A pound's a pound the world around

In case you missed it, a Poundland has opened in the Westgate shopping centre (where the Next discount store used to be). I confess I’d rather snobbishly assumed that it would be full of cheap tat; in practice it’s best to think of it as a fair-sized supermarket where everything costs £1 (or £1-for-2, £1-for-3, etc). Yes, there’s some cheap tat (mostly in the ‘seasonal’ aisle, which is currently full to bursting with glittery Christmas kitsch) but there are also a lot of genuine bargains. There are three basic rules for getting your money’s worth in Poundland:

1. Be strong. Decide what you’re looking for and don’t give in to the temptation to impulse-buy rubbish or stuff you don’t need because it’s “only £1″ — those pounds add up (and besides, buying things that will just end up in landfill a few days later isn’t doing anybody any favours).
2. Be flexible. You might not find exactly the thing or exactly the brand that you were looking for; you’ll probably find something similar.
3. Be aware. Have a good idea of how much things cost elsewhere: it’s easy to assume that “only a pound” is good value and not realise that the same thing may be only 95p in the Sainsbury’s a few doors along.

And because we’re talking bargains, you get two lists of three for the price of one in this post! Here’s three things I didn’t expect to find in Poundland:

1. Baby food. Heinz, Cow & Gate, Hipp Organic, and Organix are currently on offer at 2 jars for £1 (as a comparison, Sainsbury’s do 10 jars for £5 but normally jars are around 60-80p). Lots of other baby stuff too — wipes, bibs, feeding/weaning equipment, etc.
2. Ibuprofen. 3 x 16-tablet packs for £1 (Sainsbury’s equivalent is 30p, Boots equivalent is 37p, so it’s not necessarily a saving, depending on where you usually shop… on the other hand, Boots and many other shops won’t let you buy more than two packs at once). There’s a reasonable supermarket-equivalent medicine section.
3. Bicycle clips. Also lots of other small bike-related stuff: seat covers, handlebar grips, oil, miniature tins of WD40, bells, locks, puncture repair kits, etc. Likely to be sniffed at by serious cycling enthusiasts, but all fine for normal city cycling.

What are your favourite Poundland bargains? What do you think is good value — or not — for £1?

The mystery of the cheap paperback

I really like the idea of ebooks. Screen technology has come on in leaps and bounds; I’m not fussed about the smell of cheap paperbacks; and (contrary to popular journalistic cliché) you can read an ebook in the bath. They’re also easier to read while feeding my baby – I don’t need to hold my iPad up, I only need one finger to turn pages. So when I decided (having watched seasons 1-6 of Morse back to back) to buy a couple of Morse novels, I looked hopefully in the iBooks store.

Searching for “Morse” didn’t find them (you’d think the series title would be in the metadata somewhere, but no) but once I searched for “Colin Dexter” instead they were all there… at £6.99 each. Now that’s not particularly expensive for a new paperback, obviously, but this isn’t a new paperback: it’s a book that I can’t lend to anybody else, can’t sell, can’t give to a charity shop when I’m done with it, can’t even transfer to another device or computer without a fair amount of faff.

Fortunately, these books are easy to find in charity shops. I picked up three Morse paperbacks for £2 each in the local British Heart Foundation shop, and then (like the sticker says) took them back for others to enjoy when I’d read them.

We tend to think of charity shops as all much of a muchness (and perhaps dismiss them as being full of junk and tatty paperbacks) but I’ve found that they often have their own specialities, strengths and weaknesses. I decided to combine my most recent “crawl” with a quick check on which shops stocked what:

Charity shops in Headington (click to enlarge)

Of course, charity shops’ stock at any one time is dependent on the donations they’ve received; but it’s still possible to make some general observations. As you can see, if you’re looking for clothes or books then you’re in luck — these are the bread and butter of charity shops. Videos, however, are (unsurprisingly) on the way out; furniture is too large for many shops to stock; and many charity shops don’t stock electrical goods because of the overheads involved in testing that they actually work. An interesting development I’ve noticed in recent years is that charity shops seem to be stocking more and more new goods, and these are no exception — most had new greetings cards, but some had more inventive new items, from food and toiletries to reading glasses, CDs, and gadgets.

I didn’t include cassettes or records in my chart because so few places stock them any more — in fact nowhere had tapes, and only three shops (Oxfam, Marie Curie Cancer Care, and Cancer Research UK) had any vinyl.

A few notes on the individual shops:

The Oxfam shop has more ‘serious’ books than the average charity shop — more literature, non-fiction, and academic works — as well as sheet music. Of course, the Oxfam shops in Oxford city centre are a better bet for all of these (Oxfam has bookshops on St Giles and Turl Street, and a shop on Broad Street with a music section downstairs) but the Headington shop holds its own. Oxfam also has an already large and ever-growing range of new goods: this branch has Fair Trade food, and ecological toiletries and cleaning products.

There are two Cancer Research UK shops (they used to be for the two cancer charities — Imperial Cancer Research Fund and The Cancer Research Campaign — which merged to form CRUK) with slightly different strengths: the one on the South side of London Road has lots of CDs and DVDs, while the one on the North side has soft furnishings (cushions, curtains etc) and a considerable amount of new goods in their Breast Cancer Awareness range. These are, as you’d expect, all very pink:

Think pink! Cancer Research's Breast Cancer Awareness range

The British Heart Foundation shop had the smallest selection of new goods, with the only item that made it into my notes being the “Best Of My Love” compilation CD. On the other hand, they have a good selection of second-hand DVDs.

CLIC Sargent has the oddest selection: the new goods include not just bags and reading glasses but also Wii accessories, and the clothes currently include lots of remaindered stock from fashion chain Jane Norman (which went into administration earlier this year).

On the way back from Headington, as a bonus, I also stopped in at the Age UK shop on St Clement’s Street. Many Oxford residents will remember that this used to be an absolute Aladdin’s Cave of second-hand stuff, packed from floor to ceiling with bric-à-brac, clothes and books; now, sadly ‘standardised’, it’s clean and bland and strangely empty (and apparently makes a lot less money than it used to before the revamp). However, a helpful staff member told me that the shop is due to change again in a couple of weeks, this time to specialise in furniture and electrical goods. I’ll pop back in later and report back!

Even better than the real thing

I remember the days when a can of Coke was 23p, and it ate up a sizeable percentage of my 50p sweets budget. Those days are long gone, of course, but a can of Coke still feels like a bit of a treat – it’s cheaper to buy a multipack or a 2l bottle, obviously, but nothing quite compares to a can that’s bought ice cold from the fridge and drunk immediately while walking along in the sunshine.

It’s easy to assume that the price of something sealed and branded like that will be the same anywhere you buy it, but of course that’s not true. It’s also easy to assume that, if there is a price difference, then the big supermarkets will be cheaper — but that’s not always true either. I decided to compare the cost of a can of Coke in all the shops a short walk away from home, and the results were interesting:

[View locations on a map]

I was so surprised that the smallest newsagent was the cheapest that I checked the “best before” dates as well, wondering if they had managed to buy cheaper by going for slightly older stock (hey, it works for Wetherspoons, how do you think they can sell beer so cheap?) but there was barely any difference there:

I’m not sure what conclusion (if any) is to be drawn from this, except that prices vary considerably and if saving 22p (nearly as much as the cost of a can all those years ago!) is important to you then it may be worth walking the extra few yards … after which, in this heat, that ice cold Coke will taste even sweeter.

Café side first: comfortable, smart and well-lit, it serves Fairtrade coffee, tea (including lots of herbal teas), milkshakes and juices, plus a selection of cakes which were so tasty they’ve got to be homemade. My latte was excellent, and my beautiful blond assistant enjoyed his strawberry milkshake too. Fireside is so new it doesn’t even seem to have a website yet (though it’s on the Open Guide wiki), and the staff admit that they’re still feeling their way with the opening times (currently seems to be 8am-8pm) but I recommend visiting while it’s still unknown enough that you can get a seat – it looks set to get very popular very soon.

On the Fairtrade shop side, Fireside sells a decent range of organic and Fairtrade foods, notably a good selection of quality Fairtrade chocolates (including Mitzi Blue CD-like chocolate discs, ideal for sending in the post!), and all the Suma organic beers and ciders. Also plenty of organic wines, herbal teas, biscuits and cakes… I didn’t get a complete list because it all looked so good that I had to drag myself away before I bought one of everything!

Oxford became a Fairtrade City in 2004, so it’s not surprising that it’s now so well served for dedicated Fairtrade shops: the Fairtrade shop at St Michael in the Northgate stocks clothes and gifts as well as Fairtrade food (not just snacks but staples like rice and sugar), while the Windmill at Headington has gifts, food, household goods and toiletries – best of all (possibly uniquely in Oxford?) they let you refill your bottles of Ecover products from giant vats, so you don’t have to buy any more plastic packaging. (They’re also the only place I’ve found so far that stocks Dr Bronner’s liquid soap – try it, it’s lovely, and seems to last for ever!)

If you want to keep up to date with Fairtrade things in Oxford, the Oxford Fairtrade blog looks like a good source of information – also on Twitter for more up-to-the-minute news!

Talking of Twitter, buycurious is hoping to get tweeting soon – watch this space…

Everything must go!

Browsing the Oxford branch at lunchtime was a fairly dispiriting experience, to be honest; the queues were enormous, and while there was still a fair amount of stock on the shelves it all seemed to be a bit B-list. In most cases where something did briefly tempt me I found myself thinking “Yeah, but I could get this cheaper on Amazon, eBay, ABEBooks, GreenMetropolis…” Which is probably part of the reason why they’re closing. However, I did pick up a couple of bargains in the computing section, where 30% off a huge O’Reilly book makes a significant difference (if only they’d reduce the weight of the books by a similar amount!) — plus the last copy of The Eco Worrier’s Handbook, which I probably wouldn’t have bought otherwise (so it wasn’t really a bargain).

Borders have dropped their prices over the course of the past week and they’re now offering at least 20% off nearly everything (though not magazines and newspapers) and as much as 50% off some things. There may be bigger discounts to come, but I suspect this weekend may be the sweet spot between a useful saving and a chance of them actually still having anything you want.

Anyway, following two scoops of in-depth research, I can report that the Jaffaholic is delicious. The mixture of cointreau-soaked jaffa cake biscuit, “tangy orangey bits” of jelly, and thick creamy ice cream, results in something containing all the good points of trifle with none of the 70s naffness. It’s a limited edition ice cream, but if they’ve run out by the time you read this, don’t worry: I’ve never yet had an ice cream from G&D’s that wasn’t delicious.

Two double-scoop servings of Jaffaholic. Not both for me, honest.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time in G&D’s recently as the St Aldate’s branch is conveniently situated between my workplace and the Cherwell Singers‘ rehearsal venue. (The choir is probably a bit off-topic for this blog, but if you felt like buying tickets for a concert of Britten’s sacred works on Saturday 5th December, that would be great… just saying.) There aren’t many places where I can spend a couple of hours sitting and reading, writing or working while eating my dinner (usually a ham and pineapple pizza bagel, but occasionally a tuna-and-mozzarella or stilton-and-mushroom melt — all equally delicious) and drinking a generous-sized latte — all for around £6.

Knowledge is good. So is ice cream. You can have both!

Look out for fun ways to get more ice cream, too: my beautiful blond research assistant swears that there’s a night when you can get a discount by turning up with a cow-related item (or maybe he’s just trying to get me to wear that cow costume…), and you can usually win a free scoop of ice cream by answering the quiz question of the week. They’re not usually as difficult as the one in the photo, which said research assistant — an Oxford maths graduate, no less! — sheepishly admitted he couldn’t answer. Fortunately, you don’t have to answer it to get an ice-cream.

So: delicious ice cream, tasty bagels, good coffee, non-compulsory maths, and a nice atmosphere — warm, bright and cheery, music not too loud (and usually good!). All in all, it’s a lovely place to sit and eat or drink, on my own or with friends. Better still, though, G&D’s is open from 8am till midnight every night. Now, I confess that the “8am” end of that isn’t really my scene (I’m normally still fast asleep), though I bet they make a mean breakfast; but at the other end of the day it’s fantastic to know that there’s somewhere to sit and drink and talk all evening when you don’t want to drink beer or fizzy drinks.

G&D’s can be found on Little Clarendon Street, St Aldate’s, and Cowley Road. Cow costumes and cube roots optional.

If you too have trouble keeping up, you might be interested to know that you can get an RSS feed of shops newly opened in Oxford from the Oxford OpenGuide wiki. And if you know of a shop that’s opened recently that isn’t on there, then why not add it? :-) You don’t need to write a whole essay for your page to be useful — just fill in the basic facts and someone else (or you!) can always add to it later.

The OpenGuide does include opening hours for shops, but a new Opening Times wiki has also started recently. It makes it very easy to add opening times (I figure that even if nobody else ever looks at the data I add, it’s a useful way for me to keep a note of when the shops I use are open), and also easy to search for things which are open near you — ideal for those moments when you simply have to know where the nearest open coffee shop is!

There are lots of similar schemes (as a quick Google will show), and if I’d seen Fonebank at the time I’d have probably gone with them instead: similar scheme (though slightly clunkier interface) but 10% of the money goes to Oxfam. (Of course, if you’d rather see all the money go to a good cause, you can send your mobiles straight to Oxfam by Freepost or drop them in at a shop.)

Music Magpie provide a similarly simple system for selling CDs, DVDs and games: just type in a barcode and immediately find out how much they’d pay you for the item:

Five for silver, six for gold...?

They don’t seem to pay much, but you don’t pay postage; and with a minimum of 5 items and a maximum of 500 per batch, it looks like a good way to sell a huge stack in one go with minimum effort. Okay, typing in the barcodes takes a bit of time, but you’d have to do the same if you were selling them on Amazon (where it’d take you a couple more clicks to discover that your CDs were already selling in the Marketplace for £0.01 & hence there wasn’t much point in adding them).

Of course, any of Oxfam’s 700+ shops will gladly accept your CDs as donations, too. The only danger is that you’ll find so many other bargains while you’re there that all your decluttering will be undone! :-)

I thought my luck was in on the jeans front when I saw some gorgeous boot-cut Calvin Klein cords for £20, but unfortunately they had none in my size — I’m normally a size 10, but CK’s 10s were far too wide on the waist, and the only 8s they had were too long for my tiny legs. (They seemed to have a good range of sizes otherwise, though.) But I was fairly quickly distracted away from the jeans by all the bright colours and patterns; to my surprise, there was lots there to appeal to me and most of it wasn’t intrusively ‘branded’. I suspect the stock changes fairly frequently so there’s probably no point in describing it in detail, but there was lots of funky-and-chunky knitwear (and some sportswear too, though more of that on the men’s clothes side). I came away with two lovely tops: a big slouchy jumper (with pockets!) from J S Millenium [sic] (£10) with a trippy design of magic mushrooms and cats:

Magic cats!

And a navy A-line tunic/dress from New York Laundry (£12) with a design which reminded me of Twitter:

Twitter dress

I normally buy most of my clothes from charity shops so I confess these felt quite expensive to me, but I suspect people who are used to buying new clothes wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the prices… and the bright patterns cheered me up, they’re the sort of thing I’ll definitely wear, and they’ll sell well in a charity shop when I eventually give them away! (I suspect there’s only so many times you can wear a jumper which is covered in magic cats before people start to have doubts about your sanity.)

I did, however, manage to resist buying this tshirt (available in purple or black):

One for the boys

Though if I had, I could have accessorised it with some glowsticks (not designer branded, as far as I could tell) for 99p.

Overall, I’d say the Brand Centre is definitely an improvement on Zavvi.