Foreign Perspectives

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One thing that constantly confuses is that whenever we have a trip to Spain the diesel that we’ve bought there seems to last considerably longer than when the diesel that we ordinarily buy in France.

A LOT longer too. For example, we filled the car up Friday a week ago in Spain, have been running around quite a bit during the week and only needed to get some more last Friday. Ordinarily we’d have been expecting to top up at least once during the week.

Weird, huh?

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If you’re selling property in France, you soon find that it’s an expensive business when you go through traditional estate agents. Typically you’re looking at anything from 5% to 10% of the list price going in charges.

However, it doesn’t need to be like that. If you have property for sale in France, you could try out the newly spruced up website at France Property Shop where instead of a percentage that ends up costing you tens of thousands of pounds for a typical property, you’ve all of £70 to pay for six months advertising.

Naturally, you can’t depend on it selling your property but that’s the case for any estate agent too. Certainly, if you have your pricing right, it’s going to be worth trying out.

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The staffing levels of post offices often seems to be very much politically led and rather than being subject to whatever local demands would dictate seems merely to reflect that it’s considered as effectively a job creation scheme.

Thus, although the nearest post office to us is on a main road and in quite a large village, it has the same number of staff as the post office in the small very quiet village where our son goes to school. The net effect of us is that what should be a fairly well staffed post office is almost always virtually unuseable. Not only are the queues frequently out the door but they close quite often to catch up with the backlog of work that this generates.

By contrast, the post office in the little village rarely has queues and always leaves us with a good impression. However, a large part of that good impression is no doubt due to that office being effectively well overstaffed for the level of business which it receives.

Whilst I wouldn’t want to deny the small quiet village its own post office, that service should really be part-time with the staff working the rest of the time in the larger one thus improving the service standards considerably for a large number of people.

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