Rant: Cheapness Has A Price

The vast quantities of cheap imported goods mainly from China is all well and good but there I was stood at the head of a large queue today in an utterly unmentionable shop in Newport this afternoon. I'd seen some mugs that I thought I'd buy for my mum. £4 for 6 top quality boxed mugs (I should have seen this coming). "There's no barcode on these." The woman behind the till barked and I ran over and got one of the loose mugs complete with barcode whilst the rest of the queue tutted and shuffled around. It didn't scan. She went herself and got another two. They didn't scan. Another huge sigh of disappointment from the queue. She put out a call for another shop assistant to deal with the ever lengthening hissing snake behind me. "Look I said, it's really no big deal." She insisted it was. "They were scanning yesterday." The girl arrived and the woman disappeared up the tat laden warehouse in search of further assistance. She returned with a woman who merely picked up two more mugs which also failed to scan. Why does that happen so often? People ask for help and when it arrives, it does exactly the same thing and says, "Well I don't know." I'd resigned myself to persist now I'd been there so long. I was feeling hungry. "I'll need to ring one of the managers upstairs." She put the phone down as if she'd disturbed a hibernating grizzly. "I'll have to ring head office." Now I was finally getting somewhere, attempt to buy six mugs from these people and in 10 minutes I was dealing with head office, give me half an hour and I'd be dining out with the CEO. And then she said, "There's no-one there, could you come back say at the weekend?" I smiled and said "Couldn't I just give you £4 and leave with the mugs?" Why even bother calling yourself a shop if you can't sell things to people who are waving money at you? It dawned on me that the amount of effort she'd gone to and the number of people she'd engaged so that I could have my mugs must have cost more than the mugs. In the end her badge which said Retail Assistant was clearly a misnomer. She couldn't sell me anything despite the fact I showed her the shiny-shiny and she was ultimately no help. I looked back at the tat laden queue as I trudged out defeated; they'd stopped hissing and I detected a faint note of sympathy. I mean what sort of person can walk into a shop where the majority of items on display are less than a couple of quid and leaves with nothing?