It wasn't my intention to spend the bank holiday in Liffey Valley Shopping Centre. Again. If you remember, I was there at the Easter holiday when - due to a terminal illness to my TV - I threw caution to the wind and bought a state-of-the-art, wide-screen, does-everything-but-make-the-coffee kind of TV to replace it. Anyway, Monday saw me back at Dixons with my new Sony. A month old and it has already succumbed to the curse of electrical equipment in my house - it has given up the ghost completely.
My four-year-old nephew was at pains to point out that the reason the TV had suddenly switched itself off had absolutely nothing to do with him. He didn't even have the remote control beside him (an unusual occurrence in itself!). But, just as it was getting to the exciting part in Space Jam, the screen went blank and stayed blank despite all our efforts to coax it back to life.
We read the troubleshooting part of the manual (it advised us to plug it in - big help!); we then unplugged it and plugged in something else just to be certain it wasn't a power problem; then we waited for the men in our lives to come home in case they had any brainstorming suggestions - they hadn't.
The people in Dixons couldn't have been nicer. They pressed all the buttons we'd already pressed and they told us that it was pretty unusual and then they rang the repair shop and told us that they'd send it there on Tuesday and we'd hear back within 28 days.
I thought my own hearing had gone at that point - I'd only had the TV 30 days. I couldn't believe that I'd paid for something and now they were taking it back and I'd be without it for almost as long as I'd had it in the first place. Surely they meant eight days. But no, it was all a question of how busy they were and whether it needed parts (parts - I thought all modern technology was just a chip) and, although it could be shorter, it still might take 28 days. This is what it says in the customer service agreement apparently. But, they told me, if they hadn't managed to repair it in that time I would get another one. Well, great.
Meantime, it's back to the 12-year-old model that needs a thump in the side to get it started and the stoic nature of the nephew who still doesn't know how Space Jam ended.
I was very tense after this episode. I think I need a holiday. At least when I'm away I don't care about the TV because I'm not a news junkie once I'm outside the country. I can quite happily ignore what's going on in the markets once the sun is shining and the sea temperature is moderately warm. So I think this should be an option instead of 28 days staring at a blank screen.
However, holidays, from the point of view of the tour operators, are not really about the shining sun and sparkling water. The British holiday sector was given a jolt last week when Thomson Travel launched a price war in response to the announcement of a hostile bid by Airtours for First Choice Holidays. Since Airtours is the number two operator, the success of this bid would push it into the number one slot, ahead of Thomson's, which has been there for 25 years.
First Choice had already been in discussions with Kuoni which is considering how to respond. The Airtours bid was £850 million (€1,293.76) and, since Thomson's has already said it will not surrender its dominant position, we can expect the battle to heat up over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, Thomson's shares declined by 15 per cent, on reports that its first-half profits would be depressed by the Kosovo crisis and costs of recent acquisitions.
The talk in the industry is that Thomson will engage in a consumer price war in order to keep its customers. I'm not sure that a price war will benefit either consumers or shareholders. Cheap holidays usually mean that you're treated like a passenger in steerage and you have to keep repeating "it only cost a couple of hundred" to justify the fact that you are not considered to be a human individual.
Meantime, if the value of the shares are falling, how happy are the shareholders going to be? Personally, I wouldn't care whether the company I'd invested in was number one or two, once it was profitable and the share price was going up. Number one with a declining share price doesn't do much for me. And if people are anticipating a price war, is this going to lead to a raft of late bookings as they try to hold out for better deals? Turbulent times ahead for the industry, I think.
The turbulence on the US stock markets was solely on the upside on Monday. Barely had the ink dried on the Dow through 10,000 T-shirts, baseball caps and balloons when it went galloping through 11,000. Which is good news for the T-shirt, baseball cap and balloon industries, I suppose. Once again, there are those who are elated and those who are depressed over the Dow's inexorable rise. However, it's the cyclical stocks that are doing well right now, finally taking over from the technology/Internet sector. Interestingly, the Bloomberg US Internet Index has underperformed the Dow industrials for the past month. The index is down 7 per cent while the Dow is up 10 per cent, cheering those of us who feel that the Internet explosion is an accident waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, Francisco Lopes, the ex-Brazilian central bank governor - who only lasted three weeks in the job - is scheduled to testify in investigations over claims that two commercial banks were tipped off before the devaluation of the real last January.
According to reports, Mr Lopes has "surprising evidence" and "radical testimony" to present. Mr Lopes is supposed to have kept business connections to a consulting firm while he was central bank governor. One bank official has, apparently, admitted that it had a paid informant at the central bank. According to reports in the Brazilian media, Mr Lopes was allegedly promised over $1.6 million (€1.51 million) by a friend and business partner of his wife. . .
The Brazilian economy has been storming ahead in the last few weeks and although there are concerns about scandals in high places, inward investment has increased and the recent $3 billion bond issue was a resounding success.
Investors can ignore anything once the market is going the right way.
