I’ve just joined Graze, a service that mails you a box of fruit, nuts and other goodies for the princely sum of £2.99 per box (P&P included). A friend of mine suggested it the other day and I was so curious I signed up there and then. My first box came yesterday, and this is my unboxing video (I fuzzed out a few bits because I forgot to hide my address. Duh!):
If you would like to try Graze, you can get your first box free and the second half price if you sign up with this code: CVDK8FP. There’s no limit to how often that code can be used, so knock yourselves out.
Overall, I was delighted with my Graze box. The fruit and nuts were very fresh and very high quality. More than once I’ve bought nuts from supermarkets only to find that they have already gone rancid and bitter, and it’s always a disappointment. My Graze box was so yummy that I forgot it was called “graze” and not, say, “hoover” or “bolt”. Ahem.
From a value point of view, yes, I probably could buy all the constituent bits cheaper, but the point is that I don’t. And if I do, I forget to eat them. Nothing like that’s going to happen with Graze because it’s just so easy: It totally ticks the ‘lazy’ box!
I’m also relying on it to replace my mid-afternoon trip to the corner shop to buy Coke and a Wispa. Whilst I’m still spending money on Graze, I am not going to spend money on empty calories that taste nice but don’t do me any good at all. As that’s a decision based on economy, health and want, I’m hoping I’ll stick to it this time.
In April last year I wrote about a start-up called Kachingle for The Guardian. I explained Kachingle thusly:
After registering with Kachingle, users decide on a maximum monthly donation, currently set at $5 (£3.50). When they see something they like, they simply click on the Kachingle “medallion” to initiate a donation. Kachingle tracks their reading habits, tots up how many times they visit each favoured site and divvies up the money proportionally at the end of the month.
It’s equally simple for site owners, who just need a PayPal account and a snippet of code to display the Kachingle medallion. The revenue split gives content providers 80% of the donations, with the rest covering Kachingle’s costs and PayPal fees.
I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on Kachingle to see when they would launch and was excited to get an email from Bill Lazar, Kachingle’s Marketing Engineer, last week saying that they were ready for beta testers to come on board. They will be launching properly in early February.
I think Kachingle is a really interesting idea, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to test it out. That’s the medallion, up there in the top of the right-hand sidebar. All you need to sign up with Kachingle is a PayPal account and a spare $5 a month (although you can spend more if you want to). That works out at £3.07 per month, which even in a recession I think I can spare!
Kachingle sits very nicely with my recent decision to buy as many hand-crafted present for Christmas as I could. In an economic downturn it is more important than ever to support small businesses and I really like the fact that the vast majority of the money I spend on sites like Folksy go to the person who made the item I’ve bought.
But Kachingle is not just a way that I might earn a little spare change, it also gives me a way to support others. I’m hoping that over the course of the next few months, bloggers I enjoy will be able to join up and let me show them my appreciation.
If you want to sign up as a Kachingler or as a Site Owner, get in touch with Kachingle’s beta programme. And, of course, let me know what you think in the comments!
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Every year, on May Day, a young woman is stolen away by the faeries to become their Queen for a year. This year, though, the faeries have bitten off more than they can chew. Shakti Nayar will do whatever it takes to get her own life as a botanist back. As she struggles to work out how to get home, she uncovers Faerie’s dark secret and finds that she is not the only human who needs saving.
All the threads looked the same to the innocent eye, but Maude could see the black heart running up through one strand as it wove its way through the lace roundel. She busied herself with tidying her bobbins as a customer browsed the lace mats on her stall.
“I’ll take this one,” the woman said, holding up a square piece, twelve inches across. Maude winced, picked up the piece she had just completed and held it out to the woman for her consideration.
