Category: Business and Commerce
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The Uselect chain of supermarkets, which used to sell reasonably priced products from Tesco, has closed down. Hong Kong supermarket chain Uselect winds down operations amid relentless retail slump It used to be quite good, and there was a time when I could get delivery from them through Honest Bee but (unsurprisingly) they closed five…
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A small follow up to my post on HKTVMall. Just to say that their customer service really isn’t great. I ordered something that was supposed to be available within 4-7 working days. Then just two days later I noticed that they had updated the order with a delivery date – the following day, at a…
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In Hong Kong your supermarket “choice” is largely between shops owned by Li Ka-shing (ParknShop, International, Fusion, Taste, and the Great Food Hall) and Jardines (Wellcome, Market Place by Jason, Threesixty and Olivers). It’s no surprise that this lack of competition leads to high prices and poor service, so alternative options are always welcome. HKTVmall…
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Happy New Year and a quick follow-up to last month’s post on Tesco and other British supermarkets. There do seem to be some bargains amongst the Tesco own brand products in U購select (and Vanguard*), including their basic cheese range (as pointed out by Private Beach in the comments), olive oil, nuts, and salad dressings. They…
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About 20 years ago, Carrefour tried to expand into Hong Kong and were driven out (in part) because their prices were too low. Since then, no foreign supermarket chain has tried to challenge the ParknShop / Wellcome duopoly. But at least we have a bit more choice now, including products from UK supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury’s…
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Buy an iPhone, iPad, or iPod in Hong Kong and you will pay no more than the US price – so they are cheaper here because Hong Kong has no sales tax. But try to buy a Nexus 7 and you will pay 20% more, because they are all “parallel imports”. English books are usually…
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LinkedIn is the “professional” equivalent of Facebook, and – up until recently – rather less annoying. Yes, there are some people who try to use it to promote their company’s services, and, no, I really don’t need to know about tiny changes to my contacts’ CVs, but I can ignore most of that. It also…
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The price of Kindle books continues to baffle. There are plenty of bargains, but an equal number of titles that seem hugely over-priced. If you want to know when the prices do drop, then eReaderIQ is a useful service. You enter the Amazon ASIN code and either a target price or a price drop and…
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Interesting article in Vanity Fair about Microsoft’s problems. What I hadn’t previously realized was that they use the stupid “stack ranking” system. Maybe it worked well at GE in Jack Welch’s days - it’s possible that firing 10% of employees every year was a smart strategy for them – but whoever thought that was the…
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It amazes me that cities are still so keen to stage events such as the Olympics. Far from increasing the number of visitors it actually drives them away. Hotels put up their prices and most people assume that flights will be either unavailable or very expensive, so they go somewhere else. Locally we had this…
Ordinary Gweilo 