Every year I promise myself that I’ll have all my shopping done before December, and every year I fail utterly and completely.
If the idea of wandering around crowded shopping centres brings you out in hives… Or because like me you’ve previously sustained real injuries whilst out Christmas shopping (thanks to the crazed parents wielding 4×4 style buggies) you’re probably doing as much as you can online.
Mmmm online. At home. No crappy Christmas compilation CDs assaulting your ear drums…
Anyways if you like shopping online, but hate paying delivery charges you should probably check out the Free Delivery Day site. Shop on Friday 9th December and pay nowt for delivery. Nice, huh?
They’ve already got loads of retailers on board including TopShop, L’Occitane, Apple, and Lego.
The idea is the creation of FreeDelivery.org founder Luke Knowles, who developed the American Free Shipping Day in 2008. The idea took off and in 2010, the event became the third-heaviest day of online shopping in U.S. history with $942 million spent across the Internet - an increase of almost 60% over 2009.
50 isn’t my favourite number, but as stand numbers go, stand 50 is pretty darn lovely because it has Bavarian Beer and sausages.
Bavarian beer is pretty nice because of the Reinheitsgebot Order which only permits the use of water, hops and malt as ingredients… Or at least that used to be the case, until it was repealed in favour of the rather more boringly named Provisional German Beer Law which now allows loads of other crap to go into Bavarian beer. Progress. Grumble. Moan. In my day blah blah blah.
What do you need to go with your Bavarian beer? Sausages my friends, sausages.
In Germany they love sausage long time. They have tons of varieties of sausage including Wurste, Frankfurters, Wieners (wieners is a word which will always cause me to giggle), Bratwurste, Rindswurste, Knackwurste and Bockwurst…
What’s the wurst that could happen eh? (D’ya see what I did there?)
You should also read the behemoth linkbait guide written by the scarily clever and ridiculously young Ed Fry. It contains (amongst other things) some pictures of cats.
Thanks to this TED talk I’ve been thinking a lot about why women seem to under-achieve in the workplace. Which is strange when you consider that females typically do better academically (or at least at GCSE level -males are now apparently closing the gender gap for A levels).
So why is this?
Sheryl thinks it’s because:
Women under-estimate their own abilities
Women typically don’t negotiate well for themselves in the workplace
Women attribute their success to other external factors
Worse still - in our society success and like-ability are apparently positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. Essentially if women want to be liked, they’d better not be too successful.
Embarrassingly this is equally perpetuated by both males and females.
I’ve been thinking about what I can do differently. You see, I’m not sure I believe that ’society’ (or men) need to do something to reverse this under-achieving trend. I really think it’s up to us ladies to step it up some.
A little more self-belief, a little less self-deprecation is easy to say, but hard to do. But nonetheless I’m going to try.
I’m also going to do my best to make sure that I’m not one of those people who are busily hating on successful women.
Christmas shopping… Bah humbug.
