Foreign Perspectives

Buying from a specialised shop often means that you pay a little more for the same product than you would from a supermarket. After all, the supermarket operates on the basis of “pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap” which is an excellent way to go for standard items like beans and whatnot.

However, move into a specialised area like sat nav and you sometimes need that little bit of expertise even when you’re sure that you know what you’re doing.

For example, we bought a TomTom on Christmas Eve in El Corte Ingles. That’s a fairly upmarket department store and therefore there are specialised departments for such things so it’s effectively in-between the supermarkets and the specialised stores. In practice, they were quite happily selling units that had a fault. Fair enough, they obviously can’t go around opening all the boxes and testing them but any that were returned went straight back on the shelf to be sold again. Stupid, eh?

So, we returned that one and bought the next model “up” in a supermarket for ‚€20 more. Unfortunately, although the shop was close to the French border they are piled high with models that can’t be used in both Spain and France as it’s the one model from the range that doesn’t use a memory card (which isn’t obvious as they cover up the relevant information on the box with their security label). So, we’ve to return to Spain this week to see about getting a refund for that too.

Perhaps we’ll get one third time around!