Coventry's new Lidl opened last week but we were away at the Leeds Festival. We poppped round tonight to check out the store. They must have had a busy opening weekend because quite a few of the shelves were empty or only half-stocked.

Back in 2004 when I lived in Aberystwyth, I used to regularly shop at Lidl. The food is really cheap and it's possible to spend around £10 on a balanced weekly shop and have so much food it was a struggle to carry it home.

Written 27/08/08 but backdated to when it happened

The Leeds Festival site has a supermarket which sells a lot of packaged convenience food. Sunday is the last day of the festival so the shop usually has all food items as buy one get one free.

When we went to the shop on Sunday evening we noticed a slight anomaly with some prices. Cakes which used to cost £1.00 for a pack of 2 suddenly cost £1.80 per pack. Packs of 4 of cookies for £1.50 had somehow turned into packs of 2 cookies for £1.50 each. Cheeky ****ers.

Seen in a shop at a motorway service station on the M1:

A few years ago we went to an event organised by Lidl to drum up support for a store in Binley. The planning application failed but they recently bought the old Somerfield site on the Binley Road in Stoke.

The last time we drove past, a few weeks ago, the site was still looking empty. There didn't seem to be anything above ground level. We drove past this evening and the building work seemed to have progressed quite well. The brick shell was in place and it looked very 'shop shaped'.

You can tell it's a Bank Holiday, because the roads are busy and it's raining.

We were 'up North' yesterday, to attend a Hamster Show at Lymm, in Cheshire. We only came 2nd in the hamster racing this time.

The track used for the Hamster Racing

The Old Cross, in the centre of Lymm.

This morning, we went to the Cheshire Oaks shopping centre, near Ellesmere Port. We got there shortly after opening time, and it was already busy. By the time we left there were lines of cars snaking through the car parks, looking for spaces. When we got to the motorway, there was a long queue of traffic on the opposite carriageway, trying to leave at the junction. They can't have been wanting to visit Ellesmere Port itself - the town isn't that interesting.

We were in the Vans shop at the Cheshire Oaks, being slightly confused by shoe sizes. Normally, American shoe sizes are just British sizes +1, so we're used to a size 11 being a 'normal' size 10.

There were some shoes on the shelves labelled size 11, but with a sticker on saying 'UK8.5'. At first we thought they had been mis-labelled but then we realised they were women's sizes. To add to the confusion, they looked more like men's shoes. Ah well. I'm sure they do it deliberately to confuse us.

According to our local Tesco, 1 litre of milk which costs 74p, works out to be 12.4p per litre.

Ikea is celebrating is 21st birthday, so they have 21% off most items in the shop. We went this morning because we needed to buy some picture frames. We ended up buying a cabinet for the front hallway, which was almost too big to fit into the car. A bit of pushing, shoving and seat re-arranging and we managed in the end. There was a taller version of the cabinet which we thought of buying but decided not to. The reason wasn't anything sensible like 'how will we get it home' but 'we won't be able to reach the top shelf'.

Still in Ikea: the hand dryers in the toilets are much more powerful than most. They sound a bit like mini jet turbines and force the air through so quickly your hands dry in a few second. When I walked in, the person ahead of me had put his hands under the dryer then let out a squeaky 'ooh' or surprise.

This afternoon we were in the 'garden' section of 'The Range', which is a furniture / homeware / garden / pet-supplies shop. As we walked through the water feature part of the garden section, I saw what has to be one of the ugliest, most tasteless garden fountains ever. I just had to take a picture on my phone.

Update 27/02/08:
We were in the shop again and I saw another fountain, which might be even worse...

Coventry's new Ikea store opens tomorrow. The local news has been full of scare stories about how the traffic to the store will throttle the ring road and bring the city to a standstill. As a countermeasure, the council has set up signed diversions especially for Ikea traffic.

The shop was actually open this morning, although only to 'Ikea Family Card' holders. We had received a letter telling us about this sneak preview and a voucher for free delivery if we spent over £150, so we went along to see what the shop was like and to pick up some furniture for the front room (which we are in the middle of decorating).

There were a lot of security guards and crowd control barriers outside the shop, but a surprising lack of people. The shop was fairly quiet inside too. Apparently it's the tallest Ikea in europe, according to the announcement we heard on the instore 'radio' while we were in the restaurant. One advantage of this height is the view - you can see a lot of Coventry from there.

We managed to buy enough furniture to qualify for the free delivery. Everything arrived this afternoon, just as we were about to resume stripping the wallpaper in the front room. Our hallway is now full of rolls of carpet and flat-packs of furniture.

There were predictions of around 15,000 visitors to the store today, but I don't think they will have had anything like that many. They are expecting 20,000 tomorrow for the Grand Opening. There are 'Gift Cards' for the first 500 in the queue, and plenty of special offers and price reductions, so I expect there will be quite a few people lining up outside when the shop opens.

Beware of multi-buy bargains at Tesco.

We were in Tesco and were going down one of the aisles which specialised in foreign food. They had some Polish chocolate on a 'buy one get one free' offer so we bought a couple of bars.

The first bar we tried was described as Milk Chocolate bar with creamy filling. It was quite tasty and had a sort of Baileys Irish Cream sort of flavour. I had a quick look at the ingredients and noticed that it contained alcohol. I thought it was a bit unusual that it wasn't described as a chocolate liqueur, but alcohol and 'Baileys flavoured' didn't seem too strange.

They were only small bars (45g each) and we were sharing so we opened the 2nd one. This was toffee flavour. We were surprised to see that it also contained alcohol. I think I'll buy all my chocolate from Poland from now on...

At the weekend, Emma placed an order with a company called Cybercandy. They specialise in selling foreign sweets and snacks. One of the things ordered was a 'Mystery Box' which contains a selection of out of date food. We were impressed with the selection we received.

The main part of the order.

The contents of the mystery box.

Earlier this week, Apple Computers advertised a hard drive at about one tenth it's intended price. As you would expect, a lot of people placed orders. Apple realised their mistake and decided to change the orders without telling anyone.

The original order said:

Iomega 1TB Value Series Hard Drive with USB 2.0 Interface
TM258ZM/A £16.98 1 £16.98

but a few days later they strangely changed to:

DYMO LABELWRITER LARGE ADDRESS LABEL-ZML
TM258ZM/A £1.00 1 £1.00

The product code was the same but the price and description had changed. There was nothing on the page to explain what was happening. A phone call to the Apple Store revealed that they admitted their mistake and were cancelling the orders. It was a whole day before an email was received explaining the situation, in fairly patronising terms:

Dear Apple Store Customer,

We regret to inform you that your recent order for the Iomega 1TB Value Series Hard Drive. Which you placed on the online Apple Store has not been accepted.

Due to a temporary inaccurate pricing issue on the store, the price of the product was listed incorrectly as £19.95. Whereas the correct online Apple Store price is £199.95 i.e. the listed price was approximately 10% of the correct price.

We would like to draw your attention to clauses 2.4 and 2.5 of the Apple Online Store Terms and Conditions under which if Apple cannot accept your Order, we will contact you.

Furthermore, we would like to draw your attention to clause 2.6 of the Apple Online Store Terms and Conditions under which Apple reserves the right to cancel your order in case of a price error on the Apple Online Store.

We understand the inconvenience that this pricing inaccuracy may have caused you, and we sincerely apologize.

Kind Regards,

The Apple Store

The wording of the T&Cs was obviously chosen to allow them to weasel out of any such mistakes - they must have learnt from the mistakes of others, such as when Argos advertised a £300 television for £3. Apple aren't breaking any laws but they probably won't win any new friends this way. I'm not suggesting they should honour all the orders and sell the hard drives at such a giveaway price, but some other goodwill gesture would have been better than just an apology which was worded to make the customer sound like they were being told off.

A: When you are Adsa.

A couple of days ago we bought 2 packs of turkey from the fridge in our local Asda. Both packs were in the same fridge and had identical stickers on saying 'BUY ANY 2 FOR £4' even though they were slightly different prices. When we got home we noticed that the 'multibuy' discount hadn't been applied so we took them back to complain.

The person on the customer services counter and a supervisor both tried to convince us that the offer only applied if we bought 2 identical packs. One pack happened to be 'normal' turkey whilst the other was their healthy range. We tried to explain that the word 'any' meant we should have been allowed to do what we did.

The dictionary at answers.com includes the definition: one or some or every or all without specification. For some reason the people at Asda seemed to be using their own definition and tried to convince us that 'any' meant 'only from the identical range of produce'.