Now that the Monopolies Commission has completed its first investigation
I should like to recommend a new victim for it to concentrate on. There are not many complete monopolies in this country outside the nationalised industries. Nearly every private enterprise has at least one competitor. This particular private enter- prise has none at all. It is naked and unashamed, and goes on brazenly performing for an astonishingly small fee public services which no one else has thought of rendering. It is called Finders II think I have mentioned it once before in this column) and consists of a row of charming-sounding young men who sit at a battery of telephones and find things—theatre tickets, a hotel room, an out- of-print book, a purchaser of a pedigree Corgi, a seller of a dress suit with a 34-inch waist, the address of a vendor of pickled lampreys —and so on. This is not all, nor nearly all. If your house is going to be shut for several hours, as so many houses are nowadays, and there is no one to take the telephone call you are expecting, you can (I believe) tell exchange to divert it to Finders, who will take it down and keep it until you ask for it ; anyhow, you can certainly tell your caller not to ringr you up at all (because you will not be there), but to ring Finders direct and leave the message. This reprehensible monopoly does all sorts of other things that I have no room to write about. You will find them in the London Telephone Directory. Ask them to send you a "brochure."
Previous page
