Mary Portas on Easyjet's Inflight Shopping

Portas, M (2010) Shop! Mary Portas turns her nose up at easyjet's inflight shopping experience Daily Telegraph magazine 4th September, 2010 p.13

Ever since I've been following this excellent column I have been waiting for Mary Portas to get around to a review of easyJet ( don't tell me that you didn't recognise the logo ! )

Her verdict in brief 6/10 - good customer service, terrible food and overpriced inflight catering.

There is also a paragraph in Mary's article about easyJet's website ( and I'm sure most people will have used that ). The 'Help' function bumps you into a frequently irrelevant page of FAQ's. Better than the telephone support, which Mary claims is "hopeless, just hopeless"

I am quoting all the above from my printed copy of saturday's paper. The Telegraph website of this column

www.telegraph.co.uk/maryportas

has not been updated since the end of July.

Neither can I find this article on the Newsbank database, which includes the content of the paper, but not the glossy magazine maybe ?

Maybe there are some advantages to the old-fashioned print sources after all !

Sandwiching in CSR

This week's Mary Portas article* looks at the Pret A Manger and EAT chains. These might make useful UK case studies if you are looking at either CSR ( Corporate Social Responsibilty) or e-business / Web 2.0.

Pret is now 24 years old, and has 202 UK outlets ( none in Bedford or Luton ?) Pret's website is full of material on their commitment to charity projects and sustainability. All tuna is pole-and-line caught...

http://www.pret.com/sustainability/

EAT is a smaller company ( 100 UK outlets ) which has a whizzy iPhone application...the charity page is 'coming soon'.

Both chains might be also suitable for comparison with Starbucks and Costa in their business practices....

*Portas, M (2010) Shop! Daily Telegraph Magazine, 15th May p.11