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Smoke has been seen coming from the crater of the Auckland maunga Mt Wellington.
Images of the smoke began appearing on social media on Friday afternoon.
Around 1.45pm, Fire and Emergency (Fenz) shift manager Josh Pennefather told the NZ Herald a crew was fighting a fire of about 60 square … View moreSmoke has been seen coming from the crater of the Auckland maunga Mt Wellington.
Images of the smoke began appearing on social media on Friday afternoon.
Around 1.45pm, Fire and Emergency (Fenz) shift manager Josh Pennefather told the NZ Herald a crew was fighting a fire of about 60 square metres in size.
”It’s spreading up hill … [but] there’s no property at risk at this stage,” Pennefather said.
Six fire trucks were in attendance working to contain a grass fire that's spreading up the maunga.
A helicopter was on its way to assist firefighting efforts, he added.
At 2pm, Pennefather shared that the fire was contained and they were working to extinguish it, including “keeping an eye on a whole bunch of hot spots“.
With three basic ingredients and a bit of creativity, you can give old containers new life with Resene testpots.
Find out how to create your own with these easy step by step instructions.
Venetian plaster finishes are on-trend at the moment, so why not recreate this look at home and cover that unsightly rangehood at the same time?
Find out how to create your own with Resene Sandtex and these easy step by step instructions.
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🎆 It's that time of year again! Check out our tips to keep your whānau and pets safe during the Guy Fawkes period.
Find out when the maunga will be closed and when Te Oneone Rangatira / Muriwai Beach will have restricted vehicle access by clicking "read more"
This coming Monday is Labour Day in New Zealand. This public holiday marks when the eight-hour workday and 48-hour workweek became law in 1899. The idea started with Samuel Parnell, a carpenter in Wellington, who in 1840 refused to work more than eight hours a day. Since skilled workers were in … View moreThis coming Monday is Labour Day in New Zealand. This public holiday marks when the eight-hour workday and 48-hour workweek became law in 1899. The idea started with Samuel Parnell, a carpenter in Wellington, who in 1840 refused to work more than eight hours a day. Since skilled workers were in short supply, his employer had to agree.
As more skilled workers arrived, employers tried to change working conditions, but Parnell and others kept pushing for better rights. In 1890, Parnell led a Labour Day parade of 1,500 people to promote the eight-hour day. He passed away shortly after, and nine years later, Labour Day became an official public holiday.
Do you feel that we have reached the ideal in working environments yet? What rights are you passionate about relating to employment? Share your thoughts!
Ryman Healthcare has donated $466,640 to Leukaemia & Blood Cancer New Zealand while announcing Hato Hone St John as its new charity partner.
Ryman’s Executive Chair, Dean Hamilton, presented the cheque to the charity at a special event held at Murray Halberg Village in Auckland.
Tim … View moreRyman Healthcare has donated $466,640 to Leukaemia & Blood Cancer New Zealand while announcing Hato Hone St John as its new charity partner.
Ryman’s Executive Chair, Dean Hamilton, presented the cheque to the charity at a special event held at Murray Halberg Village in Auckland.
Tim Edmonds, CEO of Leukemia & Blood Cancer New Zealand, described the donation as ’vitally important’ to the work the charity does.
Click read more for the full article.
Inovo offers consultancy services and strategic advice across construction and land development projects.
We provide civil engineering, surveying and resource consenting professional advice and specialty services for all aspects of separate and integrated land/building development. With … View moreInovo offers consultancy services and strategic advice across construction and land development projects.
We provide civil engineering, surveying and resource consenting professional advice and specialty services for all aspects of separate and integrated land/building development. With experience in public and private capital investment programmes Inovo’s project management and project delivery capabilities provide our clients with certainty of project outcomes.
We partner with our clients, providing a comprehensive range of services, agile mindset and strategic approach to provide a unique and successful result, every time.
Congratulations to this week's winners:
Sam Fuller from Red Beach
Johanna Mortis from Saint Clair
Matthew Hardy from Kelburn
… View moreCongratulations to this week's winners:
Sam Fuller from Red Beach
Johanna Mortis from Saint Clair
Matthew Hardy from Kelburn
Anne Fahey from Woolston
They've each won a $100 petrol voucher.
If you're a winner, get in touch here.
Not a winner this week? There's always next week!
Enjoy relaxed living in breathtaking Blenheim, Marlborough.
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For just $15 a ticket, you could win this brand-new, fully furnished Jennian home, valued at over $1 million.
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1) Improve outdoor lighting
Ensure that streets, driveways, and front yards are well-lit. Motion-sensor lights around homes deter trespassers by reducing hiding spots and illuminating their movements.
2) Trim your trees
Overgrown shrubs and trees provide cover for intruders. Keeping them … View more1) Improve outdoor lighting
Ensure that streets, driveways, and front yards are well-lit. Motion-sensor lights around homes deter trespassers by reducing hiding spots and illuminating their movements.
2) Trim your trees
Overgrown shrubs and trees provide cover for intruders. Keeping them well-trimmed around windows and doors improves visibility and reduces potential hiding spots.
3) Secure Entry Points
Ensure doors, windows, and gates are always closed when you are away from the house. Upgrade to more secure locks, deadbolts, or even smart locks for added protection.
4) Add a security camera
Place security cameras in the main entry points to your home. Doorbell cameras are also relatively cheap and a great way to keep track of who is visiting your home when you aren't there.
5) Start a Neighborhood Watch Program
You could reach out to members on Neighbourly to form a group of neighbors who can regularly keep an eye out for suspicious activity and report it. You could also check with Neighbourhood Support to see what is existing in your area.
6) Introduce yourself to your neighbours
The closer you are to your neighbors, the more likely they’ll notice when something unusual or suspicious is happening around your property
Feel free to share anything that you do around your area to deter crime.
24 October 2024
Why did New World and Pak'nSave delete a crucial online shopping tool?
On this page
What a Consumer member noticed
What our survey found
Foodstuffs responds: ‘We’re upgrading our digital platform’
What Consumer says: ‘It’s bizarre’
Chris Schulz
By Chris … View more24 October 2024
Why did New World and Pak'nSave delete a crucial online shopping tool?
On this page
What a Consumer member noticed
What our survey found
Foodstuffs responds: ‘We’re upgrading our digital platform’
What Consumer says: ‘It’s bizarre’
Chris Schulz
By Chris Schulz
Senior Investigative Writer | Kaituhi Mātoro Matua
Whether it's clothes, shoes, appliances or food, anyone who shops online regularly knows there's one tool that's become ubiquitous: the ability to rank searched items by price.
Consumer spent an hour browsing local retail websites and couldn't find a single one that didn't give customers access to that tool.
From clothing stores Hallensteins, North Beach and Barkers, to shoe stores Number One Shoes, Sketchers and Platypus Shoes, to appliance stores Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming and JB Hi-Fi, to large-scale marketplaces Trade Me, Kmart and Farmers, the filter buttons marked “highest-to-lowest" and “lowest-to-highest" are easy to find and available for everyone to use.
So, it was a surprise to hear from a Consumer member that two of the websites they use most often – New World and Pak'nSave – had removed the ability for shoppers to be able to do this.
New World and Pak'nSave are owned by the same company, Foodstuffs, and rank among the country’s biggest retail websites. Yet, over the past few months, Foodstuffs has quietly removed the rank by price tool from both. It may not be back for quite some time. The question is, why?
What a Consumer member noticed
The message arrived through Facebook. It said: "I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that both Pak'nSave and New World have removed the option to sort products by price.
"If anything, they should have added the option to sort by unit price, but no, it now automatically sorts products by popularity, which makes it much harder for consumers to find the cheapest product."
Consumer wanted to find out if this was true, so we jumped online and tested the websites for both New World and Pak'nSave.
It's true! The ability to rank any searched item by price, whether that's coffee, milk, bread or meat, is no longer available through the website of either supermarket. (The function remains if you're shopping via the app.)
In a cost-of-living crisis, when the rising price of groceries has been at the forefront of everyone's minds, that's a disappointing and niggly change.
"This is not okay!" said our complainant.
Then something else caught our eye while we were browsing: the same brand name kept coming up in our searches again and again.
What our survey found
To check to see if the price-ranking function might magically reappear, Consumer plugged 10 different everyday items into the search engines on the websites for New World and Pak'nSave: butter, Colby cheese, tinned tomatoes, white sugar, flour, milk, spinach, almond milk, toilet paper and baked beans.
In almost every search, Pams products came up as the first result, both in the drop-down search function, and in the ranked search results. Pams products for butter, Colby cheese, tinned tomatoes, white sugar, flour, milk, spinach and almond milk all came first; for toilet paper, a Pams product was fourth; for baked beans, it was third.
Pams is the in-house brand owned by New World and Pak'nSave. In recent years, products by Pams have proliferated on the shelf, as have the equivalent in-house brands for supermarkets owned by Woolworths.
Consumer believes expanding in-house ranges at supermarkets lessens choices for consumers, hurts local suppliers and increases supermarket profit margins.
Screenshot of New World online
Foodstuffs responds: ‘We’re upgrading our digital platform’
Consumer approached Foodstuffs with concerns about its removal of the ability to rank searched items by price. We said we believed it was unfair to shoppers to remove a crucial online tool during a cost-of-living crisis.
A spokesperson responded: “We're upgrading our digital platform and improving our e-commerce offering with more transparent unit pricing. Soon, we'll add a new sort feature allowing customers to sort products by price or unit price.”
That’s a reference to new unit pricing rules. From August 2025, the websites for supermarkets must display unit pricing, making it easier for consumers to compare the price of products on what they cost per unit of measure.
The spokesperson says it removed the ability to rank items by prices on search pages for both websites at the end of May; for category pages, the changes were made for New World in late July, and for Pak'nSave in late August. When asked if they had a date the tool might return, the spokesperson said: "We don't have an exact date yet."
Consumer approached Woolworths – Foodstuffs’ biggest competitor – to see if it had any plans to remove its online search ranking function.
A spokesperson replied: “Woolworths New Zealand has no plans to remove the ‘sort by price’ feature. We know that our online customers use the sorting and filtering options to find the best value and we have recently made these options more prominent.”
Regarding our observations that its search function promotes its own products over those of other suppliers, the Foodstuffs spokesperson denied this.
“Our goal is to make finding products quick and convenient, whether customers are searching or browsing categories,” they said.
“Search results aren't biased toward Pams products – they’re based on regional sales data or customers’ inferred preferences. Occasionally, we may boost categories or pin products for promotions, but there are no specific rules for Pams. Logged-in users get personalised results, while logged-out users see region-based data.”
What Consumer says: ‘It’s bizarre’
Jessica Walker, Consumer NZ’s acting head of research and advocacy, calls the supermarkets’ removal of a crucial online search function “bizarre”.
“It seems bizarre that Foodstuffs would remove the option to filter by price, especially at a time when New Zealanders are continuing to struggle with the cost-of-living crisis,” she says.
She points to Consumer’s in-house Sentiment Tracker survey as proof that food prices remain among the biggest concerns facing household budgets right now.
“It’s nonsensical that two of our biggest supermarkets would move away from enabling online shoppers to browse products by price,” she says.
“Even if this is a temporary measure while Foodstuffs is preparing the roll-out of unit pricing online, it’s doing a disservice to their customers who want to get the best bang for their buck in the meantime.”
As for allegations Foodstuffs was pushing its in-house brand Pams through its online stores, Walker says Consumer has voiced concerns in the past about this tactic limiting choice for consumers.
“This latest online update reaffirms those concerns,” she says.
Do you want all young people to have an opportunity to participate in our national sport?
Sense Rugby is an adapted rugby programme for tamariki and rangatahi with disabilities or neurodiversity and we are on a mission to make it available to as many communities as possible across the motu.
… View moreDo you want all young people to have an opportunity to participate in our national sport?
Sense Rugby is an adapted rugby programme for tamariki and rangatahi with disabilities or neurodiversity and we are on a mission to make it available to as many communities as possible across the motu.
Come find out more about our programme and how we change lives for our tamariki and rangatahi.
Can you find all the words related to sleep? Test your knowledge and let’s see how many you can solve!
Down
1. A piece of furniture for sleeping or resting.
2.A sound made during sleep caused by the vibration of the throat.
Across
1. A state of sleep; deep rest.
2. To cease work or … View moreCan you find all the words related to sleep? Test your knowledge and let’s see how many you can solve!
Down
1. A piece of furniture for sleeping or resting.
2.A sound made during sleep caused by the vibration of the throat.
Across
1. A state of sleep; deep rest.
2. To cease work or movement to relax or recover strength.
#crosword #sunday #beds4u
Something a little different happening TOMORROW (Oct 26th) at the plant centre (apologies for the short notice).
Please see the attached pdf for details.
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