discounts , loyalty et al

nakumatt supermarket initialy got me hooked to their stores mainly because of the professionalism, the cleanness of the shelves, the availability of the products etc. that was when uchumi guys were literal bitting the hand that fed them by shoplifting their own shop. well nakumatt went a step further and introduced the loyalty card. i could get points whenever and wherever i shoped. very sweet. to me it became a passion, i could see my points grow and that felt like seeing my savings increase. on top of that it shows me how much i have spent on nakumatt the whole year. i just multiply my points by 100. it sometimes depresses me but mostly it just gives me an easy way to account for my money. apart from that, i have used the points before to buy shoes for my kids from bata, buy myself some clothes etc. in short that loyalty program of nakumatt is so important to me that i look forward to shoping there just to earn points! well you can therefore imagine my frustration after doing my largest shoping yesterday and being told that my card is blocked and so i dont get to earn my points! why is it blocked in the first place? they told me its coz i reported it lost. well of course i didnt have a comment for that. how can i not know when i report my card lost?! since i got mad, i was sent to the card supervisor. invariably he also told me that i must have reported my card lost! and he added that the card guys dont work on weekends so that card can only be sorted on wednesday. how convinient, weekends is when they have the highest traffic and they conviniently close shop and put their legs up! anyway their service and shelf status is still good.

does anyone know when and how mumias will be offloaded. dont you just envy those dyer and blair guys , they are the fifa, the referee and a player! either way things are looking up. what i fear is that if the govt decides to give 20% of the shares to farmers, then the price will be depressed until all of them are mopped up by other private guys. last time farmers sold their shares at 2 bob, the price was down until the excess shares at that low price were all taken up. i cant help but see history taking a troden path.

what of the roads thing, will the govt remove fuel levy once they privatise those? otherwise using cars will be a nightmare. however if those private owners start by making some great roads or improving on the ones we have then it will be ok since a lot of savings will be got from efficiency.


and talking about roads, i took the kangundo road last friday evening and met 3 seperate accidents, some fatal. what suprised me about that road is that its does not have potholes, but its horibly uneven. why would someone want to do a job like that? is it because he is african or because the west is unfair to us or simply because he or she does have self respect and self discipline? secondly i think its time we started making dual carriage all through. i suppose it will ease congestion and also reduce accident cases especially after the friday binge

however i am proud to be kenyan! especially after reading philip ochiengs column yesterday tillted "Maathai mara" it was a masterpiece to say the least

odegle nyang tip of the day -- investing in mutual funds literaly means having someone decide on how to share your returns with you