Record company rip offs

I mosied down to Fopp today at lunch to have a gander at all and sundry in the way of books, DVDs and CDs.

I was dismayed and a little horrified to discover a few things. For some reason Warner haven't been content to issue yet ANOTHER Smiths best of in two formats. They've now reissued the original singles on 7" format at £4 each!! For that price, you can pretty much buy the actual albums. Most of the b-side material is on one of the many many compilations (think "The World Won't Listen" or "Louder Than Bombs"). You need to either be stupid, a diehard Smithie or someone who can't handle listening to more than 3 minutes of music at one time to wanna buy these.

The other shocker I saw was yet ANOTHER reissue of Echo & The Bunnymen's "Ocean Rain". I bought the last reissue with four or five bonus tracks. Now they've tacked on a CD recorded live somewhere or other and jacked the price up from around a fiver to £18. That's around £13 for a throw-away live disc people - much like the Joy Division reissues.

The last disc I saw was "iSelect" by David Bowie. This was the CD that was free with the Times in the summer. The price on this throw away collection of tracks EVERYONE has? £19. That's right - £19. It's 12 tracks. You could buy "Best of Bowie" and a couple other albums and still have change from £19.

I had to leave the shop at this point. Why oh why does the music industry STILL think they can get away with these types of practices?

October means jack the prices up!

I was out and about yesterday - as were most people - and my favourite coffee shack, Caffe Nero, decided to use October to jack their prices up. This was at first quite jarring, even though it amounts to only 10p per cup of their hot brown loving.

They've had the lowest prices on the high street for some time and any increase was seen as an affront to this secret pact we had - I'd patronise them and they'd stay relatively low priced. Of coures, I felt betrayed, but soldiered on.

At lunch time, I mosied to Tesco to get a sarnie and a ludicrously low-priced bottle of Pepsi Max (41p). True to form, Tesco had decided to use October to jack their Pepsi Max price up to 45p.

Now I realise to combined outlay of these two products amounts to roughly 14p, but I find it quite interesting that both items have been low priced for ages and then - in some sort of odd synergistic twist - are both increased in price on the same day.

I think the cosmos is slowly conspiring against me.