We have just attempted to breed our rabbits - 2 females with two males. We are hoping that the breeding was a success as we will be looking forward to tender rabbits for Samhain this year! We will be following up our rabbit breeding later on this evening with another session as we think it was a little too warm for one couple, who simply enjoyed a cwtch. I am not sure if rabbits breed in the cooler time of the day, or if they like it hot! Either way, one couple went at it, but a repeat performance this evening can only make things more certain!
0 Comments
Yippee we havehad a week of good buys this week, we have been on the hunt - and when we decide that we want to buy some thing cheaply, we tend to get it for far less than the retail price.
We needed two new females rabbits for our breeding stock, and instead of heading to the local Pets at Home and spending £50 for two - we hunted the local free ads and found two for £10 - what a bargain. I do not like Pets at Home - and have written about them here - http://peapodwine.weebly.com/our-blog/appaling-custoemer-service-pets-at-home We also needed two cages for hte two new rabbits. At £50 each in pets at home, we decided to do our hunt and found them for £25 each in a local DIY shop. However, the trainee on the till only charged us for one. her manager was stood over her shoulder, so I thought she would pick up on the mistake and correct the sale. However, the manager just initialled the reciept and told a strapping young assistant to carry the cages to our car! What a bargain! So now we have two new cages and two new females - we are hoping to start breeding them today! I don’t like shopping at Pets at Home. I have previously written about their inflated prices for meat rabbits and cages - http://peapodwine.weebly.com/our-blog/bringing-home-the-bacon-well-at-least-the-rabbit Sometimes, needs must and we had to overlook the poor service and inflated prices. We needed chicken feed - due to an oversight and bad planning on my part we were running rather low - so I hopped online and ordered 2 sacks of layers pellets and 1 sack of corn feed to be delivered to my local store. Brilliant - they would be there the next day the Pets at home website said before I ordered it. Paying £39.50 for chicken feed is a bit pricey, but we were not able to get to our local feed store before we ran out of feed. I completed the online process, paid via paypal and received my paypal receipt for the goods - but, no email confirmation from Pets at Home - nor was my order showing up in my Pets at Home account. An hour later, I telephoned Pets at Home customer service to find out if my order had been processed. I spoke to some one called Louise, who seemed proactive and told me that the system had crashed after taking my payment but before the order had been processed. She asked me to send her an email with the details of the order and she would process it manually. Brilliant, email sent and I put the issue to one side, having confidence that Pets at Home customer service would provide . . . customer service. Alas, a few hours later - I still had not received any email confirmation, Louise had promised that she would email me. Back on the phone to customer service - Louise was busy on another call, but she would phone me back I was told. Did she heck. I waited for the phone call, 4 hours later I got back on the phone to chase her up. This was my third call to Pets at Home to work out if they had processed my order, or just taken my cash. Talk about poor customer service from Pets at home! This time on the phone, I did manage to get through to Louise, who reassured me that she had processed the order and it was all sorted, no need to worry and that my order would be delivered to my local branch the next day, and that I would receive an email very shortly. Did this email come? Did it heck - Back on the again for the fourth time, only to be told that Louise had gone home for the day and would be back after the weekend. This time, I spoke to a customer service agent called Hannah. The information I gathered from Hannah, is that the first Customer Service advisor, Louise, had not sorted out my claim and had not actioned my delivery for the next day. I am sure that you can imagine my frustration that after 4 phone calls, waiting for call backs and emails that never appear, Iam told absolutely nothing has been done. Upon telling Hannah that I was most disappointed in the level of “customer service”, or lack of that I had received that day - she called me Patronising! Yes, Patronising because I was not happy about the dire service I had received. Hannah took a complete lack of corporate responsibility, not wanting to offer any form of apology for the issue and just passed the blame onto the system crashing and her colleagues not doing their job properly. After 25 minutes on the phone to her, being insulted and having to give the same details over and over again, she eventually sent me a confirmation email that my chicken feed would be delivered the next day. In all, it had taken me 8 hours of phoning, and waiting from payment to receiving a confirmation email. I took the details of head office as I did not believe the standard of customer service warranted being called service at all. Hannah, also said that she would email her manager to put her side of the story forward. At least phone calls are recorded so her managers can hear her calling me patronising on several occasions. Issue resolved - in the process I was left with further distain for Pets at Home. Would I shop there again? No chance. At least my chicken feed would be delivered to the local store the next day. Alas, this was not the last of the problems. Next day, I was heading out and received an email from Hannah, asking me to call her about my order. Apparently, their systems had crashed again and the delivery could not be processed in the warehouse. However, considering the issues I had had previously with the poor customer service, systems crashing and frequency of phone calls I had to make, they had put my chicken feed into a taxi to be delivered to my local store. At least I would be able to collect my items. Not only had they hired a taxi, but they had refunded my order so the chicken feed was free. I would like to thank Hannah for eventually offering a good level of customer service and taking a proactive approach to corporate responsibility. As for the initial customer service advisor - Louise, I can only assume that she was new and under training, or just had no passion or care about her role. Would I shop at Pets at Home after this experience? Not if I can help it! As part of our mission to reduce household costs and bring our spending back into a low ly budget we have had to rethink spending on all areas of our outgoings. This includes pets, sorry Simon. We have sourced cheaper dog food, the own brand from Wilko’s which is just as good quality as the leading brands such as Pedigree, and we have substituted the dry kibble with rice. In time, when our rabbits are of breeding age, we want to be able to harvest enough rabbit for not only ourselves, but also for the dog to eat a very healthy rabbit and rice diet. This will reduce the pet food budget down to under 10p a day - or less ;) With the general election looming in the UK, over the past few weeks I have been considering which of the political parties to vote for. These days, it is no longer a two horse race between labour and the Tories, but a new wealth of idealists are spreading their political propaganda. I am sure that many of these would not come close to picking up the governmental reigns in parliament, nor having a clue on how to effectively run the British Empire. There have been many chuckle worthy statements mentioned in the manifestos of late, but the one that I am currently rabbiting on about is a statement that the Green Party have launched. If they do get into power (unlikely), they wish to bring in an outright ban on keeping rabbits and chickens in cages. I quote from the Green Party website This has many issues both on a personal and an economic level. More eggs would have to be imported from Eastern European countries, where animal welfare is of a lower standard. Not only would this drive the price of eggs up, but also increase the carbon footprint and food miles. Is this really the aim of the Green Party? On a personal note, I can just imagine poor little Josephine giving her pet rabbit one final cuddle good bye before her Dad takes it to the bottom of the garden to snap its neck. After all, it would be the law! I do believe that animal welfare should be mentioned in political manifestos, but when such concepts have not been thought through, one does have to wonder how these so called educated politicians would rule Great Britain! |
About usWe are prepping our way to reduce the carbon footprints, food miles and cost of living in both an environmental and financial way. Archives
August 2016
Categories
All
|