Post Office reorganisation threatens jewellery trade

COMMENT -

Everything is being done to favour the big stores.  Free parking in out-of-town shopping centres, while town centre shops have to cope with rising rates and parking charges.

Now they're hunting internet shoppers and independents who depend on small deliveries from suppliers and don't run their own fleets of trucks.  It's the only way to stop them - make postal charges so high that it's not economic to ship small orders any longer.

That's their plan, but will it work?  Probably not.  Suppliers will always find a way to get round the blockages and hurdles put in our way.  Absorbing postal charges will be necessary, but the reach of the internet, whether business to business as we prefer at Curteis, or direct to the public, as more jewellers are either doing or thinking of doing, is unstoppable.

BRUSSELS PLOTS 'EU-WIDE' PARCEL SERVICE

What British mail vans could soon look like if the European Commission gets its way

Sunday November 25,2012

By Geoff Ho

 Have your say(12)

THE cost of sending a package in theUK is set to shoot up under controversial European Commission proposals.

Its internal market commissioner Michel Barnier is poised to launch a consultation into the state of Europe’s delivery market which will also look at costs to consumers.

It is being hailed as a first step towards creating an EU-wide integrated parcel delivery market.

Barnier is expected to say that logistics groups are not providing a basic, reliable and affordable international package service for consumers.

They fear he will try to cap their charge to customers for delivering overseas packages and make the business unprofitable. Logistics group say they would then have to hike domestic charges to recoup the money lost on their international services.

An industry source said: “If the EC forces the cost of international parcel delivery, say you’re sending a package from London to Paris, to non-economic levels, delivery groups will have to make for up that and it’ll be through the domestic audience.

Under these plans it could cost more to send something to Edinburgh than to Paris

An industry source

“Charges should reflect the cost of international transit. We don’t want the EC to get us to the point where it costs more to send something to Edinburgh than it does to Paris.”

Freeze Business Rates - or cut them

Thank you for emailing your MP in support of the Freeze Business Rates campaign. It would be great if you could also tell your friends, family and customers to do the same. Many MPs will no doubt have seen for themselves how their local high streets and town centres have been affected by retail closures - more than 1 in 9 shops on the high street are already lying empty - and it is important to remind them that the Government can do something about this. Every email really does count.     If you would like to find out more about the campaign, you can do so atwww.taxpayersalliance.com or www.brc.org.uk. Once again, thank you for your support. Yours sincerely, Matthew Sinclair Chief Executive, TaxPayers' Alliance Stephen Robertson Director General, British Retail Consortium Chris Brook-Carter Executive Editor, Retail Week

At last. Trench being dug bringing fibre optic cable

UPDATE 20.11.2012 - The line's gone dead.  No activity noticed since they dug the trench across our land.  BT are so boring and predictable.  Nothing will happen is the safest prophecy you can make where they are concerned.

We were promised the fibre optic link in July.  It's now November.  This time however we can see turf being dug and something is happening -  belatedly.  We can't let the pressure off just yet, however.  There have been no roadworks and digging up of the 'blocked ducting', as yet.

But was that just an excuse?  And the cable will be on its way for Christmas.

Internet speeds should go up to be fast enough to receive a photographic image of any product in a second, down from three seconds.  We can get on with our SEO website and recruit more online enquiries   Next year should see a continuation of our accelerating sales trend.  October was 30% higher this year than last, which even with an extra day in the month this year, is going some in the current market.  The catalogue and the packages launched in September, and hit the spot.

Assay figures have been trending down at about 15% year on year.  Does that mean we added 50% to our market share in a month?  Three more months will give us our sales trend with more confidence.

Germany is easing Britain out of the EU

The blogs have the story.   Germany is easing Britain out of the EU. What will it mean for British manufacturers?  Will trade be made more difficult for British sellers into the EU, and will importing from the EU become more bureaucratic?   It seems unlikely that Germany would want to harm her own exports by raising tariff or other barriers to British exporters.  Yet politics is a funny game, and Germany might decide to make trading more onerous to teach Britain a lesson for not rushing to join the Euro, and bow down to Berlin.  It is Angela Merkel who is easing Britain out of the EU, not Conservative backbenchers as The Sun suggests. People sourcing jewellery from the EU might find that in future it pays to keep more suppliers inside our own borders. Media: Britain on the way out? Richard North, 05/11/2012   on www.eurefendum.com With his infinite capacity for getting it wrong, doyen of the Westminster lobby, Tevor Kavanagh, is sounding off about a subject of which he knows vanishingly little – EU politics. The Great Ego has finally sussed that there is something amiss in this department, and with a characteristically small-minded approach to the subject, displays the Germanophobia always just under the surface with his breed. "David Cameron", he writes, "should tell Germany's Angela Merkel the truth at talks in Downing Street this week – Britain is on its way OUT of Europe", then adding, "The Iron Chancellor may think she has ways of making Britain salute the EU flag, but her host has lost the power to do so". One dreads to think what contagion he might have picked up had he read this blog, but slumming it is not Kavanagh's style. Had he done so last June (below), he might have seen that the situation is exactly the reverse of what he paints. It is Merkel who is easing the UK out of the EU, and Mr Cameron who is struggling to stay in.  Similarly, The Great Ego misreads the "rebellion" of the 53 Tories who "joined shifty Labour to demand a CUT in Brussels' bloated budget". This, Kavanagh decides, was "an irreversible turning point — not just for Mr Cameron, but also for Britain as a sovereign nation state". From now on, he says, "no Prime Minister, Tory or Labour, can quell the head of steam building across all parties for an in/out referendum".  For once, though, I agree with Andrew Rawnsley of the loss-making Observer, on one point at least, when he brands the rebellion as "completely bogus". It is not real and neither will it achieve anything of substance. In a way, though, it doesn't really matter what Kavanagh writes, or what Sun readers think. The newspaper was once a power in the land, but on this issue it is so far behind the curve that its wailing no longer has any relevance. Our fate, to a very great extent, is being decided in Berlin, but not in the way that Kavanagh thinks.