Getting better & better – not

Words: 449 Reading Time: 1 minute 30 seconds

My nearest Sainsbury’s has a number of large, temporary signs outside proudly declaring that “We are improving your car park”. Let me disabuse them.

It is true that various pieces of construction and earth-moving equipment are trundling about, making an uncommon mess and changing the car park’s configuration. But it is not my car park. It is their car park and they would not be “improving” it if they did not expect solid payback as a result.

Of all the things I would have changed about this Sainsbury’s, it would not have been the car park.

1. The store is quite small, so I would have made it larger.

2. I have yet to see all checkouts staffed all at the same time – even the busiest of times – so I would have changed that.

3. And they are routinely out of routine items, so I would have worked on “improving” that.

None of this has been done.

I am a regular shopper at this site. Was I ever asked what I would like “improved”; even once?

Umm, no.

This is Sainsbury’s idea, so naturally the improvement is angled towards their priorities, rather than mine. It does not seem to have occurred to them that by addressing what the customers want their expected return might be even bigger that the one they have calculated.

Sadly, Sainsbury’s are not alone in this propensity by the big battalions to portray their selfish decisions as being in “our” interests by deliberately false or misleading statements.

1. The repeated message put out by the BBC (taxpayers’ money!) that DAB is wonderful and will make life better for everyone has long been discredited, but they continue to pump out the propaganda at everyone else’s expense.

2. ‘Because you’re worth it’ – which, if the company really believed its own publicity, would result in them giving you the product without charge.

3. And ‘Delays Possible’ before major motorway works that run for miles without a sign of any activity by man or machine. The arbitrarily imposed lower speed limit means that delays are not just possible, they are inevitable, because whatever hour of the day or night I pass through I cannot drive at the speed customary for that stretch of road.

The less sceptical among us may be drawn in by these blatant falsehoods; the rest of us grow weary as our delicious language is hijacked in the service of mammon.

With our words we tell our stories and through our stories we sell ourselves and what we offer. How are we to do that if the words no longer say what they mean? We cannot mangle the moving parts and still expect a functioning mechanism.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #1

I was recently asked to deliver a talk entitled “Staying Positive In Difficult Times”. I accepted the invitation, but I changed the title.

The words we use are important. They reflect our thinking just as much as our thinking reflects our words. If times were difficult I would not want to stay in them, positive or otherwise. Nor would I want to stay positive under them, about them or while they last, although I might choose to stay positive through them.

I am equally twitchy at airports and railway stations where I am invited get on the train, or on the plane. No thanks! I’d much rather get in than get on!

And why would I wish to stay positive only in difficult times? Wouldn’t staying positive serve me just as well, whatever way “so-called” times turn out? If your outlook truly serves you well, it should do so whatever the circumstances. And if times were difficult would I want to stay?

The fact is the phrase “staying positive in difficult times” is a complete oxymoron and that’s lesson one: watch your language and do away with labels.

For someone who is positive times are neither difficult nor easy; times are neither happy nor sad; times are neither good nor bad. Times just are; they have no innate character that is true for everybody, everywhere, every when.

Times are what you make of them. It is quite possible for times to be both good and bad at the same time. Don’t take my word for it. Dickens said it most famously in the very first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Isn’t that just like now?