare - so much easier to work out!
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" Now, you either provide excellent service to everybody and earn their trust, or you'll quickly find all your customers have gone to Tesco. "
This observation is very relevant, SS; a letter from the market traders regularly appears in the local paper in which they bemoan the fact that customers are moving over to supermarket shopping. Some of these people don't help themselves; they may work on the market but they don't have a clue about 'marketing'. I should add, of course, that they aren't all like that - that's why we continue to go down there. Many customers, however, simply won't put up with it.
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Dodgy market trader's scales? - Bigtee
