Two years ago, Farepak went bust leaving more than 150,000 of its customers who had invested in the savings club largely penniless and with little hope for much of a merry Christmas.
Fast forward to today and the collapse of both MFI and Woolworths and Gordon Brown has moved quickly to make very public messages of support in the media with pledges that Woolworths will stay open over Christmas and that help would be given to those employees who may be made redundant.
This is of course worthy stuff - losing your job is worse than losing your Christmas savings. But it's still strange that for Farepak's customers, the government did the absolute minimum to support them and that they still haven't received any compensation from its creditors.
It'd be nice to think that Brown is showing compassion that his predecessor at the time of Farepak did not. But I'm left with a sneaky feeling that its customers were quietly ignored because they were generally on low-incomes and therefore not as visible to the media and to voters as what looks set to become an increasingly boarded-up high street.
