Lidl Vs Tesco

Tesco stoop to selling live animals in China

Running scared of European competition from Lidl et al Tesco now turn to the barbaric chinese for a stab at turning a profit - selling live turtles.

Lidl Vs Tesco

When I buy a 20p (or whatever the current price is) can of Ald/Lidl chopped tomatoes I get a can of lovely thick chopped tomatoes.

When I buy a 20p can of chopped tomatoes in Tesco (which would be in their value range) I get a can of red water.

To get Aldi/Lidl quality in Tesco I would have to buy branded or from the Tesco main product range.

The same is repeated for the vast majority of everyday basic products.

The likes of Aldi and Lidl achieve this by not having expensive PR campaigns and by not attempting to supply everything all the time.

If they can't get it at the right price, they don't stock it.

Also they employ 3 hardworking staff where Tesco would have 6, who generally stand around discussing their personal lives in front of the customers (sorry, consumers).

For the equivalent price, Aldi/ Lidl are far higher quality than any main supermarket.

Why then are these stores not included in price comparison results?

The main leading supermarkets get away with it by using various methods to lock us in to shopping with them, thereby preventing us from comparing them with other retailers.

I can't recall the last time I shopped in Tesco, it was that long ago.

First Aid: Kit and Training

First Aid

At one time or another we all have cause to administer some first aid. Even if its just a plaster on a small cut a little basic first aid knowledge can really help the effectiveness of any treatment given. For bigger problems it is best to leave for specially trained people to assess and recommend action (most workplaces have a trained first aiders)

First Aid Kit

Health and safety now require workplaces to have a HSE compliant first aid kit available.

First Aid Training

Training is essential and when completed the chance to join a First Aid team is available.

The SH&E office is looking for volunteers to train and join our First Aid Team. The 'First Aid at Work' training certificate concentrates on a wide range of scenarios so that dedicated staff can react confidentially in the event of a first aid situation. Topics covered are:-

• How to act in the event of an emergency
• CPR ( cardio-pulmonary resuscitation )
• Unconscious casualty
• Wounds & bleeding
• Burns & scalds
• Injuries to bones, muscles and joint
• .......................and many more.

The course will last for 3 days (19th, 20th & 21st October), after which there will be a short assessment. It is hoped that Certified First Aiders will join our dedicated team to provide their First Aid services to the University site. First Aid equipment, including kit bags and radios, will be provided.

Pay for archive football content online?

Continuing, certain brands are inevitably going to start charging for content. Of course there is a model for charging for specialist content as shown by the FT as well as the likes of the NMA, but this comes from the principle that people will pay for something if it’s unique which runs contrary to Rupert Murdoch’s model where he plans to charge for all content across his newspaper and broadcast brands all of which contain content that people can easily find somewhere else.

Other brands such as the Guardian and Telegraph have mooted (great word) the idea of “clubs” where most content is free but those who pay a subscription get access to exclusives, possibly divided by category such as sport or business. The problem with that is that all content was previously free, so what can media owners come up with that people will be prepared to pay for when they got it for nothing before? I am sure some will, but traffic would surely go down significantly.

It is a model that may work better for the Guardian which (aside from the struggling Independent) has the lowest readership of any UK national newspaper largely because of its political views.

In the US, the political spectrum of newspapers is even more restricted that the UK and as a result of both of these factors the Guardian gets a lot of traffic from English speakers at both home and abroad looking for a liberal view on news items, as well as more irreverent comment, that they can’t find anywhere else. This makes the Guardian a reasonably unique brand and as a result plenty of people use the site who don’t buy the paper making Guardian.co.uk the most popular online newspaper site in the world.

Another factor is that as well as political bent, or maybe partly because of it, many Guardian users are young people and/or work in more creative industries (it certainly has the best media section of any paper) and are so more naturally predisposed to use the web. I am not sure the Telegraph’s, or indeed any other paper’s, audience would flock to their site in the same way for paid for content and comment that you could get for free somewhere else, let alone the brand being unique enough to attract users from abroad.

So what are the other options for papers?

The link http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/10/mirrorfootball-website-adverts contains a video of the new advert that the Trinity Mirror Group are putting out for their Mirror Football website, the first in a possible series of websites in specialist verticals, the next one rumoured to be a celebrity site under the ‘3am Girls’ brand.

Trinity Mirror’s CEO Sly Bailey has admitted that they may end up charging for some of the content on these sites, especially their “unique” football footage archive:

“The important thing for us is to develop the brand with the right content that engages a passionate audience, and therefore to have a diversified model that isn’t just about advertising. We think that is the next stage, and whether over time that gives you the opportunity to think about whether there are areas you can charge for, that’s an open discussion - but you have to create that content overall in order to have that option.”

But, again, why would you pay for something that you could previously get for free or that you can more or less get from somewhere else (i.e. You Tube)?

Paying for News?

After the huge financial losses just announced by News Corp, Murdoch has decreed that, probably from next year, he will charge for all his newspaper websites including The Times and The Sun. It is not clear whether this will extend to broadcast news websites such as Sky News.

It has been clear for some time that the newspaper industry is at a crossroads. The old model of drawing in as much traffic as possible to gain revenue from display advertising has been found to be unsustainable and further to News Corp, the Telegraph, Guardian and Mirror Groups have all mooted charging for content but as Michael Beecroft, head of digital trading at Mediaedge:cia Global, concedes: "In many ways the horse has already bolted, and trying to close the door on it now will be very tricky indeed."

This model work for some specialist content, such as the FT or the Media section of The Guardian, but in general why would anyone pay for content they can get for free elsewhere?

Murdoch, Sly Bailey and others speak about how quality journalism is not cheap but what denotes “quality” and who is the judge of that other than the audience? In a world where the media landscape is increasingly fragmenting, why would you pay for frontline heavyweight news items when the BBC will always provide that for free? And when it comes to the so called celebrity ‘news’ that the tabloids pedal so well, why would you pay for The Sun when you can go to Perez Hilton? Why go to newspapers for sport news when you can go to Cricinfo, Football 365 or Planet Rugby?

Even most of the content from the Guardian’s Media section can also be found with a subscription to the NMA or Media Week.

Just last week, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired said in an interview to German news website Spiegel:

“In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we'll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.”

The UK has always had more national newspapers than any other country, and the arrival of digital has just exacerbated the situation to the point where the market is unbearably crowded.

The Independent, with the lowest readership of any national, has been under threat for some time following huge losses with the Daily Mail & General Trust rumoured to be interested in rescuing it, though the lack of such a move so far probably says more about The Independent that anything else.

Moreover, The Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the UK, published since 1791, is facing the threat of either closure by the Guardian Media Group or being re formatted into a weekly magazine following similar heavy losses as suffered by the other papers. As a dedicated Observer reader, I would find this extremely sad, more so as no other Sunday paper quite caters for the same readership (though this may yet be its saving grace- Guardian Media Group is owned by a not-quite-for-profit organisation for a reason) but we all should come to the realization that in the next ten years a lot of household newspaper names will either change beyond recognition or disappear completely.