Skip to main content

A touch of Clas

Wandering around Clas Ohlson before Christmas (via the pre-ordained route beloved of Scandinavian stores), I was struck by the truly bizarre smorgasbord of stuff they sell. One minute, it's stationery and household electricals. The next, it's... err... lifejackets.

Lifejackets?

Not just the odd one either. A whole wall of them.

Tumbleweed billowing past the shelves, as nearby shoppers head off to find a Bosch ALB 18 LI Leaf Blower.

It's difficult to imagine quite why Clas Ohlson anticipates this level of demand. And given that no one would ever suspect that they actually sold lifejackets anyway, who could possibly be buying? Is there casual passing trade?

"Did you get the lever-arch files, darling?"

"No, but I tell you what. I found something else to stop you drowning in paperwork."


Sink or swim: Swedish retailer Clas Ohlson tries to corner the market in lifejackets in suburban London


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more