Treat us as 2nd class – and you’ll get 1st class annoyance

WE Scots come equipped with highly sensitive antennae for offence. They are so super-responsive in some of us they are often set off by our imaginations rather than anything that it is happening in the real world.

The perception, for example, that English sports commentators deliberately undermine Scottish athletes by calling them Brits when they win and Scots when they lose has nothing to do with objective reality. It is caused by hypersensitive antennae misreading data and sending it to chippy Scottish brains which process it into grievance matter.

This stuff coagulates and, in regrettable cases, takes Scots down a pathway of thought that blames the English for almost everything they dislike about their lives. There has been something of an outbreak of this in the past few years.

Then again, not all offence is imagined and not all the offended are grievance-powered Robo-Scots.

It does not take a Scottish Nationalist to be affronted by the London shopkeeper peering at our Clydesdale Bank tenner as if it were minted in a toy shop. That just requires a Scot. And, as this Scot imagines the stooshie which might ensue if the tables were turned and it were a Bank of England tenner being refused in Edinburgh, he becomes huffier still.

The sense of offence is not driven by chippiness. It results from being treated as inferior, a secondclass citizen.

Dismal

I would put the rip-off deliveries scandal highlighted in the Mail in the past couple of weeks in the same category.

We need not possess a single Nationalist bone nor harbour a scintilla of anti-English sentiment to shake our heads in disbelief at the dismal treatment of Scottish customers by largely English firms who have simply not thought things through.

Why is it that Scottish firms such as luxury knitwear retailer Johnstons of Elgin ensure all deliveries to UK customers across the UK are charged at a flat rate, while English firms more often than not expect Scottish customers to pay more?

And by what possible geographic rationale can postcodes in Aberdeenshire, Moray and Inverness-shire be excluded from the ‘mainland UK’ category on English retail websites? Don’t they understand they are insulting everyone who lives there – most pertinently, of course, their own customers?

Some eager to over-egg the grievance mixture may portray these often extortionate delivery charges as antiScottish, as a tax on across the Border types for having the cheek to be in another country.

But that bears no scrutiny. I’m a Scot who lives in one of the UK’s largest urban sprawls and I have never knowingly been charged any more for delivery of my online goods than customers in England.

No, at worst these firms are guilty of anti-farawayism, a tax on perceived remoteness imposed either cynically for financial gain or, more likely, ignorantly for they have no clue where anything north of Glasgow or Edinburgh actually is.

If greed is the driver then I sincerely hope people power stops it in its tracks.

There can be no excuse for promising free UK mainland delivery and then picking and choosing in the small print which parts of the country count as eligible for inclusion and which should be clobbered with charges sometimes higher than the purchase price itself. Delivery is either free on the mainland or it is not.

Nor is blaming delivery firms going to wash. Buyers visit retailers’ websites to purchase goods online and judge them on the quality of service provided. If they have to pay £34 for the delivery of a £20 pair of boxer shorts to Lewis, it is not the courier the shopper will blame. It is retailers who are willing to allow their customers to be ripped off when visiting their websites.

Remote

If the delivery firm is charging too much to ship your goods, do what your customers should be doing and shop around. Tell the couriers why you are doing it. Tell them it turns out to be bad for business to treat customers in rural parts of Scotland as second-class citizens and, come to think of it, you are not even sure some of these parts of Scotland where you have been fleecing online shoppers are so remote.

Which brings us to what I have little doubt is the primary driver for rip-off deliveries: sheer geographical illiteracy. That is not to suggest the delivery firms don’t know where anywhere is. Of course they do; they travel there. It is their clients, ensconced in their M25 bubble, who are too befuddled to know that a PA postcode can as easily mean Paisley as the Isle of Jura.

I suggest they educate themselves about where places are if they want to do well in the online retail business.

I further suggest that once they have figured out that Inverness isn’t in the Shetlands and that you don’t need to catch a ferry to the Black Isle, they start treating customers there and everywhere else in the UK with the same respect.

Like I say, I am sure it is mostly ignorance which has caused this little misunderstanding, but some of us Scots are to grievance as great whites are to blood.

Others just remember the referendum, how worried we were about being broken apart and think being treated as equals in one big bettertogether country is kind of what we voted for.