Julie's Boggle

In the shopping centre near us, there are a number of less formal sellers who operate from stalls in the main concourse. In the past, I’ve made use of one of them that sold Mediterranean-type sweetmeats — baklava and the like — at quite reasonable prices, but that stall had since moved on.

Today though, I walked right past a new stall selling similar wares. I had one more brief stop to make and then it was home for a cup of coffee. One of these baklava-type things would go nicely I thought, making a U-turn.

After a couple of exchanges with the foreign-sounding girl on the stall, I figured out which one of her pastries I wanted to try. Not one of the variants I was familiar with, but it looked and sounded interesting. Then I picked another more common one to share with Tom.

The girl serving was very friendly, if not very articulate. She made counting motions over my two choices and it seemed that the one I’d chosen to share with Tom was going to be classed as two items. Fair enough, it was quite long. Then she said if I bought 4, I could have a fifth one for free. Hmm, well if I already had three by her accounting, then two more wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

After some hovering over the exotic-looking selection, I picked a further two items. “And one more!”, the girl said with a friendly smile. Oh, guess I didn’t understand her properly the first time. Very well, one more.

Then, after packing them all up into a nice little box, giving me an unsolicited sample of a piece of Turkish Delight, and some vaguely intelligible instructions on storage of my purchases (“never in the cold”), she breezily said “That’ll be ten pounds, please.”

What!? Ten pounds! For that little box? Too embarrassed now though to tell her that I didn’t want any of them at that price. :zipit: Handing over a £20 note: “Um, so, you said it was fifth one free… So that’s £2.50 each?”. “Yes, that’s correct.” Another bright smile as she whisked away my £20 and handed me a tenner. Ow.

Well, all I can say is that this will be the last time I buy from that particular stall… And I wouldn’t give much for their chances of survival in our shopping centre. Those prices belong in Knightsbridge not Shepherds Bush!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.