Coles and IKEA recruiting through creative promotions

I have gotten into the spirit of ‘consumerism through children’ with the latest of Australian retailer, Coles', collectable series, which is promoting its new Harry Potter range. 

The Coles Magical Builders are cardboard cut-outs of all the characters from the Harry Potter and the Fantastic Beasts cashcow empires, with the catch (for grown-ups) is you have to assemble them yourself. They come separately swathed in tiny tough cardboard flatpacks with instructions for their assembly on a tiny piece of paper. It’s like miniature IKEA. The instructions are impossible to see and also not terribly helpful but I am also impressed that they produce so little paper wastage.

With a resolve to demonstrate that I have the dexterity and cognitive function of a six year old, I decided to put one together. As it turns out, only tiny fingers can pop out the tiny cardboard fragments of arms and legs and owl wings and wizard beards. 

As ever with activities that are designed for children, I generally require child supervision to work out how to troubleshoot, but not on this occasion! I stabbed those diminutive suckers out using a sharp kitchen knife.

I’m guessing Coles aren’t considering my requirements in their customer base. Speaking of IKEA and companies that know their base, the Swedish megabrand have recently put “career instructions” inside their IKEA products that are labelled “how to assemble your furniture” in a push to recruit people who use IKEA products, which resulted in thousands of applicants and a whole bunch of people were hired who liked and used IKEA products. Hire your brand’s current customers and ambassadors  – good idea. What would also be a good idea would be to put in these boxes ‘how to actually assemble your furniture – like, some actual instructions”. Anyway.

So perhaps, with that in mind, and with the ol’ tradie shortage around areas of Australia that aren’t currently undertaking emergency disaster restorations, Coles perhaps should be looking for future tradies and engineers through this current tiny cardboard promotion. 

If you can assemble the tiny Ron Weasley character without the instructions (or even with the instructions) and you’re only seven, of if can assemble it to put Dumbledore’s head on his knees (but deliberately), then you have just won yourself a fast-tracked carpentry career. Very fast-tracked. Faster than a speeding Japanese superman bullet train. Anyway, there’s some foods for your thoughts, Coles. 

Harrods - and that time they sold lions

Today the writing challenge is heading to one of the most celebrated department stores in the world, Harrods of London. It might not strictly meet the brief of places of historical significance, and I appreciate any concern you might have on the matter, and any confusion or inconvenience caused, but Harrods has a long history. And it’s my blog. Also, disclaimer, Harrods is absolutely my favourite. 

In term of shopping centres, it doesn’t get any more exclusive that Harrods, which has voted itself the “world’s most famous department store”, and who can disagree with the GOAT. 

The largest department store in Europe, it is the land of opulence and luxury, lavishness and magnificence, with more than 300 in-house departments in store, and 100,000m2 of fancy handbags, Prada gold clubs and all of the other fabulousness they stock on their shelves. They probably don’t call them shelves; that is too…..Sainsburys. They probably call then product royal mantels, or something. 

Harrods came from modest little beginnings, as everything must do at some point. In 1832, a wee London East End grocery store was established and named after its owner, Mr Harrod. Mr Harrod developed a business portfolio and had some stores about town, that sold various items for which Harrods is now synonymous, but on a much less grander scale. 

The site on which Harrods stands now became a key asset for Mr Harrod and sold perfumes, stationary, medicines and fruit and vegetables. It was not unusual to bump into Sigmund Freud or Oscar Wilde at the checkouts, with Freud psychoanalysing your shopping basket and determining that your Id is well and truly in charge of your grocery list.

Harrods was first to introduce an escalator, because you can’t have Mr Freud wasting all his thought time trying to negotiate stairs when he’s busy psychoanalysing customers. Speaking of psychotic, in the early days, Harrods used to also sell cocaine. In 1916, it used to sell a kit containing cocaine, morphine, syringes and needles, as a present to send to friends on the front in the war. 

And at one point, the store used live snakes to guard expensive jewellery and also introduced the selling of exotic animals including panthers, alligators and lions. Which is awful and extremely random but also so very Edwardian era. In more uplifting news, Harrods has a chip shop in its food and beverage enclave. 

It also has a fabulous souvenir gift store. I own one of Harrods signature items, a shiny olive green tote bag that they sell to the innumerable tourists who pass through the checkouts. I also own a grey one. I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff and have never met a London souvenir that I have not fell instantly in love with in a very serious way. I’ve got three pens that look like the London Buckingham Palace guards, and you press their fur hat to click the pen open. Adorable.

And here’s a cool thing. The new head honcho pastry chef at Harrods is an Aussie. Philip Khoury started working there in 2018 and in December 2021 he was appointed the boss of all things sweet tooth. What a gig! 

In this time, he has begun pioneering plant-based dessert, which he calls the “last frontier” of vegan cuisine, rethinking the traditional eggs and dairy based model as the holy grail of exceptional desserts. Apparently kicking out dairy from the recipe allows other flavours to pop. 

This is interesting, as the global plant-based food market is expected to reach $USD70 million in the next five years, and certainly is projected to double in the UK in that time. Presumably this is a calculated move by Harrods to play in the USD$7 billion plant-based food market (up from USD$5.5 billion in 2019) as consumers are more and more aware around issues relating to food sustainability and nutrition of the products they are consuming. And with up to 300,000 customers a day at its peak, Harrods has an influential role to play.

And if you are lucky enough to visit the beautiful, gargantuan money spinner that is Harrods, and need somewhere to park the Ferrari or the Vauxhall Astra, there is a single carpark nearby that you can buy for a cool £85,000, which is ostensibly about £84,995 more expensive than other parks in the area. 

It comes with a fob, CCTV, a water supply (unclear if they mean a tap, or an Agean Sea type body of water), and a 960 year lease. Yeah, I give the Ferrari engine three months before it blows, let alone 960 years. Or you can just take the Tube like the rest of London.

Your helpful Westfield updates – Voting and SANTA-20

Is there anything that screams western democratic values and ideals more than an election polling station in a Westfield shopping centre.

Yep, there's been a polling booth in Westfield Woden in Canberra. The boffins who are the boss of all things elections have obviously decided that the best way to bring liberty, equality and justice to the populace (and make them vote RIGHT NOW for the local election and circumvent COVID-19 germs) was to take the voting to the people - deep in the heart of Big W territory.

And mere steps away from the symbolic centre, the heart of Westfield, the holy grail, the iconic statue representing humanity’s march forward towards greater understanding and compassion towards overheads and rectangular plastic cards used by financial institutions – the pay parking station. 

Read the commemorative plaque if you don't believe me; it's next to the 'Insert ticket here' slot.

The polling booth stands in the shopfront that was previously tenanted by Ishka, a chichi Australian company that claims to have a "deep respect for village communities” and sells “ethically sourced furniture”. 

No wood was harmed in the manufacturing process of the furniture, except for the trees from a village community that were chopped down and therefore died at the hands of a chainsaw or some other type of tree-killing machinery just so you could have a coffee table. 

Indeed, nothing says respect for mother earth more than a shopfront in a Westfield, whose global assets are in the range of AUD$63 billion.

At the polling booth store, you have to hand sanitise - a la all COVID-era, COVIDSafe entry points - and then state that you’re not a robot to an official who has had quite a long shift already thankyou voters and ironically resembles a robot, but then it’s all electronic smooth sailing baby and it takes about three seconds and you can do it while you’re going about your other life business so I approve. Next they’ll have a sausage sizzle in the food court. Someone please make that happen. 

Another thing happening at Westfield this year is Santa Claus. I mean, he happens every year, but SANTA-20 will be a little different.

I’ve always wondered how happy Santa really is at Christmas at Westfield, with children crawling all over his jolly rotund belly and screaming into his ear drums. There’s got to be an easier way to earn a gingerbread man crust, he probably thinks every damn year. I get the feeling he’d rather be sitting on a tree stump in a Lapland forest surrounded by reindeer shit.  

Well, this year, Santa doesn’t have to handle the children. No children allowed near Santa spreading their screaming, shouting or pathogens. No sitting on laps. There will be no lapland this year. It’s a socially distanced Santa Claus.

Families or individuals have to sit away from Santa, separated by props of elves and oversized candy canes and presumably other Christmas related things like snow covered hills, a ski resort, a forest of trees, and a vast subarctic wilderness if Santa has any say in it. Westfield say it’s ‘making Christmas merrier’. Yeah, just the way Santa likes it. 

Every kid gets a free reindeer headband, presumably after they just take a quick COVID-19 PCR test. Just kidding, Westfield, don't sue me. Why would Westfield hand out free headbands. Just kidding, there is nothing on Westfield's website to indicate they are testing kids for COVID, but this is now and that is December and two months is a very long time in 2020.

It is my understanding that Santa has been granted a travel exemption to bring his herde of marauding wildebeest into Australia, which is more than anyone except Tom Hanks and Shane Warne and Tony Abbott and Lord Sugar and Nicole Kidman has received this year. I wonder what it’ll be like stuck in a hotel room in the Stamford Plaza with a bunch of reindeer for 14 days.

Coles mini shop obsessive-compulsive disorder

A few months ago, Australians were busy shopping for groceries wherever we damn well pleased. It was a great time to be alive. Coles, Woolies, Aldi, the markets, you name it, we were there, purchasing things, for no reason other than we needed things. 

And then the Coles marketing team came and ruined everything that is good about grocery shopping forever.

They stormed into our lives uninvited and, since July, they have been hunting us like prey. They threw out a silky web, made up of gross spider glands and other gross things, and also millions of those Coles Mini Shop Collectibles that have made us lose our collective shits with the excitement of all of it. (Don’t pretend you are collecting them for your kids.)

Me gently cradling my beloved Coles Mini
Shop Collectible Nescafé Gold.

We should have all kept our poker faces and shown only a vague, passing interest in the useless miniatures but, no, we’ve showed our hand and actually LOST. OUR. MINDS. over pointless pieces of plastic handwash. 

Bloody iconic products too, because Coles are not amateurs at this. This is not  their first time at the rodeo. Who turns down a mini Timtams or Weetbix? 

I haven’t read up on the Constitution recently, but it’s presumably in there as an Act of the Australian Parliament – if someone gives you free iconic Aussie shit, you take it, and you collect it, until you have all of it and, ironically, can no longer afford to buy groceries because you went and spent all your money buying minis on eBay. She’ll be right, mate.


Since the promotion came, saw and conquered I have become conditioned, like Pavlov’s dogs, to spend $30 or more in store when I just pop in to pick up some milk. But I think, eventually, I will be okay and come out of this fog. 

I’m popping in this afternoon to get bread, which, because I don’t buy the gluten free type, will come in under $30. I’ve got this.

But you just know there’s more to come. The marketing and advertising teams of the big companies now know how to catch their prey. Which, in my opinion, isn’t an accident.  

As if it couldn’t get anymore dire, the chatter on the street (in Coles aisles – I don’t go to streets anymore, unless there is a Coles), is that they are going to bring out a second range called Coles Normal Size Shop. 

Which is just grocery shopping, Coles. And we won’t play your game. We won’t no matter what (we will).