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.

Psychometric testing

I'm no fan of psychometric profiling. In my experience it's only used in firms where the management are remote from the workforce. Rather than interview the staff themselves, they employ intermediaries called Personnel, or the even more arcane and forbidding Human Resources.
When I worked for Superdrug and Volume One a few years later, I was interviewed by the Managing Director and he employed me on the basis of that interview lasting half an hour or so.
Recruiting staff is like weather forecasting. No matter how sophisticated or expensive the methods used, the results are statistically no more accurate than pine cones or seaweed.
In my long career I've interviewed a lot of potential employees, and attended a good few interviews as well. There's an old saying- "First impressions last", and psychometric profiling is a poor substitute for a face to face interview. When a vacancy occured in one of my shops I interviewed the applicants with an eye to what the job entailed and how they would fit in with the team I'd assembled.  When I was in retail the staff turnover averaged about eighteen months, that is, you'd have a new member of staff in every position every eighteen months or so. This meant that the manager would be forever recruiting and training staff, knowing full well that they'd only stay for a month or two. This often meant that he spent less time training his staff and that brought even more problems. So the answer lay in keeping your staff for as long as possible. In my experience profiling was no more effective in achieving this, and cost a whole lot more.
For the record, my last management position was as manager of a bookstore in Northampton. I was there for five years and when I was made redundant by the incoming owners, more than 90% of the full and part time staff had been with me from the start. That was way, way, way above the industry average. My record of recruiting and training and retention of staff speaks for itself.


The first time I encountered profiling was when I was interviewed for a management position with Lewis Meeson, a subsidiary company of Barker & Dobson, maker of Everton Mints. I was working at Superdrug and anxious to get out. I'd been there too long and my reputation meant that my career was stalled. I'd just got married again and we were happy to move almost anywhere in the country in pursuit of my retail career.
I saw the advert in the Grocer and applied and in due course went for an interview. I passed that initial interview and received a profile test in the post. The test involved answering a load of stupid questions, most of them variations on the same theme. I had to fill  it in and return it before my next interview with the Managing Director at head office in Liverpool. I can't remember everything the profile was supposed to reveal about me, but they went ahead and hired me anyway.
The salient point was that the profile test was as an adjunct to the two face to face interviews I undertook. The face to face interviews took precedent, and the profile was just background.


Fast forward twenty years and I'm working as a temp in a call centre. A good temp has to be able to walk into any job and pick it up straight away. I'd done a lot of call centre work, both inbound and outbound. I prefer inbound, where you respond to calls from customers.
This call centre was run by a large photo copier manufacturer and distributor. Everyone has used a photocopier at some time, but my recent jobs hadn't involved any contact with them. All of a sudden I was answering calls from customers whose copiers had packed up. I'd identify the customer and the machine using the AS400 software on the computer in front of me, and I'd try and find out what the fault was. Some faults can be cleared over the phone. I had diagrams and photos of the various models on the computer, and together with the customer we'd try and find the fault. We had a couple of skilled engineers that we could refer the difficult calls to, and if all else failed we'd get an engineer out to them. The object was to keep their copier working, although that wasn't always possible if some burley policeman had broken the glass while trying to photocopy his private parts (It happened more than once).
After a week or so I was approached by the call center manager who had been listening in on my calls and monitored my success rate. He wanted to know if I wanted a permanent job.
I was temping because there were no permanent jobs around, so I said yes. As part of the interview process I was given a psychometric test to complete.
One look at the form and I despaired. It was more psychobabble and arcane nonsense devised by people who don't like dealing with people face to face. I completed it and handed it in.
Up until that moment my joining the firm was cut and dried. I was good at the job, good with customers, good telephone manner, good clear up rate.
The call centre manager never mentioned my joining the firm again. I stayed as a temp for another couple of months. Other people, less able joined the permanent staff while I continued as a temp, so why did I not get the job?
The answer had to be the profiling. The company, a huge Japanese multi-national had several sites in the UK, with a head office in Feltham. The Human Resources department were based there. I never ever saw anyone from that department at our site. They had worked out the requirements for the job and devised a profile. My form arrived on their desk and it didn't match their profile, so no job for me.

In time I came to realise the short-sightedness of profiling.
If a company only recruits staff according to profiles, it means that there is no possible career path, no opportunities for promotion in that company. It is impossible for someone to join the company at the ground level and work their way up. Their profile wouldn't match the junior jobs if they were executive material, and individual job profiling would prevent them advancing through the company.
If every company adopted profiling it would mean that your job was assigned to you when you entered the job market and all you could expect was to do the same job in different offices for the rest of your working life.
That's my idea of hell.


And all those heroes of business who started at the bottom and worked their way up? Forget it. It would never happen. Profiling will squeeze every ounce of creativity and originality out of a company. In time companies that employ profiling will not have the talent to adapt, to be original, to spot new ideas and opportunities and will ultimately fail.
Good.

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.

Good and bad bosses

I've had a few bosses in my time. I've worked alongside a few, and I've been a boss as well. Here are a few of my observations down the years.
When I worked at the bank the manager was a seldom seen figure who occupied an office and hardly ever emerged. He left the day to day running of his branch to the deputy or assistant manager, who then delegated down to the various department heads. It worked well. Because the business was run to deadlines, the overriding concern was to getting the job done to the highest possible standard in the shortest possible time. Once everything was completed and the assistant manager gave the OK, we could go home. Because it took a long time to progress to branch manager, and because there was a well defined career path, one rarely encountered a ruthless, devious and ambitious individual trying to short cut his way to the top by fair means or foul. One did, however, encounter a bunch of bank clerks who had reached the limits of their ability and whose career path lay in a series of sideways moves.
My lack of ambition caused me to be transferred to the various sub-branches of the bank, along with the other no-hopers, and each day was spent in doing the work as quickly as possible so that I could go home.

It wasn't until I worked in retail that I encountered an environment that rewarded ability rather than length of service, and these observations are based on my retail experiences.


The first thing I noticed was how some managers would employ tactics that kept their subordinates fighting each other. Divide and rule. While your departmental and assistant managers are fighting each other, they're not fighting you.


Then I noticed that some managers rule by fear, while others by encouragement. In every business the manager needs to stand out. He need to be head and shoulders above the rest.
Some managers do this by kicking their staff so that they are always on their knees. The manager is the only one standing.
However, the best managers that I worked for and with would encourage and equip their staff, making them strong and able to stand tall- with the manager carried on their shoulders.
As I travelled from branch to branch, either assisting or training managers, or relieving them for days off or holidays, or taking over from them and managing their store, I noticed another difference between good and bad managers.
Some managers would deliberately hold the store back, rather than allow turnover to increase to its full potential. They would hold the store to the level that they could manage,and not allow it to grow any further. Success brought problems to them. A bigger turnover meant more stock had to be ordered and handled. A busier store brought problems of staff training and retention. It brought security and shoplifting problems. If turnover was held to the rate of inflation, it meant a quieter life.


I was a pioneer rather than a settler. I preferred the challenge of taking an empty shell of a shop unit and fitting it out, of recruiting and training my staff, of ordering the stock and filling the shelves, and the bustle and excitement of opening day. I enjoyed working hard and growing the turnover week by week and following it through a complete year, with the Christmas build up and climax, and the post Christmas doldrums. After about eighteen months I was ready for a new challenge.
I was lucky in that most of the firms I worked for, namely Superdrug, Share Drugstores and Volume One Bookshops operated at a time when it was possible to open new shops in town centres, that there were new markets to break into, and big profits to be made.
As a manager I opened five new stores, and assisted in the opening of several more.
I trained many a new manager, some of whom went on to greater things.
I got out of retail at the right time and have never looked back.

The greasy pole, or the onset of ambition

I've never been particularly ambitious. My form teacher at my first grammar school wrote on my end of term report that I was over inclined to rest on my laurels and time has proved him correct.
I do just enough to get comfortable and only move if bored or threatened, or if I suddenly get ambitious.
I've already posted about my ambitions for 1978. Learn to drive, new house, new job. I started work at Superdrug and found myself surrounded by ambitious people with differing levels of ruthlessness. When Superdrug started in 1966, it was a very hands-on set up. The Goldsteins did everything and as the company grew they recruited like minded people to take the company forward. They never once recruited an area manager. On the retail side, everyone started at the bottom, as a trainee manager. They learned how the company worked by doing the work. Those with talent got their own store very quickly. They were expanding at a steady rate, without having to go into debt and keeping all expenditure under control. There was never a penny wasted. As the company grew they needed an area manager and they appointed someone who'd been a manager at the very start. He then became a Regional Director as the company expanded. It was said that if you cut the arm off a Superdrug area manager, you'd see "Superdrug" running through the arm, like letters in a stick of rock.
I wasn't into such naked ambition. If it was a case of "compete or retreat", I'd leave them to it.
And that was how it was for two or three years.
Then I reached thirty and I decided I'd better get a move on. I decided to pull my weight a little more and improve my performance. I even asked to be considered for any new shops that might be opening. My bosses were gobsmacked. They'd got used to me doing just enough to stay out of trouble and there I was, bright as a button and looking for promotion. A few months later and I still felt the same way. I was based in Northampton but travelling to all the stores in a forty mile radius. I even transferred to Peterborough for a while, and commuted daily.
This went on for a year or two. I was getting more and more frustrated, and my bosses were digging their heels in. I had to get another job and I didn't care where.
Some people are naturally ambitious, but remain affable. My ambition made me angry mean and nasty. I was not nice to know.

Unpaid work part one

I've done a bit of voluntary work over the years, depending on work and music commitments. In the early eighties my band had folded and I struggled to get another one going. It was always a bind finding suitable reliable musicians, and when we relocated to Somerset I just decided that it was too much trouble finding musicians, agents and venues so I retired from music for a few years.
My father was an engine driver and I'd always loved steam railways. I got the bug quite badly in the mid-late 70s. Whenever we played a weekend booking in Leicester that involved playing both Saturday night, Sunday lunch and Sunday night I'd visit the Great Central Railway at Loughborough during the afternoon and ride on the railway. I even drove the 90 miles or so to Didcot to volunteer to clean up and help restore one of the scrap railway locomotives there. After a while the travelling got too much and when I heard that there was a small group restoring a steam engine not far from where I lived I decided to pay them a visit.
For the next few years I spent most Sundays up to my armpits in grease and muck, cleaning and painting an old steam locomotive. It was great fun and a great sense of achievement when we finally steamed it and it moved under its own power.
Soon after that we moved over 150 miles away, but all was not lost. There was another steam railway a few miles away and after spending some time getting our new house in order I put in an appearance there. Our little quarry tank engine was dwarfed by the huge 9F freight loco that I worked on. I climbed in the firebox (when the fire was out) and could stand up inside it with my hands outstretched. I had to sweep it clean and apply a limewash to the metal in order to protect it over the winter. I did a few other jobs but nothing as glamourous (!) as that.
After a few years we moved back to Northamptonshire and I rejoined my friends with the little saddle tank engine. They were about to move to a new greenfield site. When I saw the new site there were four wooden pegs in the ground to signify where the museum would be sited. Over the next year or so we levelled the ground, dug pits and foundations ready for the building and rails.
I learned that you have to dig deep if you want to build high.
It was almost a year before we were able to move our engines into the museum but it was great fun and the perfect antidote to the day job.
Sometimes a change is better than a rest.