Saturday 7 April 2012

It's been a while!


It's been a while since the last entry - the first 3 months of this year have been total murder for Amanda and I - but you don't want to know about our problems.  No - I said you DON'T want to know!  But our customers have remained loyal and the orders are still coming in - Thank you everyone.


Slimkicker.com - For those of our customers who are interested in keeping healthy (as opposed to getting as much bacon-flavour as possible!) and like BaconSalt and Mother Nature's Seasoning because of the lower salt content, natural ingredients, calorie-and-fat-free, etc.  There's a new website/iPhone app called Slimkicker.com that has been in deveopment for a long time and now is live.  It's a sort of social network and target-making, target sharing site, for slimmers, keep-fitters, and even folks like me who do try (honestly I do!) to keep their dietry excesses to a reasonable level!  They are a fun group, so please take a look  and join.


Royal Mail Rip-Off - Meanwhile, our "dearly beloved"*  UK's Royal Mail has decided to revamp their concept of how to attract business . . . .   They are doubling your average customer's shipping costs!  While an order of just one jar of BaconSalt, Mother Nature's Seasoning, or MaltSalt has always been a bit expensive, and we've never really made any money on those due to trying to keep the "shipped price" reasonable, now there's gonna be a minimum package shipping  rate of 750 grams (that's SIX jars' weight!).

So, from the end of this month, we are going to have to change our policy of always showing the "final price" on our pages, and just add a fixed 750 gram shipping charge to every order of 6 jars or less.  A lot of our regular customers are used to buying 3 or 4 jars at a time, where that made the overall price very competitive (and allowed me to have a half pint of draft bitter on the proceeds!), so the solution from the end of this months is to buy SIX jars (of any of our products) at a time, and not to let the Post Office make another Treble Scotch out of it as well.

* - The term "dearly beloved" often reminds me of "dearly departed" - which is where the Royal Mail is going to be soon. Small mail-order companies, whith small, light products are not going to stand for this, and we're all watching for competition moving into the market, and then the Post Office will be making NOTHING from us, or from our customers.  Their web site says "sorry, but we can't afford to subsidise small packages", but are they really sorry? 

The mail that used to always deliver the next day (often before you left for work, for one low charge).  Since privatisation they have laid off staff, closed local post offices, and yet they still want more money from us for a " service" that includes a 2-tier tarrif  (actually 3-tier, because if you want it delivered early the next day you pay even more!) and a "Target delivery time" of 2-3 days, second class, where it used to be a guaranteed delivery next day with just one class.
[/end rant]

Bacon BBQ Rub - J&Ds have come out with a "new" offering;  a bacon rub for your Summer BBQ.  (I hear our UK and Northern European customers saying "What Summer?"!).  Seriously, we have blogged rubs using BaconSalt (as well as our Eastern Spices), which we believe are very good, but this one is especially aimed at the BBQ.  Would you like to see this on our offerings?  If so, please drop us a line at stuart@crazy4flavour.co.uk and we'll try to incorporate it.  We were going to bring a few jars in our current shipment from J&D's but then we realised that the jars are a lot bigger - about 3 times the size/weight (but not too much more expensive) and that we'd have a lot more complication on our web shop with the pending "Darned Royal Mail" charging changes.  If a lot of you are interested, then we'll work out a way of handling it.

From Amanda and Stu - Have a great Summer, together with family/friends, and plenty of flavour to go with it!

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