Rising Cost of Living

Logs

The logs arrived this morning at 08.20! Fortunately I'd been to get the paper and croissants and put both our cars next door and asked our tenants the night before to park their car neatly.

The delivery was to be in two lorries as the large lorry was en panne. Having seen the large lorry some two years ago I'm not surprised; it looked as though it could have delivered logs for Napoleon! (the third at least!)

As I said earlier, we buy our wood by the metric ton, as opposed to the stere, which is a measurement of volume. It's more economical buying by the tonne, but you have to have absolute confidence in your supplier to supply wood that is ready for burning. If not and you get newly cut wood, you will pay a lot of money for the water content and it won't burn!

The way they calculate the invoice is interesting. The empty lorry is weighed on a weigh bridge and then again when stacked with logs; the difference is the weight of logs you have bought.
The purchase price is quoted in cost per kilo! why such a small unit I don't know,as I'm sure they wouldn't supply small amounts. Their smallest lorry holds about 2.5 tonne, which may be the minimum. 
Eventually the invoice shows a delivery of, say,  4,500 kilos of wood at 0.145€ the kilo, a total of 
652.5€.

One of the pleasures of France, or this part of France anyway, is the large number of family-run concerns; shops, restaurants, cafes and many other small enterprises.
Our supplier of logs, "Les Fils de F Barbanson" (the name says it all) is one such firm, always lovely to deal with. I was thinking of the family run context when the lorry came down our drive and backed around to empty all the logs. As usual, the logs were all stacked neatly in the back. I suspect that in a non family run firm, the cost of labour to stack logs in the lorry would have resulted in the logs being loaded mechanically in to a large lorry any which way. When it's a member of the family, it makes sense to get as many logs in as possible per delivery!

Anyway, we set out to stack the first delivery of 2.3 tonne, kindly helped by our neighbour, Jean-Louis. By 9.45 we'd just about stacked the lot when the second delivery arrived, neatly stacked in the lorry. With a break to pay the bill and drink a coffee, we started again and had the lot stacked by 11 a m!

The exercise to be repeated on 13th August. Hope the weather is as kind then as it was today, sunny but cool and if we finish the job before midday, we are working in shadow.

We always get enormous pleasure out of stacking our logs. We've had some exercise, they look good stacked and there is an atavistic pleasure in knowing that you have sufficient to keep the winter chills at bay.

Cost of living

Our friend Ian Hugo who lives in the village commented in one of his blogs that in some outlooks on life there would seem to be a deep cultural difference between the French & English.

That many French people, often in the family firms mentioned above, regard looking after their customers and giving them value for money as more important than making large (& larger) profits.

I was reminded of this when ordering our logs and subsequently confirming the delivrery date. I asked the girl in the office, probably the wife of one of the Barbanson fils, to confirm that the price had gone up from 0.140€ to 0.145€ pr kilo. She was immediately very apologetic and explained that the VAT had just gone up (true, from 5.5% to 7%) I reassured her that I was not complaining, just wanted to confirm!

I was certainly not complaining. This is the 7th year we have bought our logs from Barbanson.
In 2006 they were 0.160€ per kilo, the same in 2007 and went down to 0.140€ in 2008( some kind of loyalty bonus!) where the price stayed until this year!