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Re: e-Jobs
Well Alex you will bugger off on holiday! :rotfl:
You’re right, let’s just make it work and sort it out later, as always we’ll remain entirely fexible on it and await the results as and when they happen to reach a more orderly way of doing things. Right now it is an entirely unknown area as it’s never been done before.
However I do think that the discussion was well worth having as, I don’t know about anyone else, but it’s taken my thoughts on different tacts and that, to me, is a good thing.
K.
Re: Press Release – e-Jobs
The subscriber side was setup a while back Geoff and it has been discussed a few times but we’d never infer that anyone was tight fisted. 😆
Seriously though, we do intend a lot more through that in time but we need a bit of time to get all we want done and done right. UKW is young really in the grand scheme of things and I appreciate that not everyone just wants to jump onboard right away, which is fair enough. However, the point is, we’re active in trying to do things, not resting on our laurels waiting on something to happen along.
The other very important point to be made about the subscriber money is that it is just that, subscriber money! We do not take anything from it at all to run UKW, we have for the odd meeting or whatever but it’s simply been to avoid us paying out our own pockets for it. The intent is to let that fund grow into something substantial to use for whatever good purpose that the subscribers see fit to use it for. We/I will guide and help in that endevour but I or anyone involved in UKW Ltd ain’t wanting a bean for doing it. In short we’re not looking to make money of the poor sods that go out and graft damn hard to earn it!
In fact, if anything we give you more as all the revenues from Google and Amazon sales go straight into the subscriber’s pot! If I can swing it in time there may well be more from other areas. It’s up to each individual to see the worth of what we’re trying to do here.
Weighting Repairs@ in favour of the subscribers is just my way of saying thanks for the support.
K.
Oh yeah, real quality engineering. Anything behind the facia is of little concern, how it looks is more important than how it performs. 😕
Those Arrow things, is that for Arrow Distribution? Probably that Menenghetti crap.
K.
Does that happen before or after the customers fingers have bonded to the control knob/s due to heat? 😆
K.
Re: Servis M3810
High water pressure area perchance?
Water over the side, LHS from front, where the “overflow is”?
Then the cure is to turn down the water a bit until it doesn’t fill so fast. Another shining example of Antonio Merloni engineering at its finest. 😕
K.
Re: re: CHEAPER AND CHEAPER
mikem wrote:Now looking at these two factories, who produces a better product?
Right now, on the whole there isn’t much in it but the fact that a product carries a “made in China” sticker on it doesn’t necessarily mean it is of inferior quality.As for the price war being over I reckon theres more to come (Zanussi washer £179??)
Ah, but you forget to mention that whilst there are policies in place that are supposed to stop the exploitation of the workforce, the use of child labour, dangerous practice etc. that it does in fact still go on in many industries throughout the Asian continent and sub continent as well as most of the Asiatic islands. Quite simply there seems to be, shall we say, at best a rather relaxed enforcement by the local authorities. That said I would agree that at least they have some policies in place.
I would contend however that they are there primarily to allow certain corporate figures to sleep at night without worrying about a member of the press banging on their door in the morning. 😉
It also seems not to apply to the smaller third party local suppliers from what I hear, but I’d love to go out there and see for myself. Same with Mexico, the third world… with tacos. 😕
As to the best production lines, well it was Europe but Asia has quickly constructed newer, faster, better lines, I could bore you with a history of European manufacturing and why the Japanese, Italians and Germans didn’t win the last major conflict but went onto win the economic battle but the basics are that we bombed the sh1t out them then paid to rebuild their factories andinfrastructure so that they could in turn, produce better goods faster than we could. Good plan, I think not.
Now we see the same thing happening again, only this time it’s the Asians that have won the war and are pumping out goods as cheaply as they can, with the huge advantage on labour costs but a disadvantage on getting them to the consumer. But worse still, they copy the Western manufacturers, not seeing that the Western boys have lost their way in this industry. Fine on brown where the leading edge technology is easy to see and they’ve destroyed optical disc already, they’ll destroy LCD just directly as LG/Samsung fire up plants as if there was no tomorrow. But again a lot of people miss many of the points of merit to brown over white in such circumstances.
So anyway, they churn out goods as cheaply as they can with poor quality design and components, just as the Europeans are doing so they can compete. How they screw it together is irrelevant really, it’s still crap. Yes, I know that they offer different quality levels, three from Haier I believe, but everyone wants the cheapest so they can play the price war game.
The thing is that in a price war, no-one wins. Except the customer to an extent and even that’s debateable.
K.
True Mark, but it’s not a nice one is E9. 😉
It could also be a faulty wash pump as well as a couple of tother little nasties as well. 😕
Then there’s the fact that on the 3 and 5 button earlier timers it’s not an alarm at all but a test program..
Lovely stuff, don’t we all just love fault codes?
K.
Re: £179 For A Zanussi Washer!
Cost downs are fine, retention of margin and, ultimately, customers is far more important long term I should think but it appears that long term planning with moves such as these is cast aside.
Dyson had to do something different and he did, it didn’t work. Proving that Mr Dyson isn’t just as smart as he thinks he is, or at least his design team were not. It also proved that funky design and some clever marketing don’t always cut the mustard and eventually the machines appeared in Makro with the prices shredded, inevitable really.
Just like the Chinese and a few EU/US names to boot (IMO) they have lost sight of the product that they are selling to a large extent looking more at the cost on Currys shop floor and the cost/ways to achieve that than any other factor. But then, that’s not a new thing by far.
Mike, even if the margin does not drop the percentage allowed to filter through to the service budget will do and so, next year, we’re in a position where we’re faced with cost rises that we simply cannot counter yet there’s less money in the pot to pay for it. Fun isn’t it? 😉
The joys of an archaic system.
Both Lux and Merloni as well as others do have the power to lead and counter the cheapo brands in many other ways, it’s just that they’ve been resting on their collective laurels for far too long now concentrating on making the product cheaper or a bit prettier than actually developing it. For example, when was the last time we saw a new tub group introduced by Lux or Candy Group? I can’t speak for the rest as I’ve not been poking around in them for a while, but even the Servis crap remains virtually unchanged, despite the obvious flaws and under-engineering in them.
If you ask why something doesn’t get resolved on production you get the, “but that would cost another Euro” argument thrown back at you. Fine, but it doesn’t resolve the losses faced through needless service calls or loss of a customer or indeed the exchanges, which cost a damned fortune to do especially on non-freestanding products.
I think you’re spot on though Mike a price war is not sustainable and the only winner will be the shark that swallows the minnows when they fall foul. Only in this case the minnows may be bloody big!
K.
Re: Site Progress
Well you may have noticed that we have notched up another 100,000 in just over two weeks! What’s more astonishing about that is that we should have lost at least four days with the weekends/holidays but we really didn’t lose much, if any, ground at all.
It gets even more apparent how far we’ve come when you look at the Christmas day figure, this year on that day we took ~3500 page views, in 2003 on the same day we had… 55!!!
In the first four days of this year which includes three bank holiday days/weekend and one Scottish bank holiday we’ve had over 30,000 views already as I post this. So yes, 5 million by year end is not a totally outrageous figure to work with.
And, we’ve a few surprises in store too. 😈
K.
Basically the charter is a very basic set of rules, well not so much rules but just good basic practice. If we’d dumbed it down any more you’d have had things like…
I will attempt not to kill, maim or injure my customers.
You know, good common sense stuff without asking for anything that isn’t easily achievable and the vast majority of us will do as a matter of course anyway.
The point of it is to offer some assurance to the customers that they do not need a post for you to tie up the horse on arrival. 😉 😆
K.
Yes but generally the water has to have come from somewhere to activate the sensor in the first place. 😉
K.
