Most of us shop online these days, in varying degrees. For larger purchases, like appliances and furniture, I will flick through product reviews to ensure I am not sold a ‘lemon.’
Some of us conduct diligent research online checking product reviews on websites for any purchase. Naturally, they want to save money and purchase a reputable brand.
What’s more, companies follow up purchases, seeking out customers’ opinions – feedback is important to them. With varying degrees, our inbox might fill with invitations to respond to customer surveys like,
“So, how did we do?”
“How can we serve you better?
“Let us know what you thought of your purchase?”
Every company wants 5 stars, and to maintain that stellar rating and I am mighty conscious how even a random 1 star review can damage a brand, particularly a small business.
So, imagine my surprise when I was invited to review a purchase of shoes, and upon submitting a 4 star review with accompanying positive-worded tip to improve store/website service, I received this reply:
Our staff has read your review and values your contribution even though it did not meet all our website guidelines. Thanks for sharing, and we hope to publish next time!
What good is a product review if the company only publishes 5-star reviews?
The Backstory
I had chosen a ‘click and collect delivery for my order. It was filled promptly and my daughter collected the shoes from the store. (We were soon to leave for Japan and had run out of time to get to the shops). When we opened the box, later that evening, the shoes were the wrong size, ( one size smaller), but there was no time to return them to the store, before our trip.
The store’s website detailed a sizing table which converted AUS, US and EURO sizes, but nowhere did the order page indicate which regional sizing you were actually selecting when you clicked “add to shopping cart.”
The store was closed when I sent in the order, I was unable to clarify this via telephone.
But I live in Australia and it is an Aussie store, so I was pretty confident the website would indicate if it was using anything other than Australian sizing.
Wrong! We had received the US sizing – (one size down from Australian sizes)!
Therefore, my 4 star review suggested politely that customers should call the store to check sizing of shoes prior to ordering, as the website doesn’t indicate which sizing is used.
It seems they valued my contribution but it was deemed not to meet store guidelines.
“Try again,” the email glibly suggested.
Pfft! I then supposed that their guidelines must direct publication of reviews if they are only positive and give the store 5-stars?
I wonder if this is store-wide or just a managerial decision? Perhaps Blogger Keith might share his wisdom with me in this regard?
Earlier this year, on Australia Day, I wrote about how ‘dangerous,’ life can be in Australia. By employing a little common sense means nothing dreadful will happen, if you do visit our sun-drenched shores. Almost without exception, Australians live our entire lives without contact with a deadly snake, a Funnel-web Spider or a Death Adder.
So it came as a shock to find that …
Pottering in my garden might have inflicted serious injury or death.
[NB. this tale does not involve use of a power hedge trimmer, or chain saw].
Enter Australia’s Stinging Nettle Tree, or Gympie-Gympie.
Called the Gympie-Gympie, by the Gubbi Gubbi First Nation People, it is also known as the Suicide plant. For good reason –
Two species of the Australian Stinging trees– the Gympie-Gympie (Dendrocnide moroides) and the Giant Stinging Tree (Dendrocnide excelsa) are considered the most venomous plants in the world.
Unlike its European or North American Nettle counterparts, the Australian species are ‘particularly notorious for producing an excruciatingly painful sting.’ Covered in fine hairs like hypodermic needles, Dendrocnide species inject their toxins into skin, at the slightest touch or by brushing up against the leaves.
“Severe cases can lead to shock, and even death.
Horses have been known to die within hours of contact with this plant and one man was purported to have shot himself to end the excruciating pain. He’d inadvertently used the Gympie-Gympie leaf as toilet paper when camping in the forest.
Even inhaling the hairs of a dead 100 year old herbarium specimen caused sneezing, rashes, and nosebleeds and pain! This plant really is dangerous!
Entomologist and ecologist Marina Hurley who has been stung herself, likens the Gympie-gympie’s sting to “being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.” What’s more, the pain can last TWO YEARS!
And…..
Yesterday I discovered one growing in my Garden!
GASP!
Nature’s instrument of torture popped up along my garden fence, germinating shortly after Christmas, waiting to exact revenge on any life form that brushed passed!
That’s my dog’s furry ear is in the bottom right of the photo. How easy it would be to brush up against it while weeding! Being chemical stable, the toxins contained in the hairs are so minute, extracting them is difficult.
Needless to say, the M.o.t.h gowned and gloved up and disposed of the plant promptly. I am relieved the dreadful thing is bagged and safely disposed of.
Researchers are hoping to put this dangerous plant to beneficial use.
The poison works by binding to pain receptors in the nervous system, firing them up into a frenzy of activity. It’s hoped that working out how these proteins work may lead to the creation of new painkillers. [www.theguardian.com/e]
Australians are renowned for a wry sense of humour. If there is something we do well down under, it is to poke fun at each other in a friendly ironic kind of way. This is not to offend, but merely to spread around a little joy and to lighten the mood. A laugh can be a wonderful health booster.
It’s been a tradition here at Something to Ponder About to publish a tongue-in-cheek Australiana post, in typical Australian fashion, in a nod to Australia Day, which is presently celebrated on January 26th, (the date of which becomes more and more controversial every year).
Then he asked, ‘So what is Australia like?’
Over the years, foreigners and overseas friends have referred to me as an “ARSE-TRAIL-LIAN.” Not because I have been rude or obnoxious, it is just their pronunciation or accent. Which is kind of funny in an ironic way – as we do live ‘down-under’ -the ‘arse’ end of the world!
Given that our homeland is affectionately called ‘Straya’ – we should perhaps be called ‘A-stray-ans’ more and ‘Arse-trailians’ less.
Who are Australians Anyway?
You don’t have to go back far to find Australians are immigrants. Even the indigenous people traveled here by sea or land bridges some 80,000 years ago.
Our nations embraces Indigenous, Asian, British, South African, Greek or Italian and many other heritages, besides that lot that jumped ship from across the ditch (aka New Zealand).
We do regard New Zealand as our sibling country. We poke reciprocal fun at Kiwis and they at us Aussies, most of all. We fight about which nation claims the Pavlovas, Lamingtons and Russell Crowe, as their own. Neither side takes offence. It is just that friendly banter style of communication we have with our closest neighbours across the ditch – in that ironic kind of way.
Goodness, even our constitution listed New Zealand as a ‘state of Australia’, but the Kiwis didn’t agree and opted out. Good on them, I say.
Questions and Answers for Those New to Australia
For those who don’t know us, here’s a Q & A to get you acquainted.
Q: What is Australia like?
A: A more or less egalitarian country fringed by spectacular beaches, with a whole lot of red desert in the middle.
Q. Is Australia a country, a continent, or an island?
A: It is all three.
Q: What is the weather like?
A: In most of the country, there are only two seasons – warm and too darn hot.
Q: How hot does it get?
A: Summer in Australia lasts for five months with temperatures reaching 38- 42 degrees celsius. Australians cool off at the beach in summer and get horribly sunburnt. Sunscreen is an absolute must and unless you are super-diligent about applying it, you will get sunburnt. Twenty years after a bad sunburn experience, we become wrinkle-ly and Doctors excise skin cancers from our nose and face. Shit happens.
Q: What is the most important thing to have with you, when visiting Australia?
A: Water. It is crucial. Drink at least 3 litres a day. Don’t leave home without it, or you could die – of heatstroke.
Q: What language do Australians speak?
A: We speak English and add lots of slang. We pronounce Melbourne as Mel-bin, Brisbane as Bris-bin, Sydney as Sydney and Australia as Oz. Most Aussies think we have the best country in the world, but that is debatable – but only by the other countries.
NB. Do not attempt to use Australian slang unless you have lived for several years. It won’t end well. Trust me on that. Read more on the Aussie Slanguage here.
Q: Are Australians good at swimming?
A: Yes, yes and yes. We need some way to escape the crocodiles! Every Australia learns to swim before they can crawl. Almost.
Q: Can Australia kill you?
A: Between spiders, killer sharks, deadly stingers, crocodiles in the fresh and the saltwater plus the most venomous snakes in the world, Australia can kill you. It just doesn’t happen all that often.
Take cattle farmer Colin Deveraux’ – he even fended off an attack from a 3.2 metre crocodile by biting it back – on its eyelid! No longer Crocodile Dundee – it’s now Crocodile Deveraux!
Q: Are Australians friendly to foreigners?
A: Yes, Aussies are always willing to say g’day and help out a stranger in ‘strife,’ as long as you don’t tell them what to do. We have a bit of a ‘class’ chip on our shoulder, stemming from colonial days.
Q: Do Kangaroos hop down the middle of Australian streets?
A: Yes, sometimes. It depends on which street and the weather.
Q. Do Australian hamburgers contain beetroot?
A: Who eats a burger without beetroot? Come on! It’s essential – period.
Q: Are Australians weird?
A: We call a WeedWacker, a ‘Whipper-Snipper’, and a traffic cone is a Witch’s hat. Is that weird? It’s your call.
Oh, but what is weird is our love of constructing exaggerated sized and typically tacky tourist attractions. For reasons yet undetermined. Examples include- The Big Pineapple, The Big Banana and The Big Prawn – all iconic landmarks. [Nuff said.]
So on January 26, chuck a sanga on the barbie for Straya day, mate!
“How much more anger and grief do than the things that cause them.”
“For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have?
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Sayings and sageful words uttered in past centuries bear poignant relevance for modern communities across the world. Their timeless interpretation a general fit for a multitude of circumstances. Make of them what you will. Thanks to fermincazares for highlighting Marcus Aurelius’ wisdom.
Buy your Christmas food locally where possible, or purchase craft from a local market. Support local, small or family-owned businesses where you can. Support local bakeries for your fresh bread as this supports employment and tastes so much better than supermarket frozen offerings.
Make a homemade gift instead of buying one.
Give a relative an experience or a helping hand, such as mowing their lawn, as a gift). Give someone a voucher for an ‘experience’.
Thinking of getting a pet: adopt an animal from the shelter.
Give edible gifts – home made jams, chutneys and other preserves, infused spirits, cakes, biscuits/cookies or sweets/chocolates, even dried herb or tea blends.
Use solar-powered Christmas lights/decorations
Choose an environmentally friendly gift – e.g. a funky, natural, art project using natural or reclaimed materials and placed in an upcycled frame.
Give Plants or Seeds from your garden as gifts – see below
Make natural gifts – including lip balms, bath bombs, and scrubs using herbs and flowers
Beeswax can be turned into a wrap or used to make candles
Wrap gifts in an eco-green bag, old fabric or clothing cut up, newspaper or normal paper, old greeting cards, magazines or newspapers, or even fabric like a scarf from an old op shop.
Use reclaimed fabrics to make small gifts such as makeup bags or zippered pouches for people
Christmas cards have short lives and are wasteful of resources unless you make them yourself from your craft stash.
I love this idea of plantable Christmas cards: When the card is finished, plant it along with the seeds in the garden soil. The seeds grow, and the paper decomposes.
You can even D.I.Y and make these at home from the craft stash.
Sending Christmas E Cards
E-cards still consume power. Look for ones that will donate to charity with every E-card you send as a way of helping those less fortunate.
While Scandinavia observes the time-honoured rituals and traditions of Advent and selecting a live fir tree, Australian shoppers prepare for their Christmas experience by visiting Westfield shopping centres and erecting plastic Christmas trees.
Perhaps you call them malls or something else, but these concrete Westfield centres pay homage to Western greed and indulgence. They are places where every possible gift or want could be exchanged for money. But visiting these venues at Christmas is not just about purchasing gifts, it is also an endurance experience.
It is cut-throat and dog-eat-dog – believe me.
For instance, it is not uncommon to experience a minor verbal brawl over the last free car parking space at Westfield at Christmastime.
Once the Christmas shopping is complete, arms laden with bags brimming with gifts, Aussie consumers dodge and weave the line-up of vehicles circumnavigating the Westfield car parks, like participants in the old video game: ‘frogger.’
Woe betide any shopper arriving late to the shopping party (i.e. after 10 in the morning) as this automatically marshals you into a ‘hunt.’ To snag a spare car park after 10 am at Westfield is like winning the lottery. Any human carrying shopping bags in the car park precinct is stalked and followed in the desperate hope the ‘prey’ will vacate their car park and not just offload their gift cache and return to the shops for a second ‘run’ through the Christmas crowds.
Every man must fend for himself in this retail frenzy.
Thinking Outside the Box
I know of one homeowner who capitalised on Xmas, finding a silver lining in the chaos. Compensating for the proximity of his home to a Westfield shopping centre, he made a small fortune in tax-free cash, renting out his yard as an impromptu car park to desperate shoppers in the days leading up to and after Xmas.
Good on him. There has to be some compensation for tolerating the bastion of consumerism at your back door.
However, Westfield’s days seem to be limited – the pandemic has changed the consumer landscape forever.
Shopping online, or choosing to ‘click and collect’, saves most consumers time and stress. Modern youth embraces it – despite issues with delivery (tell me about it) and the fact that buying online produces more fossil fuels in transport and the manufacture of the necessary plastic packaging. This includes black plastic packaging, which can’t be recycled at all due to carbon black pigments.
So, I ask: what is the future for the behemoths of consumerism and the acres of asphalt that constitute the car parks?
Will the ‘Christmas Shopping phenomenon, the ruthless haggling over car park spots, and the bustling Westfield Xmas chaos relegate the concrete monoliths to a slow decay, unwanted and unable to adapt?
Is there still a place for the in-store shopping experience?
Earlier this year, I celebrated another year around the sun, by driving 1.5 hours to a Boutique Winery and Restaurant.
The setting: a rural sub-tropical farm complete with grapevines, dry grass and the odd cow. The country serenity was broken only by a half dozen bothersome blowflies (But hey, this is Australia!) and the delightful conversation of our lunch guests.
Visiting a boutique winery/vineyard was exciting. I was more than ready for a filling country-style lunch and accompanying wine tasting. And, having worked for a large Australian wine operative some years back, and attending wine tastings here and there, I do feel qualified to comment on this experience.
Really, I should have raised a red flag at the sight of the sad-looking vines that appeared to be merely for decoration. Not the dinky-di thing.
It wasn’t too long before we discovered the lunch menu was profoundly limited, more of a snack food menu. I liked the sound of a grazing platter but the Man of the House, who is a hot meal/red meat and mash kind of guy, would have preferred something more hefty than salad, cold meat and cheese. (none of which he eats cold). So he went a little hungry for his birthday meal, eating just a couple of slices of bread.
NB. (the restaurant had been alerted this was a birthday celebration).
Then there were problems with the wine-tasting experience, the main attraction of having lunch at this restaurant. But not all of our party were participating in the wine tastings.
To our surprise, the staff insisted that only the ‘paying’ wine-tasting participants could sit up at the bar, ie. next to their spouses while they tasted the wines.
Non-drinking spouses, (who were the beer and mixer drinkers) were banished to remain at the allocated dining table towards the rear of the dining hut during the entire wine-tasting experience, some distance away.
This felt uncomfortable and a tad separatist. We were ostracizing our spouses and friends. This detracted significantly from our overall birthday experience.
The Wine Tasting
The wine-tasting portions offered were barely adequate. A small mouthful is not really enough to detect the full aromas, scent and taste of the wine – paying for a small mouthful of six wines.
Please note, at many other wineries, tastings are free and fulsome. Two or even three mouthfuls at least and even then, they’re still free or, of nomimal cost.
No matter how persuasive my laconic, ‘ocker’ friend was, the bar attendant flatly refused to pour more than a mouthful of wine, in his tasting glass.
Her reasoning:
“I have to be responsible with alcohol. I cannot serve more than the equivalent of one alcoholic drink, in total, for the ‘tasting experience.’
You have to be able to drive home,” she added in her husky, forthright tone.
What if you were to have an accident?” she postulated.
Explaining that we had two non-drinking guests accompanying us who could, and would be driving home and reinforced there was no way we’d be taking the wheel. But the staff member, a German exchange student, reinforcing the stereotype, stoicly refused to yield to our pleas.
“We could not have you driving on the road if you had tasted more than just one glass full in total.” {This is not their responsibility once we leave the premises}.
So.. okay. We were getting nowhere with the German.
Ten minutes later, over our lunch grazing platter snacks, our waitress asks,
“Would you like any more drinks? “
“Another glass/bottle of wine perhaps?” (Which of course, would be added to the bill).
“Yes, I will have another Shiraz, please.”
“The Shiraz? Of course!”
Huh?
Yes, we had a lovely day, thanks to our kind friends.
Due to the drawbacks cited above, we won’t return.
What Could They Do Better?
Offer a more consistent and considerate customer service
Double the tasting serves
Have friendlier staff willing to share the history and development of the winery or some interesting factoid of conversation
An expanded menu with hot options for fussy Moths. (Men of the house)
On the plus side, one of their red wines was of a reasonable quality. My friend purchased two bottles to take home.
FYI – Fascinating correspondence received when I sent in my feedback.
“Hi Amanda,
Many thanks for your email, and taking the time to give us your feedback. We do highly value and appreciate this. We are really pleased to hear you had a lovely day and enjoy the visit and wine overall.
We recognise, and agree our food menu and some resources are very limited being a small boutique cellar door. Unfortunately, we do not have a restaurant kitchen, and so we focus on food to complement the wine being grazing platters and salads.
Expansion, and a restaurant is something we are considering in the future, but presently we only promote and cater to what we can successfully deliver in our busiest times with the facilities we have.
It is disappointing to hear you didn’t feel the wine taste volumes were sufficient. Our standard practise is to pour 6 x 25 ml equating to 1 standard glass of wine to ensure customers can monitor their wine intake. We also have an obligation to ensure we are serving alcohol responsibly by law. Whilst we practise best practice to assist customers and remain compliant, we would have be more than happy to offer another taste as it suited on request.
We sincerely apologise your partner was unable to come up to the tasting bar, it is not intended to be rude, but have just 10 places at the bar. We do get very busy and so unfortunately have to limit these places to the guests participating in the wine tasting.
We can only apologise we did not meet your expectations on this occasion within our current business modal, but hopefully we can in the future with an expanded operation.
If there if anything we can do on the short term Amanda, please don’t hesitate to ask. We do highly value repeat business.
Kindest regards,“
My response in return:
Hi ***
Thank you for your reply and explanations.
I understand the compliance with responsible service of alcohol but wish to point out that we did explain to the bar waitress on the day that we had a designated non-drinking driver and we were not driving that day. I also wish to point out that we ordered and paid for more drinks, which was no problem. This seems to be somewhat of a contradiction in your policy. I am all for safe driving and do not drink if I am driving but it does seem terribly unfair to lump all guests in the ‘driving’ basket!
Please note my friend did in fact request another/larger serving but was told it was not possible.
FYI – I attended two wineries in other locations, recently, which was far more generous in their portions. So this was the reason we both felt the portions offered were skimpy.
Having said all of that, I simply wanted to advise you of my feelings in response to your email. I appreciate your detailed response but do not agree with your rationale. I do hope that you are able to expand the food menu in the future and wish you well in your business endeavours.
Cheers,
Amanda”
No further response was received.
This company repeatedly sends promotional advertisements to a facebook group I administer. It’s a group that has an attractively large following and ads on the group are posted for free.
Since visiting this winery, I have so far denied their posts. I don’t want to promote a place I was dissatisfied with, myself.
My Questions:
Should I allow this winery to post free ads in my book group?
Were my expectations of the establishment too high?
Do wineries charge for wine tastings in your area?
Can a restaurant call itself a restaurant, without a restaurant kitchen?
In your opinion, what could they have done better? (besides proof-reading)
Bloggers’ Brains Trust: I would love to hear your response in the comments.
Something to Ponder About 