How to Make Visitors Feel Welcome

We were walking from the campsite at Sandy Haven into Milford Haven, following the coast path through Gelliswick, when we came across a planning notice.

Normally, planning notices are about as exciting as a council tax bill. This one wasn't.

The former Gelliswick caravan park is being brought back into use, but the plans go rather further than simply reopening a campsite. First comes camping and parking. Then, if the scheme develops as intended, woodland walks, sports areas, a coffee shop, workshops, a community resource centre, green space, eco-therapy and rural crafts.

In other words, somebody has had the radical idea of taking a redundant coastal site and turning it into something useful for both visitors and local people.

It immediately made us think that, once it opens, we might come back in the motorhome. It is right by the sea, on the coast path, with Milford Haven within walking distance. Given that the old caravan park took touring caravans and motorhomes, it is exactly the sort of place we would use.

And that made me notice something else. A surprising amount of parking around here is free.

No app. No QR code. No machine demanding your registration number, inside leg measurement and first-born child. You can just park and go somewhere.

It turns out there is a reason for some of that. The free car park at Sandy Haven isn't Pembrokeshire County Council's at all. It belongs to Herbrandston Community Council, which describes it as one of the few car parks in Pembrokeshire that remains free to use. Around Gelliswick there is also plenty of roadside parking where, remarkably, nobody has yet found a way of monetising the act of stopping a car.

Pembrokeshire County Council charges quite happily elsewhere.

At Christmas, though, the County Council has made its car parks free at weekends specifically to encourage people to visit the towns and support local businesses.

So they know perfectly well that free parking can encourage people into town to spend money. It just seems to be an insight with a rather short seasonal shelf life.

And that is what makes the Gelliswick project interesting. The whole idea is based on encouraging people to come, stay, walk around, drink coffee, spend a bit of money and perhaps wander into Milford Haven as well. The point is to make the place worth coming to, then make it easy to stay.

Councils do have a habit of looking at a car park and seeing a tidy little revenue stream. Charge £5 and the spreadsheet says you've made £5.

Except perhaps somebody takes one look at the charge and doesn't bother. That's a coffee or lunch not bought, a shop not visited, perhaps an afternoon spent somewhere else. None of that appears in the parking department's figures, naturally.

Of course parking sometimes needs managing. Where spaces are genuinely scarce, sensible charges can encourage turnover and stop someone leaving a car in a prime town-centre space all day.

But there is a considerable difference between managing parking and treating every arriving visitor as a source of income.

We were already doing exactly what this sort of regeneration is supposed to encourage. Staying nearby, walking into town, buying things, looking around and thinking about coming back.

If you want visitors to bring money into your town, perhaps don't start by charging them for the privilege of arriving.

Outsourcing Dog Ownership

Somewhere along the line, owning a dog stopped meaning owning a dog.

People buy a dog, then pay someone else to walk it. They pay someone else to groom it. They pay for doggy day care. They hire pet sitters when they go away. There are dog psychologists, dog trainers, dog spas and, presumably, dog therapists for Labradors struggling with separation anxiety.

An entire support industry has materialised around people who want the emotional benefits of owning a dog, without any of the accompanying inconvenience.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm very fond of dogs. But dogs are, by their very nature, inconvenient. They need exercise when it's raining. They need feeding when you'd rather stay in bed. They need attention when you're halfway through a television programme.

That's the deal.

Yet we've somehow convinced ourselves that paying three different people to perform the actual dog-owning bits still counts as dog ownership.

The economics are fascinating. A person buys a dog for companionship, then spends a small fortune outsourcing the companionship.

At that point, one has to ask an awkward question.

Why not just get a cat?

Cats have spent thousands of years perfecting the art of requiring almost nothing from human beings beyond occasional food and a warm windowsill. They don't expect a daily march around the local park. They don't need a haircut that costs more than a gentleman's barber.

Cats understand modern life.

Dogs, on the other hand, still operate under the quaint assumption that if you bought one, you might actually want to spend time with it.

Perhaps that's why cats always look faintly amused.

The Banking System Has an Undo Button. It Just Won't Let Me Use It

This morning I intended to pay £7.28 into my NatWest Reward account and managed to pay £728 instead. I think this may be the 4th time I have done something similar, so clearly the decimal point and I have unresolved issues.

Fair enough. My mistake. But that is really where the interesting bit starts, because the transaction itself took seconds. I entered the amount, authenticated it and off it went. NatWest's systems apparently saw nothing particularly remarkable in my paying roughly 100 times the amount I actually intended to pay.

You might have thought that a banking app could spot that sort of thing. It knows the balance. It knows the amount being paid. A simple message saying, "You appear to be paying £728 against a balance of £7.28. Are you sure?" would probably have saved everybody some trouble. Banks are quite capable of detecting unusual transactions when they want to, so this hardly seems beyond the wit of man.

Still, people make mistakes, and software generally allows for that. The problem is that once I have made this particular mistake, I cannot correct it myself.

The £728 has not disappeared. It is sitting as credit on my account. It is still my money. NatWest knows where it came from, knows where it went, knows that both accounts are mine and knows that the receiving account is now substantially in credit. Yet there is no straightforward way for me to reverse the excess payment back to the account it came from.

Instead I have to contact the bank.

That sounds simple enough, until one actually tries it. The automated voice system could not understand what I wanted because, apparently, my problem did not fit one of its approved categories. It had a stock number of things it was prepared to discuss and "I accidentally paid £728 instead of £7.28" was not among them.

At one point I was directed to another telephone number. I rang it. The number was no longer in use.

Eventually I got through to a person. By then I had already been through the bank's security process once, but I had to go through it again. That proved rather more fraught than it needed to be, which added another layer of irritation to a problem that was, at heart, very simple.

And then came the explanation that the transfer back was still "pending", which was why it could take 24 to 48 hours.

That is where the whole thing becomes particularly difficult to defend.

If I use the account to pay a retailer, the transaction is authorised immediately and, from my point of view, the money is gone. I do not get 24 to 48 hours in which everybody pauses for reflection. Yet when the issue is simply returning an obvious excess payment to the account it came from, suddenly the machinery needs a day or 2 to process it.

I appreciate that card settlement and bank transfers are not technically identical processes, and I am not claiming that the banking system literally moves every penny from one ledger to another the instant I tap a card. But that rather misses the customer's point. The system is perfectly capable of making the consequence of my payment immediate. What it apparently cannot do is give me an equally immediate way of correcting an obvious mistake.

And that is the part that grates, because banks have spent the last few decades shifting almost every routine task on to the customer. We transfer our own money, set up our own payments, manage our own cards, authenticate ourselves, download our own statements and generally do most of the things that once required a visit to a branch. Mostly this is an improvement. I have no great desire to go back to queueing behind somebody paying in the contents of a biscuit tin.

But there is an obvious asymmetry here. When automation saves the bank money, I am trusted to manage things myself. When automation would allow me to correct an obvious error, suddenly a bank official has to become involved.

I can pay almost anybody in Britain in seconds. What I cannot apparently do is return my own accidental overpayment to the account it came from.

There may be perfectly sensible regulatory or technical reasons for putting controls around this sort of transaction, and I am not suggesting NatWest has deliberately designed the system so that it can sit on my £720.72 for a couple of days and earn a fortune from it. That would be a fairly heroic claim over £720.72.

But there is still an interesting question of incentives. Making it easy for customers to move money into an account is useful to the bank as well as the customer, so the systems exist and they work quickly. Spending money to make it equally easy for customers to undo their own mistakes is rather less obviously useful to the bank.

And my £720.72 is only my £720.72. Multiply similar errors by however many customers make them across the banking system each day and the total is presumably not trivial. Whether banks make any meaningful profit from those temporary balances is almost beside the point. They certainly have little commercial incentive to make the correction process frictionless.

From the customer's point of view, though, the solution does not appear especially exotic. If an account has been put into credit by a payment from another account in the same customer's name, allow the excess to be returned to the originating account. Authenticate the customer in the usual way, limit the amount to the credit balance and send it back where it came from.

That is essentially an undo function.

If I accidentally delete 5 pages of something in Word, I do not have to telephone Microsoft, negotiate with a voice system that cannot understand why I am calling, get referred to a number that no longer exists, authenticate myself twice and then wait 2 working days for somebody to restore paragraph 7.

I press Ctrl-Z.

Banking has somehow reached the position where I can make the error instantly but cannot undo it instantly, even when there is very little ambiguity about what has happened or where the money should go.

The technology clearly exists to move the money. I have demonstrated that part myself, repeatedly.

After the 4th encounter with this particular problem, I am beginning to suspect that the decimal point is not the only thing that could do with redesigning.

Marshmallow Inbound

There are no missiles called Marshmallow. Nor Fluffy Bunny. Nor Gentle Breeze. Nor Cuddles.

Instead we have Storm Shadow, Hellfire, Brimstone, Tomahawk, Meteor and Sea Viper. Apparently it is not enough for a missile to contain several hundred kilograms of high explosive and arrive at considerable speed. It must also sound as though it has been named by a 14-year-old boy designing a computer game.

Storm Shadow is particularly good. As if the several hundred kilograms of high explosive weren’t sufficiently intimidating.

I understand why this happens. Weapons need names, and nobody at the Ministry of Defence is going to stand up at a procurement meeting and announce that Britain’s latest long-range precision strike weapon will henceforth be known as Trevor.

But why not?

Imagine the intelligence briefing.

Multiple Trevors launched from aircraft over the Black Sea. Frankly, I’d find that more worrying.

There is obviously an unwritten rule that military equipment must sound aggressive before anyone has even switched it on. You can almost picture the committee rejecting Mild Concern, Firm Rebuke and Quite Cross because they didn’t sound sufficiently lethal.

And yet the name makes precisely no difference to what the thing does. Call Storm Shadow Marshmallow and it still flies hundreds of miles, finds the coordinates you gave it and rearranges the target fairly comprehensively.

Indeed, Marshmallow might have a certain psychological advantage. Nobody wants to be the commander who has to report that his headquarters has just been destroyed by a Marshmallow.

Forget Hellfire.

Marshmallow inbound.

The LNG Jetty That Disappeared

Walking around Milford Haven, I noticed something rather odd.

The LNG jetty is there. You can see it. Satellite imagery shows it. Ordnance Survey mapping shows it. Ships berth at it. I was under the bloody thing.

Yet on one Google map layer, it simply vanishes.

This is not some forgotten fishing quay. Milford Haven contains 2 of Britain’s 3 LNG import terminals and is a rather important part of the country’s energy infrastructure.

Presumably it is just a mapping anomaly - different datasets, simplified mapping, perhaps some peculiar treatment of industrial infrastructure.

But there is something wonderfully modern about a vast LNG terminal, handling a significant chunk of Britain’s gas supply, being physically impossible to miss while apparently not existing on the map.

Perhaps energy policy works the same way.

When a Coffee Cup Needs Instructions

We stopped for coffee while walking the Pembrokeshire coast path at Milford Haven.

Around us were tankers, tugs, pilot boats, jetties and terminals. An entire harbour full of things designed on the fairly sensible principle that engineering has to work.

Then I was handed a coffee cup that required instructions.

Push.
Pull.
Blast.

Blast?

The thing looked like a cross between a takeaway cup and an escape room puzzle, with four flaps around the top and no obvious place from which to drink.

Then came the sugar sachets. Outside. Beside Milford Haven Marina. You tear one open and the empty wrapper immediately attempts to make for Ireland. And, of course, there is nowhere to put it. No tray, no little waste pot, nothing. So you're trying to control hot coffee, sugar, a spoon and several tiny airborne pieces of litter while simultaneously working out how the cup operates.

Fortunately, because we were walking, we had our own cups with us. So we poured the coffee into them. Which rather raises the obvious question. If a specially designed coffee cup has to be decanted into another cup before it becomes practical to drink from, what exactly has been achieved?

The coffee was excellent and the service was friendly. This isn't really about the café. It's about the modern urge to redesign perfectly functional objects. For centuries, the brief for a cup was simple. Hold liquid, protect fingers, allow drinking.

Job done.

Now it apparently has to be innovative, sustainable, distinctive and accompanied by operating instructions. Milford Haven is surrounded by engineering worth hundreds of millions of pounds, all ultimately judged by one question.

Does it work?

Our coffee container didn't.

The solution turned out to be a cup.

The £93 Aeroscreen That Nobody Can Buy

There’s a curious bit of psychology going on with an aeroscreen I’ve been watching on eBay.

A new one is generally about £141 on a Buy It Now basis, which is the normal asking price and something anybody seriously looking for one will establish fairly quickly. Then up pops an auction starting at £93.

Now, as an ex sales executive selling high-value equipment, I’m hardly unfamiliar with anchoring. I spent years around pricing, negotiation and buyer psychology, so I know perfectly well what that first number does. What amused me was that, despite knowing all that, it still worked on me.

The moment I saw £93, I stopped thinking of the aeroscreen as a £130 or £140 item and started thinking that perhaps I could nick it for under £100. So I put in a snipe at £95.50.

The 50p is my own little bit of bidding psychology. Plenty of people bid nice round numbers, so I tend to add something odd on the end in the hope that one day somebody else has bid £95 and my £95.50 wins it. Whether that is clever or merely another example of auction psychology is open to debate, but I’ve done it for years.

Anyway, the auction ended and I didn’t get it. Nobody did. The reserve hadn’t been met.

That was the point at which it struck me that the seller had probably made a fairly fundamental mistake. I don’t know what his reserve is, but I’d guess somewhere around £125 to £130, which is perfectly plausible if comparable new aeroscreens are sitting there at £141.

The problem is that he hasn’t anchored the buyer at £125 or £130. He’s anchored them at £93.

Once £93 is in your head, £95 feels sensible, £100 still feels like a bargain and £110 starts to feel as though the bargain is disappearing. By the time the bidding gets anywhere near £125, you’re no longer thinking that you’re still saving money against the £141 Buy It Now price. You’re thinking that the whole reason you became interested in the auction has vanished and you might as well just buy one elsewhere.

That is what I find interesting, because I knew all of this before I bid. I knew the market price, I knew what anchoring was and I knew exactly what that £93 opening figure was doing, yet I still approached the auction as a chance to buy a £141 item for £95.50 rather than as a chance to buy a £141 item for perhaps £125.

The seller, I suspect, thinks he is creating excitement. Start low, attract attention, get a few people bidding and let competition do the rest. That can work perfectly well if there are enough bidders and enough competitive heat, but this is an aeroscreen. It isn’t an iPhone. It’s a niche item with a relatively small pool of buyers, and most of them will probably know roughly what a new one costs.

So instead of attracting people prepared to pay £125 or £130, he risks attracting people like me who are interested precisely because they think they might get lucky at £95.50.

The reserve then makes the problem worse, because it reveals that the attractive opening price was never really available in the first place. The listing says £93, while the seller has a quite different figure in his head. Those 2 numbers are doing completely different jobs.

I suspect he’ll relist it, and if he relists it on exactly the same terms I wouldn’t be surprised if much the same thing happens again. Somebody bids £95, somebody else perhaps goes to £99 or £103, the reserve isn’t met and the auction ends without a sale.

If I genuinely wanted £125 for it, I’d be inclined to start somewhere near £125 and forget the reserve. Then £125 becomes the reference point and the buyer approaches the auction thinking that this is roughly what the thing costs. Alternatively, I’d simply put it up at £130 Buy It Now and let somebody decide whether they wanted it.

What I wouldn’t do is advertise £93 and then quietly refuse to sell it for anything like £93, because the seller thinks he is selling an aeroscreen when what he is actually selling first is an expectation. At £93, the expectation is that somebody might get lucky. At £130, the expectation is simply that this is what the thing costs.

Once you’ve put the wrong expectation into the buyer’s head, it can be surprisingly difficult to get it out again.

And that, I suspect, is why the aeroscreen may keep coming back. And why I bought another at £141.

Results Day, Brought to You by the News Industry

School results day has become one of those annual media rituals that now arrives with all the subtlety of a royal wedding.

Television crews descend on schools. Reporters wait outside the gates. Teenagers are encouraged to wave bits of paper in the air while photographers search for the perfect shot.

And I find myself wondering when this became normal.

When I sat my exams, you didn't even go to school to collect your results. You got an envelope through the post. You opened it at home. You told your parents. End of. The world carried on turning.

Of course, some people were thrilled and others disappointed. Exam results mattered then, just as they do now. What didn't exist was the assumption that every personal milestone had to be converted into a public spectacle.

Every year we see exactly the same photographs. Smiling pupils leaping into the air. Groups hugging each other. Proud teachers standing in the background.

What we don't see are the pupils whose results didn't go according to plan.

We are constantly told that young people are under unprecedented pressure, suffering unprecedented anxiety and struggling with unrealistic expectations. Yet we seem perfectly happy to transform one of the most stressful days of their lives into a media circus.

Not everything needs a camera crew. Not every success requires a photograph. Not every disappointment needs an audience. An examination result is a piece of information, not an entertainment format.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still think an envelope through the letterbox had much to recommend it.

You opened it.

You dealt with it.

And then you got on with your life.

Baked Beans

I noticed a tin of baked beans in the cupboard while reaching for a coffee pod - yes, I know, not exactly eco-friendly - and found myself looking at the words Baked Beans.

Baked beans.

They are not baked, are they?

I had never really thought about this before, which is odd because I have been eating them for most of my life. You open the tin, tip them into a saucepan, heat them up and eat them. Or put them in the microwave, which is what most of us actually do now. At no stage does baking occur.

Apparently they are soaked, sealed in the tin with the sauce and cooked under pressure. That is perfectly sensible, but it is not baking. It is beans being boiled inside a tin, although I accept that this would not be a particularly attractive thing to print on the label.

Presumably there was once some connection with beans being slowly baked in an oven, and the name simply carried on after the method had changed. Or perhaps people thought baked sounded nicer. It does. Baked suggests warmth, a proper kitchen and something taking its time. Pressure-cooked suggests the food has been interrogated.

But we have all gone along with it without question.

I do not feel cheated. A baked bean is still a baked bean, even if it is not baked, which is itself a slightly ridiculous sentence. They are cheap, filling and very good on toast. I shall continue buying them.

It just bothers me slightly that the entire product is named after the one thing that does not happen to it.

I went into the cupboard for coffee and came out mistrusting beans.

The Algorithm Thinks I'm Commercially Useless

Hay is convinced Amazon is listening to her. She looks briefly at something online, or mentions it at home, and within hours she is being followed around the internet by adverts for it. Shoes, furniture, kitchen equipment, whatever it happens to be. Amazon has apparently stationed a small commercial intelligence unit in the sitting room.

I don't get that. I can spend days looking at motorcycles, carburettors, sidecars, welding equipment, classic car parts and tools of increasingly doubtful necessity, yet the adverts mostly leave me alone. The exception is motorcycle clothing. I have been bombarded with motorcycle clothing, but unfortunately for the advertising industry I won't buy that new either.

That was when it occurred to me that the difference is not that Hay is being listened to and I am not. The internet has almost certainly profiled both of us perfectly. The difference is that Hay looks at things which are still being manufactured. Most of the stuff I research was last available new when John Major was Prime Minister.

I am not usually looking for a current product from a retailer with an advertising budget. I am looking for a used carburettor from a dismantled Yamaha, a sidecar built before anyone had heard the phrase lifestyle brand, or a Triumph panel being sold by a man in a shed who regards email as an unnecessary complication. There is no glossy marketing campaign for any of that.

Even when the algorithms find something they can sell me, such as motorcycle jackets, they run into the same problem. I look at the advert, decide the price is ridiculous, disappear down a small rabbit hole of reviews and protection ratings, then buy one second-hand from Facebook Marketplace.

So the internet is not failing to understand me. It understands me all too well. Somewhere, a computer has reduced me to: retired male, motorcycles, classic cars, engineering, high browsing activity, almost no chance of paying full retail price.

Hay is a potential customer.

I am an administrative overhead.