Importer Wholesaler Santa’s Warehouse of Warners Bay NSW and PRD Nationwide real estate franchises of Newcastle and Lake Macquarie have jointly launched an annual Christmas Lights Competition for residents in their area.

Santa’s Warehouse normally opens their Warners Bay NSW warehouse in Lake Macquarie up to the public for a huge clearance sale from early November till a few days before Christmas and sell a lot of Christmas lighting including rope lights and outdoor rope light motifs, so they have decided to sponsor a local Christmas lights competition with $1000 of Christmas decorations and Christmas lights as the main prize, with a special prize drawn at random so that not only those homes with a really big show of lighting have a chance to win.

Participants can register at either the PRD Nationwide Newcastle & Lake Macquarie website or at santaswarehouse.com.au Christmas lights competition page and entry is free.

 PRD Nationwide real estate Newcastle or Lake Macquarie will erect a sign with details of the competition at every registrants home so that the community can be made aware of the competition and find out where to register themselves or where to find other homes to visit.
 Mark Kentwell, residential property director of PDR Nationwide Newcastle said that the two companies are hoping to get more people in the community behind the Christmas spirit of “peace on earth and goodwill to all men”

Dell offer Laptops & Mini Tower PCs, Desktop Computers, Monitors, Printers & Ink, Electronics & Accessories online to consumers and small businesses. Their products can be ordered on their internet store and are delivered direct to your home or business.

Dell’s website, as well as their recent mail catalogues, offer “0% for 24 Months” You would think this means 0% interest or cheap finance right? Rather than pay cash, you may as well conserve your cash flow and take the interest free finance offer right?

On Dell’s website dell.com.au under the heading “Products” you will find a subcategory “Finance” where it explains their offer as follows:-

“Dell Financial Services (DFS) can provide simple and convenient finance solutions for business users. Dell customers can take advantage of easy finance programs with affordable monthly payments.”

Further down the page you will find that this product is then called a lease. When you finally read all of the way down you will find that its not a finance lease as we know them. It is an equipment rental deal.

When I phoned them to ask, they explained that customers pay the full retail price of the goods over 24 months. After 24 months if you still want to keep the goods you need to buy them at their then fair market value, estimated (but not agreed) by Dell at around 20% of the purchase price. (Paying 20% more then to buy the goods would not be a nice surprise or a cheap interest rate).

So please note that their offer is an equipment rental agreement, nothing to do with finance or interest rates?  Misleading to say the least!!

Pre-Christmas shopping is urgent. Don’t wait till next month if your planning a major consumer products purchase. Harvey Norman is not kidding when he advertises that his furniture prices will be going up. The Australian dollar drop in recent months has seen the Australian dollar (AUD$) exchange rate drop from a high of US$0.97 in July 2008 to currently under US$0.62.

That difference is more than a 35% drop and will translate to a real 35% increase in the prices that importers and wholesalers (and consequently retailers) will now have to pay for any new goods manufactured overseas compared to July.

Since Australia effectively has no manufacturing industry (thanks to unionism and Workcover, forcing costs that the market simply can not bear), then whatever you are planning to buy is going to be manufactured overseas and 95% of foreign manufactured goods are quoted and paid for in US$.

The supply chain of course always has a lot of goods in warehouses at pre-crash prices but these are currently being pushed out at discount prices to keep sales targets up and wont last too long. So unless your next large purchase is from that existing stock (and only for as long as retailers/importers remain prepared to sell at pre dollar crash prices), then it is for sure that your large ticket product that currently might have a sale discount, is going to have a hefty price increase shortly.

The bad news is that future projected interest rate cuts are going to keep the dollar low or send it lower. In the large scheme, supply and demand determines the level of our floating $AUD dollar exchange rates. When our interest rates are cut, international investors buy less Australian interest rate securities, so there is less demand and resultant downward pressure on the Australian dollar exchange rate.

Do your shopping early this Christmas!!

 Santa’s Warehouse is a Christmas shop in a wholesaler’s warehouse in Newcastle that opens to the public once per year from early November till late December.
The business is located in the suburb of Warners Bay NSW on Hillsborough road. The Warehouse is in the Retailing Precint of the Warners Bay Industrial area. You can find it abour 500 meters down the driveway amoung a grouup of warehouse buildings that comes off the access road. The next driveway up the hill from Bibina.

 Your visit will be well worth the trip as you will find many end of run products at discounted or wholesale prices. The store carries a wide range of Christmas decorations ornaments including wall plaques, table centre pieces, santas, snowmen, reindeer etc. You will also see a great range of artificial Christmas trees , plain or fibre optic also LED lights and crablights and bright LED ropelights and rope light motifs to decorate the house or yard.

From baubles to garands, wreaths to tree hangers, you will not want to miss the latest Christmas decorations at Santa’s Warehouse of warners Bay.

I know you small businesses get harrassed to change phone companies on a daily basis, but if you do have a small business, then you cant afford the hassles of dealing with Optus. I recently agreed to transfer our 2 mobile phones to Optus (as well as our other services) and they agreed to send 2 new Apple iPhone handsets. One handset failed to arrive and the other didnt work properly, so having activating it with Optus we had no mobile service.

The Optus sales guy’s number was permanently directed to an answering machine and he was not phoning back. When I phoned customer service and eventually got through, I was told it would be referred to the sales guy who was not calling back.

I then tried other numbers and when I finally got throught their system (designed to block enquiries), I was eventually told that I had to send the phone back and wait till they assess it and send a new one (and to start by ringing a cetain number for Claims on faulty equipment).

This number has a message saying the line is so busy that you had better ring back later. However when you have no service on a business number you need to get started on what seemed like it was going to be a major hassle.

After about 30 minutes of waiting to try to find out how to get a handset that works, I put that line on hold and used the other to call the local Optus branches to see if I could arrange to give their faulty new phone back there and collect a new one. Both Optus branches advised that if it was bought over the phone from Optus I need to deal with that source and that If I had collected it from them in the first place, I would still have to get them to mail it back to Apple anyway.

So after 4 days without service and the prospect of at least another 4, when I find out where to send the $%$#@%(65 Apple Iphone to, I asked one local Optus branch can I buy a new handset direct from them. She advised I can, but that they are not allowed to pre-test the Apple Iphones and that if I opened it there in the store and it would not work I would have to wait to have it sent back to Apple and I couldnt be just replaced. When I then asked if I could cancell the deal and go back to Vodaphone I was advised that I would have to pay the early cancellation fees.

Optus say they have a special system for Apple iPhones only. It appears that there are lot of problems with the Apple IPhones.

 When after 45 minutes on hold I got through to the “Claims on faulty equipment” number for Optus and explained in great details the problems with these mobile accounts and having no service, as well as the ADSL accounts that have not been set up, I was eventually told that he was going to send an email to the same guy in sales that never calls back, and that he would get back to me within 2 days!

You would think that these phone companies that spend so much money trying to get customers, could spend some trying to service new customers properly in stead of agravating the hell out of them when there is a problem.

Do yourself a favor.  Keep away from Apple iPhone untill they iron out all of the faults, and keep right away from Optus period.