That sinking feeling

It's 1988. We moved back from Somerset the year before and we've just moved house again. Sue had bought a house in Kettering so that we had somewhere to live while we sorted ourselves out. It was a nice mid terraced house overlooking a park and we paid £34,000 for it, having sold our house in Shepton Mallet for £37,000. House prices were rising fast and we decided to move while we could, so, one year after we bought our home, we sold it for £46,000 and bought another one on the outskirts of the town. It was slighly larger and had a garage. We paid £48,000 for it.
It's worth noting that our house earned more in that year than I did. I was on about £11,000 as I recall.
As well as moving house, I was in line for the new store in Corby that was due to open later that year. The company still had plans to continue expanding and had a brand new state of the art distribution centre in Southampton. It was then that we began to hear rumours that the company was up for sale. The rumours were confirmed. Everything went on hold and I had to continue commuting to St Ives.
Then the news came through that the company had been bought by Superdrug.


Oh joy.

There were a few ex-Superdrug managers working for Share and none of us felt secure. We were called to a meeting to meet the new owners and I came face to face with my nemesis who by now had been promoted from Area Manager to Regional Director. I recognised a few of the Area Managers as well. Superdrug only appointed from within so they'd been managers when I was kicking my heels as an assistant manager.


After that meeting which seemed to go OK (there were no promises made that we would automatically keep our jobs) I recived a letter stating what I could expect if I decided to accept redundancy. It wasn't a lot and I'd just moved into a new more expensive house. I agonised over this for a week or two and finally and reluctantly accepted the new contract from Superdrug.
Share had already appointed a new manager for St Ives, so I was once again a spare manager. I went around the various local stores to re-acquaint myself with the systems, which hadn't changed much, only evolved and then I heard that Superdrug had taken over the lease that Share had signed on the new store at Corby, so I applied for the position and was given the OK.


Once again I was recruiting, and training staff, fitting out and stocking the store. The store opened and we started trading. I can only remember a few things about it.
One was the silly lift from the warehouse to the shop floor. It was only about 3 feet high and just big enough for one stock trolley.
Then there was the steady stream of toerags who had nothing better to do than to stand outside taunting me. They were all barred from entering, but that didn't seem to stop them. They thought it was a game. They'd intimidate the younger staff and openly shoplift unless I stood in front of them. I wish I'd had a cattle prod.
The next was the staff's accents. Although Corby is less than ten miles from Kettering, the people speak with an entirely different accent, a strange almost scottish accent. This derives from the huge influx of Scottish and Irish families to work at the steelworks in the 1930s, when the population increased from 1500 to 15,000 in a little over eighteen months.
Finally there was my chief cashier. She lived on one of the more notorious estates. She knew everyone who came into the store. OK so far, but then she didn't turn up for work one Saturday and rang in sick. This meant that I had to cash up the tills on my own and at that time we used to take the banking to the local bank and deposit it in the night safe. We closed on time and I asked a couple of Saturday staff to wait and walk with me to the bank. As we rounded the corner I was jumped from behind by a young man who tried to grab my briefcase which looked like a security case. I fell to the floor and we had a tug of war for a second or two. I managed to kick him hard in the balls but in doing so broke my hold on the case. He ran away with my case which contained my wallet, some papers and the remains of my lunch. The night safe wallet was inside my jacket, tucked under my armpit. My glasses were broken and I was bleeding from a cut above my eye. I placed the wallet in the night safe and went to a call box, rang home and then called for an ambulance. The cheque cards were cancelled before the lad had stopped running. The police later found my briefcase in the local river and no, I didn't get it back.
I rang the area manager and he arranged to meet me early on Monday morning. When I arrived at work I looked a sight. I had a huge black eye and swollen face. We sat at the checkout to greet the staff as they came in. I kept my back to each one and turned to face them in order to gauge their reaction.
Only one person didn't register shock.
Guess who?
My chief cashier.
We suspected that she'd tipped off her boyfriend and he'd mugged me. Only there was no proof.
She put in her notice a few weeks later.
Funny that.


About nine months after the store opened I was on the move again. I was asked to take over an existing Share store in Northampton.
And I went on a training course. My first proper training course since I'd left school over twenty years before. Ah, well, it's never too late to learn.

On the move again

I worked for Superdrug and Share drugstores in the late 70s and 80s. Both businesses used the same model of having a central distribution centre where suppliers delivered, and minimal stocks in the branch. We kept accurate stock and order records (this was pre- EPOS and computers) and we ordered what we needed every week.
It meant that the companies didn't have their cash tied up in slow selling stock in the branches, which was the downfall of Lewis Meeson's.
I left Meesons after they'd been taken over by Martins and moved up the High Street to Share Drug Store, a company in the same mould as Superdrug. It was a brand new shop, and I was sent to another store for training while the builders fitted the store out. I enjoyed working there, it was a much better atmosphere than Superdrug, and they were expanding.
We'd been living in Somerset for about three years. I loved our house but the towns were all a bit small for an ambitious retail manager. After a succesful Christmas I was ready for a change.
Share had about 140 stores, mostly in the southern counties, with a distribution centre in Southampton. One day I was looking at the list of branches when I noticed thatthey were proposing to open a branch in St Ives. It was a few weeks after we'd been to Cornwall on holiday, and we'd spoken about the possibility of moving down there. In the end we decided against it, because of the lack of alternative employment should the job not work out.
Suddenly the company was opening a branch in St Ives. I looked long and hard and then realised that it was St Ives in Cambridgeshire!
We'd lived in deepest Somerset for three years, and the locals were only just acknowledging our presence. I'd always treated the move as temporary, and we'd visited every tourist attraction within 30 miles, so I was ready to return to the Midlands.
I talked it over with my wife and we agreed that I should apply for the post. I heard back within a few days. I'd been successful. All I had to do was train my successor and I could move up in time to recruit the staff and fit the store out. However, the company would not be paying my relocation costs.
We put our house on the market. We'd been there for three years and had turned a very run-down property that lacked a kitchen or central heating into a nice comfortable end of terrace home with a very large garden, not overlooked, on the edge of town and with views out over the Mendips. We'd paid £22k for it 9in 1984) and sold it for £37.5k in 1987.
However, it still wasn't enough to buy a house anywhere near Cambridge. St Ives was about ten miles from Cambridge and the most we could afford there was a tiny two bedroom quadrant home. We decided to move to Kettering and I would commute, although the A604 wasn't the best road to travel on.
I moved up to stay with Sue's relatives and began the job of getting St Ives store open. She rang me one day to say that someone had agreed to buy the house. I said that she should get in her car and come up and buy us a house in Kettering.
So she did. She put Chris in the child's seat, sent Jayne to school and drove the 150 or so miles to Kettering. She walked into an Estate Agent just as a couple were placing their house on the market. She had a look around and did the deal there and then. She then drove back home and told me what she'd done when I rang her later that night.

Sue packed everything and arranged the move while I worked to get the store open. She moved on the day I opened the store. We had to stay in her parent's spare bedroom that night, as we couldn't get the keys until the following morning.


St Ives was a succesful store that made money right from the start. We had a good team of staff and we all got on well. It was a bind travelling 35 miles each way each day, with only the last few miles on dual carriageway. I began to look around for somewhere a little closer to home.
As luck would have it, the company had signed a lease on a shop unit in Corby, just down the road. I was all set to transfer there when the news came through that the owner of the company had put it up for sale- and the new owners were- Superdrug.


Four years on and I had come full circle. I was going to be working for Superdrug again.
Oh bliss. Not.

Good buying

I worked in retail for about twenty years and I learned that good buying is much more important than good selling.
I moved to Somerset in the mid 1980s to open and manage a 3000 sq ft CTN (Confectionary, tobacco, news) in Wells. I was responsible for most of the buying, with the exception of the promotional items. The company used a separate firm to negotiate deals and import goods from the Far East.
Less than eighteen months after joining the company the buyers had destroyed the company, one that had  a history going back over 100 years.
Some examples.
Easter Eggs. The company decided to take on Tesco and Woolworths and sell Easter Eggs at silly prices. Bear in mind that most of the shops were small newsagents less than 1000 sq feet, that is, a fraction of the size of an average supermarket, with a correspondingly smaller number of customers, no advertising budget and tiny windows to display your goodies.
Not looking hopeful is it?
The company were persuaded that it was a good idea and we went ahead. We received deliveries of eggs that filled every nook and carnny of the store. We pile the eggs high and sold them cheap. Come Easter Monday we'd sold thousands at great expense of energy and stress. However, we still had thousands left over, so we had to reduce them in price still further in order to clear them.
Then we sat down and worked out how much profit we'd made by selling all those eggs at give away prices.
None. Nothing. Zilch.


Then  there was the toys and fancy goods. Every month I'd drive up the country to a presentation where the buyers would show us what they'd bought for us. They made a great play of how much margin these goods would produce. (assuming that we could sell them).
Then the goods would arrive. Lorry loads. Every shop had more stock than it could display. Each month we'd remove all the unsold items from the previous month's special promotion and put them in the stockroom along with all the other unsold items. Each month we'd get more stock and the backrooms would be bulging with unsold goods.
The ultimate insult came in 1985, when the buyers decided that we should be selling Acorn Electron computers. Just the hardware. There was no software available. I received ten of these misbegotten follies to sell and set one up on the counter. Remember that this was a W H Smith type of outlet. We sold newspapers and magazines, greetings cards, tobacco and confectionery and some toys and gifts. We also sold records and cassettes and outsold the Woolworths next door.  Wells is a tiny city of about 5000. There is a tourist season but the winters are very quiet. And I had to sell computers without software and without any training. I'd never seen a computer let alone operate one.
I went without saying that the company's financial situation became dire. We were on stop with all our suppliers,and had to pay cash on delivery for cigarettes. The margin on cigarettes is tiny, less than 5%, so it was clear that we couldn't survive.
And we didn't. We were taken over by Martins, part of the Guiness empire at that time.
I hated working for them. In some respects they were worse than the other shower. But at least they had their buyers under control.


I learned that potential profit margins are only potential. Until the cash in in the till, the product is either a liability or an asset. Good buys are an asset, bad buys are a liability.


I left the company in 1986 after about two years. The new management treated us like criminals. It wasn't the fault of the store managers that the buyers were out of control, but we got the blame. I kept a tight control of the items that I was responsible for buying. I kept waste to a minimum and kept a close eye on the shrinkage. I sacked one member of staff for underringing on the tills and that dissuaded the others from trying it on.
What did it for me was when the chief executive of Guiness awarded himself a 10% rise. The Martins staff got 5% and those of us who'd been taken over after our firm had gone bust had to be content with 2%.
It was time for a change again.

Superdrug

Superdrug was set up in the early sixties by the Goldstein family. Ralph (the father) had sold his chain of supermarkets to Tesco and his sons Peter, Ronald & Howard were looking for a new venture. They opened the first Superdrug in Putney High St in 1966. They found the premises, fitted it out, stocked the shelves and manned the tills. They grew the business from humble beginnings and there wasn't one single aspect of the business that they hadn't done. They knew it inside out.
I was interviewed by Peter Goldstein at the Northampton branch of Superdrug and he offered me a job. The company was growing, opening new stores almost every week and he made a point of telling me about the opportunities for promotion that existed within the company.
One thing convinced me to join Superdrug.
It wasn't Tesco.

I wasn't prepared for the culture shock when I turned up for work on my first day.
For a start, it was very formal. All the management staff called each other Mr.... No first names.
No fraternising with the staff. Inappropriate behaviour with a female member of staff was a sacking offence. It was like being an officer on a ship of the line.
Then there were the hours of work. The store opened from 9.00 to 5.30. I was expected to start at 7.00 to unload the deliveries and to stay until at least 6.00 each night. I was used to having the odd Saturday off. I couldn't even have the Saturday off before my annual holidays. My band were playing about three times a week and they'd have to wait for me to finish work before driving off to the venue. I'd change from my work clothes in the van and grab a sandwich and perhaps a short nap. I weighed about 11 stone and was built like a racing snake.
My job title was Trainee Manager. This meant that I did everything from opening the store to unloading the deliveries and packing everything in the warehouse. I also made lists of the stock that had been sold during the day and picked the goods for the female staff to price. I also kept the store neat and tidy and dressed the windows. Every evening we'd face the shelves up, bringing all the stock forward to give the appearance of  full shelves. We'd count the stock every week and place and order with head office. This was delivered two days later. Superdrug ran a very very very tight ship. There was no waste anywhere. The cardboard was separated from the rubbish and sent back to the warehouse, where it was baled up and sold for recycling. This was at least twenty years before recycling became fashionable.
We cashed up the tills every day and banked every penny. The cash had to balance to the penny. If it didn't there was an enquiry.
We carried out staff searches at least twice a week. The reasoning was that if the staff expected to be searched then they wouldn't try anything stupid. It mostly worked, although I did catch a saturday girl with a bag full of sweets and no receipt. She lost her job.
We took stock three or four times a year. We didn't have a stocktaking team as that would have cost too much. The area manager would oversee the stocktake and it was conducted like a military exercise. Every staff member had to come in, or stay behind after work to take stock. We never closed, not even for half an hour. During the day we'd count the warehouse and the backup stock and as soon as the door shut we started counting the stock on the shelves. We were only interested in monetary value. One person would count the stock and write the amount on a piece of tally roll, and another would follow along, spot checking and recording the amounts on a master sheet. These were gathered together and tallied up and it was possible to arrive at a provisional stock result within three hours of closing time. Woe betide if you had a bad result.

Superdrug didn't have a training department. They expected their trainees to have had some formal training at their previous jobs. I hadn't. The company estimated that a trainee manager could relieve another branch manager after a few weeks, and be able to manage his own store after three months.
I struggled. Boy did I struggle. I tried to find another job but there was nothing doing. It was 1979 and the country was in a right mess. I had to stick it out.
For all my different jobs, I'd had no experience in management or leadership. I sullenly followed orders and became the area relief manager. I'd travel to the various Superdrug stores within a thirty mile radius to cover the manager's days off and holidays, and I tried to keep a low profile.
Two things kept me sane.
One was my music. I'd formed a top40 group in 1976 after my rock band had folded, and we played the pubs and clubs within a thirty mile radius of Northampton. It was the one constant during all the years that I was with Superdrug.
I'd achieved my ambitions for 1978. New house, new car, new job. I'd married my long term girlfriend in 1977 and we were working hard doing up the house that we'd bought together.
I can't say that I was happy though. We were predictable and safe, like an old married couple.
Then a new chief cashier started at Superdrug. She only stayed for a few months but she changed my life. After she'd left the company the rules about fraternising didn't count and we became friends. After a couple of years we became lovers. We've been married for over twenty five years.
I was a stubborn and slow  learner. It took me ages to feel comfortable giving orders. I'd always been one of the workers. I had to learn to be single minded, not to be distracted and have clear objectives. It took a long time.
One defining moment was during a particularly busy time. I was on the shop floor, rushing around trying to restock the fast moving lines. There I was, with my head down, price gun a blur, and my staff standing by watching me. I suddenly realised what I was doing and everything changed in an instant. From now on, they would be the ones with their heads down working, and I would be watching them.
I stayed with Superdrug for nearly six years before moving on. As fate would have it, I was back with them within three years. A lot had gone on in the intervening time.
Looking back I really admire the Goldsteins. They were innovators, pioneers. They were hard but fair. A few years after I'd left Superdrug they offered me a chance to join them on another pioneering retail venture.

The birth of ambition

1978 was the year for change. At the start of the year I resolved to do three things: firstly to pass my driving test. I grew up in London and never needed to drive, not when there were three different bus routes and two tube lines within easy walking distance of home. I did get a Honda 50 when I was seeing a girl who lived in Hillingdon. I missed the tube one night and it was a long walk along Western Avenue, more than ten miles before I got a lift. I bought the bike soon afterwards. But even a bike is a bind when you live in a bedsit, so I sold it to my dad.
Living in the suburbs of Northampton was a culture shock. No buses and taxis were prohibitively expensive. I was still in my drinking phase so my girlfriend learned to drive, and our roadie used to pick me and the other guitarist up and take us to Milton Keynes, where we would rehearse and also store our kit.
So passing my test was one priority. The next was to buy our own house. In 1978 the average price for a victorian terraced house in Northampton was about £7000. We opened a savings account and I put all my gig money in it. We saved £500 in a matter of months, found a terraced house in Abington for £7200, got a mortgage and moved in during the autumn.
The third resolution was to get a new job. As a department supervisor I fancied myself as management material, despite my reluctance to impose my will in any situation. I was already considered too old to be a Tesco trainee manager (that's what they told me), so my future lay elsewhere. But where?
I needed a clean driving licence for a start. I'd had a bit of practice driving our car with my wife/girlfriend in the passenger seat, so I could control the car. I need to learn how to pass the driving test. I had five lessons and put in for my test and passed. I don't know who was more surprised, me or my wife. She needed two tests and a lot of lessons.


So that was two down, one to go. I saw an advert in the local paper looking for trainee managers for a drugstore that was opening branches everywhere. I applied and was asked to an interview.
I must have said something right because I was offered a job at a higher rate than I was earning, so I put my notice in at Tesco and prepared to move on.
By this time I was managing the wines and spirits section and I didn't have a clue what to order for the Christmas rush. There were no records and the outgoing manager had had quite enough of Tesco and wasn't going to help.
I disliked the new general manager intensely. He was arrogant and sly. He's stand on the shop floor eating the stock, and would bawl out anyone who even thought of doing the same. The top man at Tesco was Ian Maclauren. When he called in to look around he was the model of courtesy. The same could not be said for his underlings. The regional manager would visit along with the area manager. The regional manager would walk around the store and publicly bollock the area manager if something wasn't to his satisfaction. After he'd gone, the area manager would drag the general manager around the store and publicly bollock him about the same thing. He'd stomp off and the general manager would call the departmental manager over and publicly humiliate him. The the departmental manager would do the same to whoever was nearest.
Why didn't they cut out the middle men and have the Regional manager bawl out the saturday boy, and give us all a break?
Working at Tesco had its compensations, namely the fifty or more checkout girls, plus other female staff scattered around the departments. Getting off with one or more of them was almost compulsory. I did untold damage to my marriage when I worked there, but hey, that's rock 'n roll, right?
I heard from friends that the wines & spirits department sold out of stock in the first week leading up to Christmas and couldn't get any more. Shame. They should treat their staff better. 

When I started work at Superdrug in November 1978 I had achieved my ambitions for that year. New job, new house and a driving licence.

What followed was a real culture shock in every way

Dossers and slappers

After reading my last post I realised that that was the second time in my life that I'd left a job without having another one to go to. It got me thinking about my time at Olympia.
I started working in around November 1970 in an upstairs office overlooking the service yard. At that time Olympia hosted all the major trade exhibitions including the Ideal Home Exhibition. In all I spent about eighteen months there. Most shows took a week or so to set up, then the show itself for four or five days followed by another week pulling the stands down. There was a small core of staff augmented by casual staff when the shows were running.

There were still doss houses (a place where homeless people can sleep for the night. Provided either by the local council, or by a charity organisation)in London in the late sixties/early seventies. There was one just down the road in Hammersmith and the "residents" would queue up for work when we had a show. The firm would pay wages each day in cash, as it was by no means certain that the worker would turn up two days running. The men would be employed as porters and would be paid a pittance and get a meal in the staff canteen. It was just possible to earn enough to stay in the doss house by alternating between Olympia and Earls Court.
They'd stand in line each morning, nursing hangovers and giving false names to the personnel department. If they were lucky to be employed that day they'd dissappear into the labyrinth of tunnels under the halls and do just enough work to keep out of trouble.
I recall one regular. He'd alternate between pulling a rag and bone cart around the streets in the summer and pushing a barrow delivering goods to the dry goods store in the winter. He was loud and uncomplicated. He claimed he couldn't read or write, yet understood enough to be able to do the horses every day (reading the horse's names and the odds) and play darts very skilfully (subtracting his score and working out his next dart in his head).
I remember another kitchen porter who worked full time. He must have been approaching retirement age and may have been gay. (This was only a few years after homosexuality had been legalised). He kept himself to himself. I only spoke to him once and he told me how much he loved his job, because this was one of the last places in London where he could wash up by hand, with his hands in soapy water, rather than using the now universal dishwashers.
Ah well, it takes all sorts and I've met most of them.

I did a spell as a kitchen porter a dozen or so years ago when there was nothing else going, and I was glad to have had a dishwasher for the plates, cups and cutlery. The pots and pans were buggers to keep clean (and to get clean in the first place). Months of sloppy cleaning had left them encrusted with grease and dirt, and don't ask about the deep fat fryer!
(I sound like Kim Woodburn don't I)

As well as the itinerant tramps and dossers we had a fair sprinkling of foreign students, mostly commonwealth but a few from France. At one point we had two Canadians, one in the payroll department and the other in the winestore. Both were travelling around Europe and had arrived at Olympia at different times and from different European destinations. It turned out that they were from the same town, same university and had never met until I introduced them. Earls Court was like a magnet for Aussies and South Africans so we had a few of those working there as well.
On the female side, we had a lot of university students, girls coming from Europe to learn English and old gals waitressing for pin money. It was quite a mix.
I got to know one or two of the younger ones very intimately.

After a few months of almost terminal boredom trying to sort out the dockets for the accounts department, the storeman walked out just before the start of a show. I thought I'd give it a go and for the next few months was responsible for ordering all the bread, milk, cheese, coffee and all the dry and tinned goods.
I also learned how to cut cheese from a wheel of cheddar and make butter pats and curls using a grooved wooden bat and a marble slab. It's harder than it sounds.

The problem with the job was its start stop nature. Any fresh ground coffee left in stock at the end of a show would be out of date before the next show started. I lacked the experience to judge how much or little of a product to order and there were no records to look at. Once again I had no training and was left to muddle on. I stayed for one year and after the Ideal Homes Exhibition handed my notice in.

Working underground made one appreciate the sunshine. I remember leaving for work in the morning when it was still dark, working underground all day and then coming home at night in darkness. It was a strange experience for a country boy.
I'm glad I did it. It kept me busy during the days and paid enough for my rent and beer money in the evenings when I was out playing with the folk group. And I met some nice people. I also got to look around all the trade shows, car shows and Ideal Home Exhibition for free.
The doss house was closed in the early 70s and a swanky new hotel built on the site.
I have no idea whether the business continued to lose money. I was out of there.

The next day I signed up with an employment agency and looked forward to a few days off. Fat chance.