The Millwall FC of British retailing

I have a sneaking admiration for companies whose approach to public relations mirrors that of Millwall football supporters: “No one likes us, we don’t care.”

It’s a bold strategy and obviously one that works best for businesses that offer some unique advantage – exclusive products, exceptional prices or outstanding convenience – that will keep the customers coming anyway.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who much likes Amazon, whether on the grounds of alleged tax avoidance, claims that they overwork their staff, or simply because of the way they sneakily keep trying to add an annual Prime subscription at the checkout.

Yet overwhelmingly we keep using them anyway because they are keenly priced, efficient, and it’s a whole lot easier just to click on their website than to re-enter all our information on someone else’s.

The continued survival of WH Smith is altogether harder to understand, in a world where high street bookselling is on the ropes, and news sales are declining.

I used to handle financial PR for Smiths 30 years ago, when it was a patrician company run by chaps who had been to top public schools and served in decent regiments. Said chaps included some scions of the founding family.

The company once treated me to a night on a newspaper train from Euston, on which I marvelled at the way the sorters grabbed handfuls of different papers to prepare the orders for individual newsagents, which were picked up by vans from the stations en route. This is a world that has now completely vanished.

On another occasion I took a leading investment analyst to the country house where Smiths honed their rising talent, putting them over military style assault courses to develop their management skills.

“Have you ever thought,” the analyst asked, “of just incentivising them according to the financial performance of their stores instead?”

The look on the HR expert’s face made it clear that this was just about the grubbiest and silliest idea he had ever heard.

How different it all is now, when Smiths is renowned in the City as a company that single-mindedly keeps profits moving ahead in a generally unpromising market place.

One of its weapons is the self-service till, of which they became an early and dedicated exponent. On several occasions I have abandoned shopping baskets out of sheer frustration at being compelled to queue to serve myself while staff lurk about chatting.

At least I thought the self-service tills would not try to offload a giant bargain bar of chocolate on me with a simple newspaper purchase. But no, they have programmed them to do that, too.

They also famously operate a network of stores in motorway service stations where everything seems an awful lot more expensive than one would expect them to be at a supermarket, though maybe quite compelling once one has factored in the time and fuel costs of diverting to a supermarket to buy them there instead.

Then there are the airport stores and the famous “show your boarding card” VAT scam which has attracted so much publicity of late. Smiths were asked to comment on this when they recently issued a trading update, but showed no such inclination. “No one likes us, we don’t care.”

Instead they attributed their continuing financial success to book launches, including the latest “Shades of Grey” pulp fiction, that thing from Harper Lee’s bottom drawer, and a craze for colouring books for grown-ups.

No, really. Who knew?

I’m planning to cash in on the best of both worlds by writing a tedious, mildly pornographic novel targeted at the “ladies who lunch” market, with the added bonus of outlines of all the climactic scenes that they can colour in with crayons.

I can see it doing very well in WH Smith, where I have belatedly realised that the self-service tills are not a cost-saving measure after all, but an attempt to spare the blushes of its soft porn-loving clientele.

How much simpler life would have been if only they had been around when I was a teenage buyer of Parade magazine.

I shall call my masterpiece “Would You Like a £1 Bar of Chocolate With That?” and sit back to wait for my royalties to flood in.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

My Daddy is older than God

People who think God is talking to them tend to be kept under lock and key, or surrounded by adoring if gullible followers.

Up to now my five-year-old son is neither, but it could clearly go either way.

Shortly before the end of term his Church of England primary school held an Easter service for the children, so we naturally asked him how it went.

“We just sang some songs and God came to talk to us,” he replied disarmingly.

At Charlie’s age I had a clear mental picture of God as a very old Englishman (obviously) with a long grey beard and flowing robes.

But my son’s God is clean shaven and has short white hair and spectacles. I can state this with confidence because he is, in fact, the rector of our parish.

The last time he addressed the school he told them he had just celebrated his 60th birthday. I had passed this landmark myself a few weeks earlier, enabling Charlie to announce proudly that “My Daddy is older than God.”

No doubt we will be able to iron this misunderstanding out eventually, though it is an uphill struggle. The child seems much more willing to accept the existence of Santa Claus than of the Holy Trinity. Though when his first milk tooth began to wobble recently, he announced with great confidence that there was no such thing as the tooth fairy.

A line to which he stuck resolutely until he was advised that there might be money involved.

I don’t understand how one of his tender years has attained such a level of technological sophistication that he can create and constantly add to his own Amazon wish list, yet at the same time believe this is being monitored by Santa. Whose elves, he asserts, are currently labouring away making the Playmobil, Lego, Brio and various other branded goods specified, presumably under licence.

One for a future wish list?

Still, I suppose it is no more implausible than the apparent belief of large sections of the population that those vying for their votes at the forthcoming General Election are going to deliver any material change to their lives.

Life will indeed change, and for most of us will change for the better, if the evidence of the last 60 years counts for anything. But the influence of politicians will be marginal compared with that of inventors, scientists, technologists, creative thinkers of all kinds and even humble marketeers.

When I was Charlie’s age the nearest thing my best friend and I had to mobile phones was two cocoa tins and a length of string. He uses an iPad where I aspired to an Etch-a-Sketch.

Mine was a reasonably prosperous middle class family with a car and a phone (albeit initially a party line shared with the family across the road) but even we did not own the massive luxury of a fridge until I was 10.

At Last The 1948 Show (not Monty Python)

At the risk of sounding like those competitive Yorkshiremen who lived in a shoe in the middle of the road and ate gravel, it is important to pause every now and then and remember just how massively almost every aspect of life has changed during the long reign of the present Queen.

And while we may look back fondly on some aspects of the old days, we should never lose sight of the extent to which our collective lot has improved.

If we are not all full of the joys of spring and attending thanksgiving services it can only be because our expectations have risen more rapidly than the economic system has been able to deliver. 

Capitalism, like democracy, is imperfect, but it is decidedly better than anything else that has been tried up to now. If you doubt that I suggest you read a bit on the history of communism, or take a look at North Korea today.

The bright lights of North Korea:
clearly a Green paradise as well as a Communist one

Whoever wins on May 7th, if indeed anyone does, money will be tight. Taxes will go up and Government spending will be constrained. Accept that, and focus on the many ways that your life continues to improve in ways that have nothing to do with politicians.

If you can’t accept that, you may as well believe in the tooth fairy.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

I have seen the future, and it does not work

It does not seem to be the start of April, so I guess Amazon must be serious when they claim to be exploring the possibility of having their products delivered by unmanned drones.

This creates the attractive possibility of having the latest best-seller precision-dropped through the panes of your cold frame, or your beloved dog cut to shreds by an Octocopter as it descends onto your lawn. 

But it’s progress, isn’t it? And surely exactly what the City’s teenage scribblers had in mind when they trashed Greggs’ share price during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, on the grounds that the whole idea of a “shop” was dead.

They will surely have the last laugh as miniature helicopters fly through our office windows bearing sausage rolls and cups of coffee.

Even if the Air Traffic Control implications seem more than a little disturbing.

This was the future as predicted in the pages of my favourite childhood comic, in which a lucky boy called General Jumbo had a vast miniature air force, army and navy at his command.

I always related to him, not so much because I had a particular interest in model armed forces, but because I shared his tendency to stoutness.

Who would have expected The Beano to turn out to be a more reliable predictor of the future than Tomorrow’s World?

If the futurologists of the 1970s were to be believed, by now we would be working no more than 20 hours a week, retiring at 50, enjoying limitless free nuclear power and subsisting on vitamin pills.

None of which seems likely to come to pass apart from not working very long, as pretty much every job in the country is outsourced to India.

Still, not to worry. “Dave” Cameron and an assortment of his family and friends are out in China as I type, opening up a new golden age of export-led growth. Though his decision to put Jaguar Land Rover at the forefront of promoting UK plc does make me wonder whether he is not secretly in league with the Dalai Lama to bring the Chinese weeping to their knees, if personal experience of my hugely expensive and totally unreliable Land Rover Discovery is anything to go by.

Sorry. I should have put a warning at the top of this column for my new Wednesday audience. (Which, research tells me, is larger, richer and more business-orientated than the bunch of dullards who pick up the paper on Tuesdays.) This is the weekly update from the bloke who hates “progress” in all its manifestations, from Ed Miliband to trendy church services by way of wind farms.

A fine example occurred last week when I received a letter from my four-year-old son Charlie’s school informing me that he would no longer be required to wear a shirt and tie. Even though the pleasingly reactionary dress code had been pretty decisive in my choice of school in the first place.

Even worse was the reason for the change. The pupils had requested it at the “school council”. The oldest of them is 11, for heaven’s sake. If you consult them you will end up with whole classes in Spiderman costumes and school lunches supplied entirely by Cadbury’s.

It’s the daftest thing I have heard since Alex Salmond extended the vote to 16-year-olds as part of his attempts to rig the Scottish independence referendum, with the hugely pleasing outcome that their teenage contrarian instincts apparently make them one of the groups likeliest to vote “No”.

Where will it all end? In five years’ time I expect that Charlie (aged nine) will be voting in a referendum on Northumbrian independence, all our high streets will be boarded-up and filled with tumbleweed, and the news websites will be dominated by heartbreaking stories of all the Christmas presents destroyed as “Cyber Monday” segued seamlessly into “Drone Crash Tuesday”.

Of course it’s never going to happen. At least not until they have perfected an Octocopter guaranteed to flutter down in the five minutes you have chosen to nip to the loo. And trained it to write a “Sorry You Were Out” card and leave it wherever you are least likely to find it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.