How much would you pay for a stick?

Lynne

A florist's in London, is selling sticks for customers to hang on their walls.

How much for these decorative items? The price ranges from £12 to £18, depending on the shape and size.

The best thing is, this florists is next to a park.



Read more about this topic:
http://www.itv.com/news/london/2017-03-29/london-florist-next-to-a-park-sells-sticks-for-18/

Frank

£12 to £18 for a stick seems rather expensive to me. However, maybe the florist didn't have the intention tho sell the sticks at all, but just hoped for free publicity, which she actually got.

Sometimes the reason why people do things are not that obvious as it seems. Take Mac Donalds. Once they sold two sizes of coke: normal and large. Most people chose the normal size. Doesn't everyone want to be normal, behave normal and choose normal? Then Mac Donalds introduced a third option that was even larger: a bucket size coke. Now the small one was called small, the middle one was called normal and the bucket size was called large. Now still people preferred the normal one, although it was now bigger. The bucket size lage coke is hardly ever sold, but that's not the reason for it's existence. The bucket size coke is just there because it makes people chose for the middle one more easily.

Gaurav

I like the way you think.@frank

mheredge

That's a very good point @Frank. Those sticks are so ordinary but then again, maybe for a city dweller, not so bog standard.

Practical_Severard

> @Lynne said:
> A florists in London, is selling sticks for customers to hang on their walls.

A question of English: "a florist's" or "a florists"? The latter one is plural, so I doubt about the indefinite article.

Practical_Severard

> @mheredge said:
> bog standard.

Thanks for the vocabulary item.

mheredge

It should be a florist @Practical_Severard.

Practical_Severard

> @Lynne said:
> How much for these decorative items? The price ranges from £12 to £18, depending on the shape and size.
>

Well, a price depends on curcumstances. What's the price of a cup of water in middle of a lake? Nothing. How much would an exhausted thirsty person pay in middle of a desert? A fortune. "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!"

When I was in London in 2005 the price for a ball of ice-cream near The London's Eye was £2 . I could have bought 20 in my home country with the exchange rate of that time.

GemmaRowlands

Wow that is incredibly odd. But fair play to the florist - if people are willing to pay that amount for something they could pick up off the ground then why not make money from it?!

april

I still have one Christmas tree stick here. You can have it for free. It's a good one and It's from the year 2015.

mheredge

Practical_Severard said:

> @Lynne said:

>
When I was in London in 2005 the price for a ball of ice-cream near The London's Eye was £2 . I could have bought 20 in my home country with the exchange rate of that time.

I dread to think how much an ice cream costs in London these days @Practical_Severard. I did have a really nice one for 2.5€ near Lake Como in Italy the other week. This is not far off half the price it would have cost here in Nice. But then Nice is probably charging not that far from London prices.

Practical_Severard

> @mheredge said:
> I dread to think how much an ice cream costs in London these days . I did have a really nice one for 2.5€ near Lake Como in Italy the other week. This is not far off half the price it would have cost here in Nice. But then Nice is probably charging not that far from London prices.

Well, I think, the locals know the places and don't buy anything in the city centre. Probably, most of them haven't been there for years.

2.5€ buys 2 pieces of this

vkusvill.ru/sites/default/files/styles/product_page_image/public/images/goods/13933.jpg?itok=b2RcAkE3

here

Michouxe

I fear that I never want to pay for the stick, but I will use idea’s and possible other things buy of the florist! perhaps am I a little bit miserly?

chyijung

If you could sell a stick with that prices, you would be able to sell everything.

Lynne

@Practical_Severard - Quite often we treat organisations and businesses as if they are people. A florist's = the shop / a florist = someone who works in the shop. I've added the apostrophe to make it clearer.

Lynne

We discussed this last night in Kitely. It was a very funny discussion, and I might just edit it and put it here.

What do you think @oscar001 @Monik @Zom @gam01hr? Are you okay with that?

Zom

@Lynne - Okay for the "How much for a stick?" part of the session.

Practical_Severard

> @Lynne said:
> @Practical_Severard - Quite often we treat organisations and businesses as if they are people. A florist's = the shop / a florist = someone who works in the shop. I've added the apostrophe to make it clearer.

Thank you. The apostrophe has made it clear - now the sentence matches what I've learned.

Practical_Severard

Can one refer to those sticks as "twigs?" At least googling pictures with the "twig" query brings mostly severed twigs.

Am I right that a "bough" is something which hasn't beensevered from a tree?

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
(D.H. Lawrence)

Yellowtail

Given what @Frank said, I have a suggestion for the florist. They can hammer a nail into some of the sticks, and sell the 'with hook' version for 50£. It will make the 18£ sticks look very cheap!

mheredge

I think for the 'rustic look' people might spend money to buy a stick if they never get out into the countryside. In my friends' homes in Nepal, I'm afraid a stick like this would make good firewood and wouldn't last long.

Practical_Severard

> @mheredge said:
> I think for the 'rustic look' people might spend money to buy a stick if they never get out into the countryside.
Is it possible to pick up a stick in the UK? IMO, in that country all the land is owned by someone, therefore picking up a stick may be qualified as a theft.

Lynne

@zom - that's the bit I'm thinking about. It will have to be next week, and I might just take the mp3 and broadcast it on English Radio. (/me puts thinking cap on.)

Lynne

@Practical_Severard - Good point. People have been hung for less.

GemmaRowlands

mheredge said:

I think for the 'rustic look' people might spend money to buy a stick if they never get out into the countryside. In my friends' homes in Nepal, I'm afraid a stick like this would make good firewood and wouldn't last long.

Yes, that is true. I suppose if you live in the middle of London, for example, you won't really get to see many places where you could just pick sticks up like you can where I live.

chyijung

@GemmaRowlands @mheredge A friend of mine who is also a travel agent told me once he brought a group of tourist to a suburb area. They saw a chicken on the street. A little boy in the group asked his mom what was that, when told it was a chicken, the boy were so surprised said: "How come a chicken has feather?"

mheredge

You might get away with it if you find the stick on common land @Practical_Severard. Epping Forest still has laws going back centuries that allow farmers to graze their cattle freely here. But then they might worry that you were collecting the stick to burn. In London I think the area is a Smokeless Zone, so you might have to go a few miles further to Essex where I think you are still allowed to burn wood.

https://www.gov.uk/smoke-control-area-rules

Practical_Severard

> @mheredge said:
> You might get away with it if you find the stick on common land
I suspected the things weren't that bad

>Epping Forest still has laws going back centuries that allow farmers to graze their cattle freely here.
How much would a 1st Tube zone dweller pay to get there? A 2 ways metro ticket costs a comparable price, I guess.

>
But then they might worry that you were collecting the stick to burn. In London I think the area is a Smokeless Zone, so you might have to go a few miles further to Essex where I think you are still allowed to burn wood.
>
The sticks on the photo aren't good firewood. You need to collect a heap of them for such use.

mheredge

You're right @Practical_Severard. A little twig like this would only keep the fire going ten minutes or so. You'd need a whole pile and at £12-18 a stick, that's a very expensive fire.

GemmaRowlands

chyijung said:

@GemmaRowlands @mheredge A friend of mine who is also a travel agent told me once he brought a group of tourist to a suburb area. They saw a chicken on the street. A little boy in the group asked his mom what was that, when told it was a chicken, the boy were so surprised said: "How come a chicken has feather?"

I suppose lots of people have only ever seen 'chicken' on a plate, and never the actual animal. Even where I live in the countryside you don't see chickens very often, so I suppose children could go for years without knowing what they really were!

clair

Sometimes it's the idea that costs rather than the item itself.