Rabid reseller: Saving the planet

When Rabid Reseller decided to join the Green Revolution, it was the best thing we’d ever done. The cost of the ‘green paint’ was well worth the increased traffic in the shop. The main problem was explaining to all the new customers that we actually sold environmentally friendly technology – not garden products. 

There’s no point going into this half-baked. There’s a planet to be saved and it’s the only one we’ve got, despite those tickets to the space station we bought on eBay. So we also introduced compulsory recycling. By that I mean we wouldn’t sell anyone a new computer unless they brought along an old one for recycling. 

Well, yes, a few astute shoppers did notice that we no longer offer trade-ins and that we weren’t actually offering money for the old PCs. But that’s not the point. We’re doing our best to keep the old clunkers out of landfill. Yes, there’s now a Recycled Rabid Reseller shop next door to the main shop but how else did you expect us to get rid of all these useless old, er…pre-loved PCs? 

Yes, indeed, we’re using the money to pay the electricity bill, but we ticked the box on the bill which said ‘rip me off another 20 percent and pretend it’s for green electrons’ so you can’t accuse us of not getting with the program.

And we’re also doing our bit to reduce our carbon footprint in other ways, several of which are worth noting. The carbon dependency around here has been reduced, starting with turning off two out of every three fluorescent lights. Now this is an idea we really wished we’d thought of much sooner. It’s really hard to spot the blemishes on ‘shop-soiled’ items when you’re operating out of a cave. 

We’ve also converted the Rabid Reseller delivery van to run on bio-diesel. Well, it’s actually running on used chip fat from the greasy spoon next door, but hey, he was just tipping it down the sink before we offered to buy it to power the van. We’re using the word ‘buy’ in a strictly pejorative sense here because there’s no money changing hands. The simple mention of the ‘environment’ and the ‘constab-ulary’ in the same sentence caused him to make an instantaneous gratuitous offer of an endless supply of bio-diesel.

We’ve also saved on phone charges since we no longer have to call the driver to find out if he’s on his way back to the store. No, all we do now is wait until it smells as though somebody forgot to turn off the chip fryer and we know he’s close. When it smells like the burgers are done, we know he’s in the loading dock and when the Chiko rolls smell ready he’s got the back door open.

We didn’t stop with the delivery van either – we’ve downsized the gas guzzling sales vehicles at the same time. Well, actually we just sold them. OK, we gave them away to the scrap metal bloke. It seems there’s not much call these days for candy-pink V8-powered SUVs with ‘R U Rabid’ painted on the sides. People just don’t place any value on things these days and nostalgia is no longer what it used to be either.

Gotta go! Carbon to trade!