Fork Lift trucks

I first used a fork lift truck back in the 70s when I worked on the night shift at Tesco. I had no training or elfin safety in the use of the reach truck. my options were simple. I needed a pallet from the top of the racking and there was no-one else to get it down but me. I'd watched a few people use the machine so I worked out what each lever and pedal did, and then jumped on. It was a hair-raising experience, and I guess it stayed the same even when, many years later I'd taken my test and was passed fit to be allowed loose on one.
There are a number of different types of forklift but the two main types are reach and counterbalance. For the scientifically minded a folk lift truck is a lever, (just as a shovel is)and if you try and lift too heavy a weight, or put the weight too far in front of you, the truck will lose stability. It also helps to have good eyesight and co-ordination, as I found out quite quickly.
A reach truck has a long wheel base with the front legs positioned in front of the forks and to either side. My truck had a single steering/driving wheel beneath the driver's seat, which makes it quite manoevrable, as it can turn almost in its own wheelbase length. It's very stable but not as fast as a counterbalance truck, which relies on a solid ballast weight at the rear of the truck to counter the weight of the object carried. You can always tell if the truck is overloaded as the driving wheels come off the ground and it becomes a seesaw.
One evening I was taking a pallet of coffee from the top deck of the racking and failed to notice a supporting cable between the rack and the roof. I drew the pallet out, reversed the truck and very neatly skimmed the top layer of coffee jars off the pallet and crashing down around my ears. This creates a dilemma. Do I sit tight and be covered in coffee powder and broken glass or do I get off the truck and risk being hit by full cases?
As I grew in confidence (albeit not much confidence) I used to be called to move pallets for other people, and even to unload lorries (once I'd transferred to days), and the regular forklift driver was on lunch. Eventually I moved on to other jobs and careers and left it all behind.
Until the turn of this century when I found myself at a distribution warehouse dealing in tenpin bowling equipment. This time the truck was an ancient battery driven counterbalance truck that wasn't quite up to the job.
I lost count of the times my heart was in my mouth as I unloaded a full pallet of bowling balls that overloaded the truck by at least 50%. Or the times I held my breath as I tried to retrieve a very heavy pallet from the top of the racking at the limit of its capacity. I worked there for three years and never had an accident, but it was a close run thing on more than one occasion.
There's something utterly buttock clenching about inching across the warehouse floor with a very heavy pallet of very expensive machinery on the forks, and the rear wheels having only the most tenuous contact with the floor.
And then knowing that this is only the first pallet and there's a whole 40ft container still to unload.
When that job ended and I was back in the market place I had another qualification, namely a current fork lift licence. And yet it was the last job I wanted.
I recall going for an interview at a distribution company as a progress chaser, but not getting through the interview but finding myself undergoing an impromptu fork lift driving test in the warehouse. I was awful. I took ages to do the simplest task. My nerve had gone. I didn't get that job either, and I'm glad about that.

While on the subject of forklift truck driving, my son left school at age 16 with ten GCSEs and an utter contempt for the education system in this country. I got him registered with my main employment agency and he was soon earning a man's wages. He saw that he could earn more than the basic minimum wage by training to get his forklift licence, so he paid over £200 to take it. At that time the basic agency hourly rate was £4.50 per hour, while a forklift driver could expect £6.50 because they were in short supply. My son actually held a forklift licence before he passed his test to drive on the roads.
With the rising number of unemployed looking for work, the Jobcentre started sending them on forklift training courses. (Sending people on courses is the main way the Jobcentre keeps the unemployment rates down. If you're on a course, you're not seeking work.)
The consequence was that within a year or two there was a glut of forklift truck drivers and they no longer commanded a higher wage. The last I heard, the basic hourly rate at the local agencies was approaching £6 per hour, but forklift rates were still at £6.50. You have to speak Polish as well.

It's good to know that the law of Supply and Demand still holds good.

The Net Book Agreement

One of the many temp jobs I did was at a local print works about ten or so years ago. They needed some extra pairs of hands with a huge print run of magazines. It was all very clean, light and airy and the work wasn't too strenuous. Pick this up, put it there, and so on. There were frequent stops while they worked on the machines and our small gang of temps were moved around the works as required. All in all an interesting couple of days for a couple of reasons.
It wouldn't have happened at all a few years before that. The printing trade was 100% unionised and any non-union labour would have had them out on strike. We can all remember the scenes in Wapping when News International moved production of their papers out of Fleet St.

I drove past the site of the print works the other day. It is no more. The buildings are demolished and the concrete floor is a car park for the local hospital workforce. The other printworks where the local paper was edited and printed was knocked down about fifteen years ago and production transferred to Northampton. It's inevitable that that print works will also close as more and more people get their news on-line rather than from a newspaper.

I thought about this as I was browsing Ebay looking for books by a particular author. This week it's Kurt Vonnegut. I have a dozen or so and I'm looking for more of his books to take on holiday. As I browsed the lists I thought about the Net Book Agreement, which was in force when I managed Volume One Books in Northampton twenty years ago.

According to Wikipedia
"The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a British fixed Book Price between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public.
It came into effect on January 1, 1900 and involved retailers selling books at agreed prices. Any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question.
In 1962 the Net Book Agreement was examined by the Restrictive Practices Court which decided that the NBA was of benefit to the industry, since it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less widely-read authors using money from bestsellers."

I was made redundant in 1994 when the Goldsteins foresaw the end of the NBA and put the company into administration. The new owners and I didn't see eye to eye about how the books were ordered, etc and I was made redundant. I was happy to go. Within a few months the Net Book Agreement was no more and Sunday Trading had been forced through. My employment contract would have been changed for the worst. I was glad to go.

I was a firm believer in the Net Book Agreement. Books are not baked beans. You don't read your Dan Brown or Nick Hornby or whatever your favourite author happens to be, and then pop down the supermarket for another one. Each book is unique. They take time to write. The most prolific authors only manage about three every two years. They are a premium product.

So why pile them high and sell them cheap? Why reduce your margin and even sell them at a loss? Waterstones opened at midnight to sell Harry Potter at half RRP.
Two things. Either the RRP was wrong or they sold it at a loss. All that work , all that expense, all that aggro and they sell it at a loss. They're mad.
Secondly, the books were printed in China and shipped over by the container load.
Hardly any books are printed in the UK now. Since the NBA was scrapped the publishers can't afford to. So all those printer's jobs are gone forever. When they close the print works or shoe factories the machines aren't scrapped. They're sold, boxed up and sent to factories in the far East where they are used to print books or make shoes that are sold back to us.

Cheapest is dearest. Always.

Good Buying or Goodbye

I've already posted about one firm that went bust because of bad buying decisions, now I want to tell you another story about my time working in retail.
I was working as manager of a large bookstore in Northampton in the late 1980s. The store was set up by the Goldsteins when they were directors of Kingfisher Plc. They d sold Superdrug to Kingfisher a few years before and wanted to try something new. Volume One Bookshops was a new concept in retailing and a complete change from the "libraries with tills" look that characterised bookselling at that time.
Our shops were bright, had acres of space to display books with the covers out rather than spine-on, and sold videos as well. Sell-through video was a very recent concept. Up until that time videos were rental only. No-one foresaw the potential, or that legions of Dr Who or Startrek fans would buy every episode of their favourite shows to watch at home over and over again.

Volume One were one of the first to sell videos alongside books and in time the business grew so that half our turnover came fom selling VHS cassettes. We ordered our stock from a wholesaler called Parkfield. They were the main wholesaler in the UK. We could ring our order in on a Monday and it would be delivered the next day. This meant that we could keep our stockholding to a minimum and reduce our exposure to bad purchases clogging up the shelves.

Sell through video was like pop music with a very short shelf life. A film would be released on a Monday, sell for a week or two and never sell another copy. It made sound economic sense to keep our stocks at a minimum, although the margins were lower than if we had bought direct from the publisher. Using a wholesaler made such good economic sense. The wholesaler held the stocks and we could replace our sales within a couple of days. Constant stock-turn more than compensated for the lower margins. This was good buying.
We started having problems with our video supplier soon after we read in the press how they planned to become the largest video wholesaler in Europe. Each delivery would have lines missing. This went on for week after week. I found out that the firm were taking in so much stock for the Christmas rush that the staff didn't have time to pick the orders going out to the customers. The problem of short deliveries got so bad that we had to change suppliers. Needless to say the video distribution company went bust soon after, having filled numerous warehouses with stock that they couldn't dispatch to their customers.
The firm failed because of bad buying.
We used a couple of wholesalers for buying books. One of them was a small family firm on the South coast. Nothing was too much trouble. You could get in your car and pay them a visit, walk around the warehouse and choose some stock which was then scanned, an invoice/delivery note printed there and then, and the books packed into a box which you could either take away or have delivered the next day.
Our other supplier had a huge brand new state of the art warehouse, and a computer system that was unable to update fast enough to keep up with the business. Every book had a bar code, yet the warehouse lacked bar code readers to input the stocks, which had to be input manually. The stock levels were only updated each evening, so they never knew what stocks they had. The computer said one figure, but the reality was always different. We d place an order and their computer system was unable to distinguish whether the books were on the shelves ready to be picked, in the loading bay ready to be unpacked, or already picked and waiting to go to a customer. Once again we were faced with unacceptable shortages in our deliveries and we switched supplier. They went bust soon afterwards. They had no control over their stock.

Bad information equals bad buying.
Bad buying equals goodbye.

A few years ago I worked in a warehouse that supplied tenpin bowling equipment to the various bowling complexes in the UK. If you bowl regularly you will soon buy your own ball.
The technology of bowling balls is very complex.The normal ball you use when you go bowling for fun is a far cry from the highly complex balls that are used by the serious players. Everything from the shape of the core (the middle of the ball) to the type of material that covers the ball will have an effect on how it moves down the lane. Serious bowlers buy their ball from the bowling pro in the same way that the golfer buys from the golf shop at his course. When you buy a bowling ball it comes without holes. The pro will measure your hand and will cut the holes so that it fits you exactly. You can choose the weight of the ball. Years ago the serious players would use a heavy 16lb ball in order to get the swerve and power to score consistently high. As the technology developed and the players got older they found that they could get the same power and control with a 15lb ball. To all extents and purposes the 16lb ball was obsolete. My friend and work colleague was responsible for ordering the stocks of balls and although he knew as well as everyone else in the industry that 16lb balls were obsolete, he would still order "a few" each time.
Every time a new ball was introduced we would sell out of 14 and 15lb balls, leaving the 16lb balls unsold. Eventually we had a warehouse full of 16lb balls that no-one wanted. We ended up giving them away,although it might have been better to send them to landfill.
The company is no more. Bad buying contributed to their downfall.