Netmums, the UK’s fastest-growing online parenting organisation, surveyed over 2,000 of its members earlier this month to investigate how the economic downturn was hitting families’ incomes and what the impact of rising prices was having on families around the UK.  Their research found:

1. One in five mums is missing meals so her children can eat
2. A quarter of families are living on credit cards
3. Almost half of families have sold or pawned goods to make money to live
4. Sixteen per cent of parents are being treated for a stress-related illness due to lack of cash

Certainly none of the above is good news for the economy or David Cameron who is committed to promoting family values and cohesiveness as primary in his government’s mind.  However the UK does face itself, through little fault of the common-man, in tight-straights financially.

At RentMyItems.com has been championing the idea of making a little extra cash from little-used household items not simply because it is their business model – they also believe it makes a huge amount of sense.  RentMyItems.com believes that, in many cases, when hard-earned cash has been spent on a little-used item it is better to rent it to others than sell it entirely.

At  RentMyItems.com Finnian in Edinburgh has a Moulinex Juice Master Plus which he has listed for rent at £4 per day.  A similar item currently listed on eBay is listed for sale at £20.  It does not take much working out that if Finnian was able to hire his juicer out once a month for five months then he would have achieved the price he would have received if he had sold it outright – and he still has it in his cupboard and available to rent to others.  By renting the item rather than selling it Finnian gives himself the opportunity to earn more than the amount that he might have sold the item for online.

It’s a similar matter with Margaret, again in Edinburgh, who has a ladies electric bike for rent at £30 per day on RentMyItems.com.  A similar bike for sale, again on eBay, has a price tag currently of £180.  If Margaret is able to rent her bike twice a month for three months she will have achieved the same amount of money as the similar bike for sale on eBay – and again she will still own it and it will be in possession for her own use, the use of her friends and also to those that she rents it out to.

Another example is Gillian in East Sheen who has a Graco Travel Cot for rent at £4 per day or £20 per week – with just one week’s rental Gillian would make more money than selling it on eBay as the current price for a similar model is £10!  So by renting, rather than selling her unused Graco Travel Cot, Gillian would make £10 extra!

So, as you can see, think twice about selling or even pawning one of your household items as you could make more money even in the short term by renting it to others in your local neighbourhood rather than selling it outright.

RentMyItems.com‘s advice if you find yourself a bit strapped for cash?  List your little-used household for rent at their site, where ALL listings are currently FREE and there’s NO COMMISSION to pay unlike their other competitors.

Make a little bit of extra cash this week – with free listings, you literally have nothing to lose!

I’m delighted that we’ve achieved further press coverage for RentMyItems.com today, this time in today’s editions of the commuter newspaper Metro – though they did get the domain wrong by missing out the ‘s’!  The article appears on page 54 of Metro and is the lead Business article as Business focus.  I’ve been on to them first thing about the spelling so hopefully we’ll get a correction tomorrow!

I had an interesting customer service experience this morning when having a coffee and sandwich whilst visiting the cafe of The Garden Centre Group at Osterley.

Having waited in the short queue for five minutes I ordered two coffees and two sausage sandwiches for myself and my partner.  Having paid, taken my tray with the coffees on it (plus two pots of cold milk – why, oh why always cold milk unless you ask specifically for hot?) and collected cutlery, condiments etc we sat down.

Our coffee, cooled by the cold milk, took little time to drink, and then we waited… and waited…

During this time a young waitress brought the order for people at a table near us and, on being asked if she had butter, the waitress said, at the same time as pointing in a general direction, “Yes, it’s over there”.  My partner and I both raised our eyebrows.  Our own, of course, not each others.

Having finished our coffees, and still waiting for our sandwiches, we ruminated on the young waitress’s reply.  Should it not have been “Certainly.  I’ll just get you some”?  Or as the order was for toast should she not have brought it anyway?  A general pointing and retort as to where the customer may themselves get up to fetch an item that should have been brought by the waitress in the first place seemed somewhat lacking in customer service.

Time passed.

We watched the yummy mummies and dozzy daddies largely ignoring their young progeny as they played (the progeny, not the parents) on the climbing frames and ball pit.  Thankfully The Garden Centre Group has now fully boxed in the children’s play area – I assume for safety, but most thankful of all it cuts out most of the babble and shrieks of happy, sugar-filled children.

Back to the empty-cup filled table…

After much door singing from the entrance/exit to the kitchen and some twenty minutes after we ordered, a [how shall I say?] mature female waitress (as opposed to a young waitress) came to our table with our order.  After confirming the sandwiches were the ones we ordered, this waitress (who I would guess was the young waitress’s age plus twenty years) apologised for us having to wait giving a reason that there was a new chef in the kitchen and she hoped we would understand.  We did, mainly as her acceptance of the time the order had taken, her ability to instantly apologise, and her honestly beaming face immediately softened any moans that may have been brewing.  Additionally, noticing our empty coffee cups, she asked if we would like two refills.  We thanked her and said that would be good.  Within a few minutes she was back with our coffees, and we knew we would return in the future.  Again we thanked her for the coffees and also her excellent customer service.

So, is good Customer Service down to age and experience?  Generally I feel it is.

There is no doubt that experience comes with age.  This obviously does not mean that all young people give bad customer service and all ‘more mature’ people give excellent customer service, I am simply talking generally.  I believe with age comes the wish to be treated well by others, which itself allows an understanding that this also means to treat others as you would be expect to be treated.

As my mother used to say – “Do unto others as you would wish they do unto you”.

I used to go ‘yeah, yeah’, now I fully understand what she means.

A big thank you to Warren Heal, founder of RentMyItems.com, for his very kind tweet thanking me for the PR work on the launch and ongoing of the new site:

Tweet from @rentmyitem:  Huge thanks to@paulsavident for the amazing press coverage we have had this year inc.#BBC, #thesundaytimes, #yahoo &#msnmoney. Great #PR!

As you may know I am also COO of RentMyItems.com – though it’s always nice to get an unexpected thanks from those you work with.

The launch of RentMyItems.com has been, as all startups, challenging, enjoyable, frustrating, exhilarating, confounding and inspirational.  I’m sure all will continue in 2012!

Yesterday, for about the sixth time this year, I was having a conversation with a friend and we got onto the state of the economy and touched on inflation – and then I got rather confused.

My friend was clearly stating that with inflation falling things were going to get cheaper so we must be on our way out of a recession and 2012 was going to be looking a damn site rosier than 2011.

Now, putting aside that there is, I believe, far worse to come in 2012 than in 2011 (for me personally and financially 2011 itself has been rather ‘challenging’) I just could not comprehend the words being uttered around inflation – and coming from someone I think has a good head on her shoulders it sounded even worse the more I thought about it.

Inflation, put simply, is the rate at which prices rise over a given period.  Generally in the UK we are talking of how prices have risen compared with this time last year.  The Bank of England‘s simply description is that “Inflation is a general rise in prices across the economy” and that “The inflation rate is a measure of the change in prices over a specified period” – so when we hear in news bulletins of inflation we are ALWAYS talking of a rise, not a fall – this would be deflation.

So, if in November 2011 we were looking at a headline inflation rate of 5.2%, this means that what we could have bought a year ago for £100 would in November have cost £105.20.  Now, if inflation falls back to the government’s inflation target of 2% in November 2012 (ie falling from 5.2% this year to 2% next year), though this is a significant fall in the rate of inflation it will mean that that same basket of good will cost £107.30 in a year’s time – obviously an increase in the price even though there has been a decrease in inflation.

So please – will people just simply understand that a fall in the rate of inflation is not about falling prices, simply of prices rising less quickly.