remind me to tell you the tale

The tale of the missing crystal factory and the rubbish that so many others sell.
Then I’ll mention the overpriced organic grocery store and the frequency that friends get the flu. It's random but it might make sense later...

UPDATE:

Ok so, it's really not as interesting as I make it out to be, but I might as well oblige. We went to a Crystal factory on Friday to get some crystal. It's not that kind of crystal, but the glass kind. All cut and shaped and polished and so forth. Some of it is stunningly beautiful and a real display of craftsmanship that has clearly taken decades to develop. Other pieces look like knock-offs that are made to be sold to the village idiot 'down t'market'.
My mother has a book which details some of the factory outlet stores that sell direct to the public the goods that would otherwise be flogged off in Harrods for almost three times the price. So we drive through the industrial heartlands of the Midlands, the region where guns were first manufactured and the industrial revolution starting as early as 1550 really blossomed. Now there are shopping centres and council estates abound as the people of the region are left behind in the vacuum that is the collapsing manufacturing industry. There's nothing to be done unfortunately, except attempt to go into the higher margin, low quantity but high quality goods markets. This (clearly) takes time to realise and the area is in a dire state at the moment.
To get to the point, we drive around a winding maze of Dudley and Stourbridge roads to arrive at the first site of the morning, Staffordshire Glass.

It's not there.

We are greeted by the site of diggers and newly laid bricks which accompany the second stage of development of a 'magnificent' collection of tatty, cheap, pokey, small and overpriced single occupancy homes designed to rip off the homeowners and shove as many people into as little space as possible, all the while making a fork load of cash for the developer. Quality.
We got some crystal in the end; rooting around for a million years through five different 'showrooms' to find what should really have been possible to find in the first one. What this demonstrated to me was how out of touch the manufacturers really are. I don't need a £150/$230 commemorative urn for my kid's football league, but something that can actually be used and appreciated in everyday life. I don't have time for that.

The other things were organics, which was really just a rant in my head. Do you care, probably not. Just to say, if you're going to run an organic food store, you should at least have the honesty to not pretend your food is low priced. Organic food in boutique-like food stores remains a rip-off because the public and the stores themselves see the market as being able to sustain the prices. I look at the organic apple and notice how it's twice the price of the chemical laden one, but still buy it. That's because at the moment I have money to spare.
But to put a 'new low price' right next to that apple is really just taking the piss. It's not low, it's just slightly less of a grab into my pocket to steal the £5 notes from me.