To really dislike those Bounty packs that get forced upon us, whether we want them or not?

[electra]

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since everything is a commodity today. But for some reason I find them in such poor taste. You go for a booking appointment with a midwife, so very early on in a pregnancy and it's an opportunity for you to be bombarded with advertisements for oak cots and so on...

I feel it's not entirely appropriate that healthcare providers buy into this kind of thing and endorse it and I felt the same when I was given one after dd2 was born and I barely had the energy to mumble 'I don't want one thanks'

Apart from the little pot of sudocrem (I think we are all agreed that it was fab) Bounty Packs are shite. I slung it all in the bin. I get the distinct impression they were pretty good 30 yrs ago but now crappola.

"I get the distinct impression they were pretty good 30 yrs ago but now crappola."

Depends what you call good! I suspect 30 years ago they were far worse for promoting formula as the laws were less strict then.

Angrywasp I always, always ask if it's OK to take details. If the answer were ever to be "no" (and it never has been) I would still leave bags. There are lots of Bounty employees and I can't speak for everyone but that's what I'd do. Secondly, our pay is calculated on different things - we leave boxes of p/w with midwives, we give out Overnight bags and also the New Baby bags. We also take wipes and baby wash to SCBU and the children's wards.
LovelyTin Blimey, if you think that's hard sell you should go to a sales office - I don't SELL anything.
Thanks for the offer of a pipe but I don't smoke

I was just going to post on this, then realised I had already posted what I was about to post last year!

busybutterfly you seem to be deliberately missing the point about hard selling of baby photographs on post natal wards by bounty employees, something that happens in my trust.

You might have a point Queenie. Perhaps there was some free carnation milk?

busy that;s good to know. My Bounty Lady insisted I gave her my details or she would take away the pack which I needed because it had the child benefit form in it apparently. She also suggested that she needed to take a photo of ds for 'security' reasons

I was so shocked at her behaviour I actually put 'no Bounty' in my birth plan for no.2

TBH I was a bit shocked that the baby bath they used to wash ds was Johnsons. I would have thought it would have come in unbranded. It was like they were promoting it and I find that shocking.

Bounty packs are a pile of commercial shite, designed for the purposes of

• getting your/your baby's/your family's details on a database

• selling said database to anyone and everyone so they can target you with advertising for more shite

• undermining BF relationships with their soft-sell brand placement for formula

• encouraging early weaning by sending out samples in the 3/4 month pack

• exploiting any loophole they can find in the legislation banning formula advertising

• targetting HCPs with advertising for 'pregnancy and birth synonymous products' (they boast on their corporate website about how much parents trust their HCP's recommendation of products)

• making big mahoosive profits out of all of the above

The representatives and their bags/cameras have no place at all on a maternity ward. They serve no purpose, they are of no benefit to anyone except greedy corporations.

Busy I do appreciate your kind wishes, I'm sure they're heartfelt, but the fact is, not knowing me from Adam (or Eve) we both know if you are at my hospital you'll be poking your nose round my door same as everyone else - it's indiscriminate.

And yes, noone who isn't my DP or a member of the medical team needs to have anything to do with me, not because I'm, ooh a little bit 'uncomfortable' about complete strangers seeing my beautiful milky breasts, but because I don't want to be a blasted sitting duck for your commercial enterprise.

It's breathtaking! Leave the polluting crap packs on the ward for those who are interested to take.

.

Good Lord. Think I shall leave you all to rant - just remember your blood pressure comeinnumber49. And lovelytin...I think I've said I don't do photos so can't comment on that. For the millionth time - if you don't want it SAY NO
I'm not a mouthpiece of Bounty, it's a little p/t time job and I love it. And hands up those of you who work for companies who no-one has any problems with...No? No-one? Thought not.

Agree with majority of posters here, YANBU!

What really pisses me off annoys me is that this is all a commercial ploy to get your details onto a database and once on you can never escape it. (Even if you do get them deleted by then your details have been resold 20 times over.) An earlier poster mentioned Bounty pay £1 per pack handed out, well my privacy and my details are worth a lot more to me than £1. Plus it's all a load of advertising crap - except for the mini Sudocreme pot of course - and much prefer not killing trees for this in the first place rather than recycling!

In my case I hate giving out my details to commercial organisations unless there's a good reason so I immediately told the Bounty lady I wasn't interested. Her demeanour changed instantly : whereas she'd been all chirpy and happy with the other mums (I was at the end of the ward), she glared at me and said I would need the pack for the Child Benefit forms. I told her no thanks I could download these, and which point she just thrust the pack at me anyways and marched off.

As I recall she was wearing an NHS labelled badge and I bet many of the mums thought she was a hospital employee and this was normal NHS business and so they needed to answer all the questions. At no time did she explain this.

I can report I've had no unsollicited marketing phone calls / emails etc since, so it worked. Appalled at an earlier poster who said they received adverts with their birth certificate as well. At my hospital the photo person was different and I had no interest in that either -- and yet the photo people had their own room on the ward when the staff surely could use the extra space .

BTW I thought current consumer law was that personal details were by default withheld and you had to explicitly tick the box saying you allowed your details to be shared. If so aren't Bounty pushing this the other way round, effectively opting you in unless you say No? Agree with all comments that there's no way one should be subject to a marketing push whilst in postpartum state. There shouldn't be anyone on the ward who's not a HCP unless they are visitors (family & friends) during the approved hours.

I think Bounty (the company) knowingly exploits new mums in hospital - a captive audience - and this is encouraged by the NHS and the Government, which is sad.

Otherwise Child Benefit forms would be given out through some other means, eg. at antenatal clinics, GP surgeries etc.

As a new mum you tend to assume that everyone who comes to see you must be a health professional, but sadly that isn't the case - there is no respite from advertising, even just after childbirth!

If there are other ways of getting a child benefit form other than in a Bounty pack, these aren't made clear to expectant mums. Hiding them in the Bounty pack is a very clever marketing strategy, and it must work, or Bounty wouldn't carry on doing it.

But the fault lies, I think, with Bounty the company, and the NHS - not so much the Bounty ladies, because if the jobs are there people will take them, and there some hard-nosed people around who thrive on that sort of thing.

Having said that though, I enjoyed my freebies and had no qualms about binning the bumf in the hospital waste paper basket!

err, that is what you get for bumping a year old thread busybee.

it amazes me how so many women willingly hand over their personal details get excited over a pot of sudocreme that costs 89p in Wilkos.

I did say no to the Bounty lady, and she came back while I was in the loo and got my details from DH. She implied she was an employee of the hospital. I registered on the baby mailing preference service but I'm still getting lots of junk. I meant to write to complain but I never got around to it. I know the junk originates from bounty because they got my inital wrong.

On a more positive note, I finished the bottle of fabric conditioner this week and DD is only 4.5. It made my laundry reek. The lid kept falling off my Sudocrem pot which stopped it being very portable.

I haven't read all the post sorry. Has anyone mentioned Muma Packs? Mama Packs are the Uks only ethically influenced trade-marked natal sample packs.

See here www.goddessmums.co.uk/

Child benefit forms can be had here and filled in online here.

Or phone HMRC for one.

Only Bounty benefits from the myth that they are only available in Bountyshite packs.

I'm quite lucky (and obviously pretty rare) in that my PCT doesn't use Bounty, so I had absolutely nothing. On the other hand it did mean I had no idea about how to claim Child Benefit, but 30 seconds with Google sorted that one out, or there are details in the back of Birth to Five.

I did have all the HIPP stuff with DS's birth certificate though. Now that would have been a good place to put the benefit forms. As a vegetarian I loved the fact that I could put a sticker on the calendar when my DS first ate meat .

Great Telegraph article, though it perpetuates the idea that you need the packs for Child Benefit forms - no you don't!!

The only people who saw me in hospital were DH and HCPs, which is exactly as it should be. Some of the stories are shocking and I'm glad my PCT opts out of it all.

(My GP hates Sudocrem as well, warned us off it as apparently dermatologists think it's evil)

if a woman is responsible enough to have a child I think she should be gven some credit for her ability to say no to any advertising packs that come around should she not want them.
The Bounty lady is just doing a job, it's not harming anyone or pushing any propaganda on anyone and as has been said earlier it's easy to say no to or to leave in the hospital.
FWIW the MW and the HV do a pretty good job of pushing BF hard (my dr friend who'd had a double mastectomy at 28 deliberately didn't mention this on the ward after her first child was born (it was on her notes) and when she was asked if she was BF she said no only to be told she should by the nurses who only gave up when she said why she couldn't BF.
Slightly off topic but a lot worse than being offered fabric softener (have I missed something, when did this become so bad??!)

Btw the Bounty lady who posted earlier did say she asks if she can take details, but she certainly doesn't phrase it as "Can I take your name, address, phone, email, number of kids, kids' age, etc" to put on our Bounty marketing database and resell to as many organisations as possible". Noooo, it just comes across as yet another hospital employee wielding a clipboard...

Iirc there is a sticker for when your child stops bfing - as if it is a developmental milestone!

I also believe some of the samplers in the Mama Pack are Work at home mums who i would rather support than the likes of the big people any day. I also loved the food in there!!!!

salvadory, all a woman needs to know about having a baby is, well, i think you already know. i can't see how that relates to refusing hard sell marketing when she is in a very vulnerable physical and mental state.

how's offering a pack of leaflets a hard sell?? It's not like you're being asked to insure your life on the spot is it? It's some free crap which can be left in the hospital. Hardly a hard sell, but i'm only having my first in January so maybe I'll think differently after I've been bounty bothered actually in hospital