Woolworth’s

Some overviews

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Woolworth_Company

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolworths_(United_Kingdom)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolworths_Supermarkets

Origins

https://youtu.be/A0JlIKnVIT4?si=1ktfV8DtHosxIY3h

Changing consumer habits

Obviously ordering online changed the game, but one other factor has increasingly impinged … the downside of city centres and shopping malls … the main reason I don’t go to town now to shop … safety.

For me, it’s not the carparking issues, nor plod on the roads, nor the traffic today … it’s not those … not price, not laziness.  It’s safety. And I list safety under these headings:

Imports from other cultures

This completely changes the shopping experience … wariness about sudden physical attack, esp. when aging and not driving. For me to walk into our town, once a pleasurable experience … it’s now fraught, requiring eyes in the back of the head, constant scanning, auto-defence-reactions of a ‘no beg pardons type’ … we get one shot at this, needing to disable as many as poss in the first seconds … no fun whatever.

The poisoned sky

Maybe I’m the only person in Britain to feel sick after having gone out, then returned home … throat, eyes, ears, stomach … not good if out for more than thirty minutes, plus I need a loo within range which is not public … for reasons of hygiene, plus what one finds in there now.

Customer service

You wot?  From trying to take money for faux charity to queue length, the only alternative is those bleedin’ auto-checkouts … no way.  Ditto with pubs, if you can still find a good one.

Plus one more thing … if you look at the Woolworth’s philosophy of customer selects and pays at the till … knows the price and quality are what they are, with no hidden rip-offs, plus friendly, indigenous staff … stores can’t do that now, esp. in city centres with high ‘visiting’ cultures … it’s dangerous for stores now, dangerous for indigenous customers.

Is online safe and straightforward?

Until mandatory Q codes, digital ID, all the rest of the bollox.  When all that comes in, then new solutions must be found.

t’s Not Just Going To Be Women Who Demand This, Is It?

When Bella Hadid said, “Working on your period should be illegal,” the internet didn’t erupt. It barely reacted at all. There were barely any headlines, no viral debates — just silence.

 Because who cares what some scatterbrain z list celeb spouts off about? Thankfully for once.

Which, ironically, mirrors the way society has long treated menstrual pain: something to be ignored, minimised, and endured in silence. In the same British Vogue interview, the supermodel added: “We should literally ban women working on the week of their period. And the week before, to be honest.” For some, it may have sounded extreme but it touched on a very real, often invisible crisis: the chronic pain and shame many people who menstruate are forced to carry alone.

Note that she's not demanding womrn who suffer this shouild be given the right to request time off - no, she demandsa blanket ban on all women! Hardly reasonable, even by crazy sleb standards.

According to a recent Superdrug study, 36 per cent of Gen Z women would consider leaving a job due to poor menstrual health support.

Genz & the world of work is hardly a good fit, whther male or female... 

One in five say their period has already held them back professionally. Just 31 per cent feel comfortable telling their employer they need time off for menstrual symptoms. Nearly half feel pressured to power through severe pain for fear of being seen as unprofessional.

You just know who is going to want a piece of this action should any kind of leniency be brought in, don't you? 

Only recently has the UK government started to acknowledge the scale of the problem. A report from the Women and Equalities Committee last year found that “medical misogyny” across the NHS, education and the workplace has fuelled widespread ignorance around gynaecological health.

Medical misogyny certainly exists, but it reveals itself in far worse ways.

Meanwhile in Spain, menstrual leave is already enshrined in law.

Ah, Spain. That powerhouse of industry. 

The D Day landings at Normandy

There being so much on the MSM plus the net, this will be a commemoration but the fine detail can be found in most western publications. For those born on the Planet Zog:

The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during the Second World War. Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day (after the military term), it is the largest seaborne invasion in history. The operation began the liberation of France, and the rest of Western Europe, and laid the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front.

(Express)

Naturally we commemorate the planning, decoys, assembly and operation … especially the bravery of those participating … most westerners, plus others have at least some family connection with the event.

We’ve reached that point I’m afraid

There was an interesting American tweet:

Whilst the Americans have the solution in hand, but not the problem in quite the same way we do … we in Blighty have the problem, but the solution is denied us.  In short, there is no way to defend our citadels without having thug plod bashing the door down en masse for an aging pensioner or largely defenceless lady.

Remember Myleene Klass brandishing that kitchen knife at the two brat teenagers who’d swarmed over her back fence?  Plod went for her big time.

Days ago, it was an elderly man whose home was attacked by local doctors/engineers … he died. Isolated case?  Nope, we know that from soc-med, obviously not from the MSM.

So … in Britain … solution?  Well, for each one of us, it’s a case of which hill we’re prepared to die on. The slightest move to defend oneself or others, e.g. family, someone vulnerable, sees you in prison at the mercy of hundreds of doctors/engineers.

Better to just let them torture us, rape our wife and daughters and thus we escape the doctors/engineers who’ve filled the prisons?  It’s an increasingly more important personal decision to make … what with the sheer numbers Starmer and Sunak, back to Cameron and Blair/Brown, have planted in cushy accommodation in every town, awaiting the call to attack.

……

And here’s yet another issue Julia and I must decide. The moment any of your comments appeared below in a Lucy Connolly style, urging any violence whatever upon these doctors/engineers, failing to fully love and welcome our guests … then both of us, plus you the commenter too via your IP are in danger of swatting and prison terms. We can’t see your IP but ggl can.

Thus I, as the post author, have no option but this I’m afraid:

This applies, of course, to this post alone … sorry, but I’m not subjecting Julia and Grandpa to the consequences of my writings … nor you the reader.  This post only, ok?

Tribunal Shenanigans...

'Sad though it is to have to say this, it seems to us to be likely that Mr Habib is, unfortunately, ill-equipped to cope with the nuances of social interaction in the workplace, and lacks the sort of social skills that might have eased tensions that arose around the mug incident.' 

Were there other clues? 

Mr Habib also tried to claim that his manager denying him five weeks annual leave to go back to Pakistan for a series of weddings, which he requested just a month into his employment, was race discrimination.

Aha! 

As well as the race discrimination claims, Mr Habib alleged that during his time at Currys he had been sexually harassed by a female co-worker. However, his allegations were dismissed as 'simply incredible'.

Tribunals are usually so gullible, he must have had a face only a mother could love. 

At the end of March, Mr Habib was dismissed by Currys and was not given an opportunity to appeal. His unfair dismissal claim was struck out because Mr Habib had not been employed long enough to make that claim. However, he was awarded three weeks' notice pay because there was no mention of a probation period in his notice and therefore he was entitled to one month's notice not one week.

The comedic value of a Pakitsni or Indian being in a dispute with Cuttys. of all stores, was not missed. 

In the hands of maniacs ... how did it happen?

Reading some of Julia's posts just now and our styles are different ... her ability to find all this minutiae is quite something. In my case, my mind was described by Tom Paine: "His is a magpie mind," meaning, I think, that I gather bits and pieces from everywhere to make the nest (post). This one's no exception.

First off is our reader Toodles at Unherdables who sent this:

I'd just looked up this:

And last evening had gathered these:

Indeed Bring Back the Sausages is in totall thrall to his EU and WEF masters, to the point he's going to bring nuclear war upon us because of a Chucky Clown in Kiev.

Now yes ... I'd agree, in the light of the above quotes and thousands of others ... I'd sgree it's all Kabuki theatre and sabre rattling ... except that Storm Shadow missiles are not theatre, launched by a madman in Kiev and another in London.

The eternal question, in these censorious and home-swatting times ... is just when comes our flat refusal to play their games ... right across the country?

......

Late note: "Stigmatised […] by Starmer" ... that's rather good from Allison really.

A Glimpse Of A Hideous Future

At 3.12pm on a sunny spring afternoon in St Albans, Yasser Afghen reaches for the iPhone in his jeans pocket, hoping to use the three minutes before his son emerges from his year 1 primary class to scroll through his emails. As he lifts the phone to his face, Matthew Tavender, the head teacher of Cunningham Hill school, strides across the playground towards him. Afghen smiles apologetically, puts his phone away, and spends the remaining waiting time listening to the birdsong in the trees behind the school yard.

And this is seen as a good thing, that a grown adult behaves like a chastised schoolboy on sighting the headmaster? 

Yes, Reader, because the leader of any cult wields enormous power, and mark my words, this has all the hallmarks of a cult. 

A one-storey 1960s block with 14 classrooms backing on to a playing field, Cunningham Hill primary feels like an unlikely hub for a revolution. But a year ago, Tavender and the school’s executive head, Justine Elbourne-Cload, began coordinating with the heads at other primary schools across the city, then sent a joint letter to parents and carers across St Albans: the highly addictive nature of smartphones was having a lasting effect on children’s brains. The devices were robbing children of their childhood. Could parents, the letter asked, please avoid giving them smartphones until they turned 14?

And obviously enough didn’t screw the letter up and hurl it at the nearest wastebasket with a muttered ‘Jumped up little pipsqueak!’ to prevent him going ahead. 

A year later, it’s clear that St Albans is still far from a smartphone-free city for under-14s. And yet, something small and potentially significant has shifted.

Oh, really? 

...in May, at the start of the summer term, Tavender and his colleague Elbourne-Cload convened a parents’ meeting. “It was the most well-attended meeting we’ve ever had,” he says. “About 80 people turned up; normally we get about 40 to 50. We tagged it on to the end of a meeting about reading – which is the most critical thing in primary education – and just eight people turned up to that one.” The teacher who was leading the reading session was disconcerted to see crowds of parents outside the door, all staring at their phones, waiting for the meeting about phone use.

How very dare they! Who do they think they are? 

Tavender, with his grey V-neck jumper (an adult version of school uniform), grey trousers and greying beard, is not an obviously revolutionary figure. He talks about his fondness for watching golf. His delivery style is a bit wearily monotone, as if he’s reminding the room for the 15th time of what he considers to be acceptable behaviour in the lunch queue.

Well, not every cult relies on a charismatic leader, clearly… 

“When you’re ready for your child to stop being a child, give them a smartphone,” he tells them, running them through a series of slides provided by Smartphone Free Childhood. “WhatsApp is the crux of all evil, in my mind.”

Anyone else would have said drugs, underage sex, knife culture, but no, a simple useful messaging app is the bogeyman, according to this idiot. 🙄 

Most powerful is his readiness to talk about his own struggles. “I’m addicted to my phone. I absolutely am.”

Converts are always the worst, aren’t they?

By the end of the meeting, many parents have agreed to become ambassadors and work to persuade fellow parents to sign the Smartphone Free Childhood pact, in which they promise to delay purchasing their child a smartphone until they turn 14.

Yes, this is, after all, how cults work - hook in the newbies and send them out, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, to proselytise!

Six months after the Southwark initiative was announced, Mike Baxter, head at City of London academy, said pupils had been issued with mandatory phone pouches. Any pupil found with a smartphone out of its pouch and switched on would have it confiscated for a week. “We’re confiscating about 15 a week,” he says. The school is doing random bag searches. “You have to rigorously implement it.” Next year, the school will prohibit ownership of smartphones for all children in year 7; any child who comes to school with one will have it removed for a month.

Gosh, if only they took the same hard line with disruption and assaults….

But a quick walk around St Albans suggests that there may not yet have been a fundamental shift. Teenagers in school uniform queueing up for hot drinks in the city centre after school awkwardly balance iPhones, school bags and coffee cups.

The kids are alright... 

What if Brits refused to fly to western Europe and the Med?

There’s this first:

The operative words are “the EU doesn’t want”. Not the individual nations and/or their resorts. No, it’s just this communist toad squatting on the Euro nations and milking them for all the money they can, the politburo growing ever more bloated as time goes on.

And Bring Back The Sausages is their devoted disciple.

There's really no such thing as AI

There is, however, machine learning and the programmers gradually become Dunning-Kruger globo-psychos themselves, wreaking their engeance on humanity.

Time To Start Rooting Out The Infiltrators?

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that NHS employee Omar Abdallah Mansuur, 39 – an influential imam – faces claims that he decreed a fellow Muslim should get the death penalty for insulting the Prophet Mohammed. His broadcast was made to tens of thousands of followers and is thought to be the first time a cleric in Britain has made such a threat.

In some of his inflammatory diatribes, Mansuur appears on video from inside St Thomas’ Hospital – directly across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament – where he works in procurement.

YCMIU, could you? And these days you no longer have to…

Staff describe bespectacled Mansuur, a British national of Somali origin who lives in North London with his wife and children, as unassuming and polite. But his social media profiles tell a different story.

Shocker! 

On Friday, after the MoS passed on its evidence, the hospital said Mansuur had been suspended pending an investigation.

And hopefully, the police will be taking an interest too. How many more of these have infiltrated our institutions?