talking trade
Monday February 4 2019 THE NATIONAL MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM, BIRMINGHAM
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose Independent cookshop retailer Keith Crowther reflects on 40 years of retailing
a consumer boom hit. (And when inflation hit the roof, the Benn’s Guide was invaluable: it said what the retail prices were, not just trade.) Then there were television shows about food -
well actually, it was the BBC’s ‘Food and Drink’ series which launched in 1982 hosted by Chris Kelly, with recipes from the late Michael Barry and wine tastings by Oz Clarke and Jilly Goolden. They could do wonders for a product.
“One thing that has not changed is
F
orty years on, I can still remember the first customer I served as a 16-year-old shop assistant. I had gone to help out at
Olivers Hardware in the Newcastle suburb of Benton (a store owned by my parents’ friends) for one Saturday back in October 1978. Back then, I didn’t give a thought that this was a life- changing decision. My career as a budding accountant had started
five days earlier, so this was a one off. Or so I thought. Four decades on, my career as an accountant is a distant memory. It lasted two years - and I didn’t leave the hardware shop either in that time. I served there on Saturdays whilst working from Monday to Friday and doing night classes three nights a week. My retail shifts paid for my driving lessons, which I
think were something like £3 an hour: a great investment, as I became a rep a few years later. After spending a decade on the road, I decided to open La Cookshop in Durham in 1994. My second store followed at Blagdon in Northumberland in 2013. Very sadly, the Durham branch closed in 2015: the city is now dominated by its university and blighted by two massive retail parks on the outskirts. Trading has faced monumental changes over the past 40 years. In the 1970s, there were no retail parks or out-of-town malls. Department stores were the Amazons of the day and there were hundreds of them. They were very dominant on the high street: chains, independents… all opening six days a week (or five if you were John Lewis: they used to close on Sunday and Monday!). Shops closed for half-day on Wednesday or
Thursday. That’s when we went off to wholesalers to collect stock ready for the weekend – well, for Saturday actually. That was the Big Day of the week, when 50%-plus of the week’s takings could be made.
Our stock would be priced using the Benn’s
Guide. This print directory was like a ‘bible’ on price. It came out monthly with weekly updates. So most stores sold at the same price, give or take the odd halfpenny. Service was king. As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, VAT rose and
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We are still here and if we continue the service role that makes us stand out above the rest, then we will be here for many decades to come”
Another cook started to appear on our screens called Delia Smith (don’t know what happened to her!) and a new publication called ‘Housewares Magazine’ arrived in 1983 on buyers’ desks across Great Britain. As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, things started
to change. The new millennium was around the corner and a young Tony Blair stood on my shop steps addressing the crowds in Durham during the 1997 election campaign. His constituency was Sedgefield, a few miles south of the city [he served as Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007]. It made good pictures on TV that night. But he didn’t come into the shop to apologise for stopping the shoppers. He didn’t even buy something. And he didn’t come again. A fresh mood swept the
country of a throwaway culture that craved convenience. So the supermarkets got bigger and bigger and the high street started to suffer. The supermarkets often took on the role that had been held in such authority by the department stores. They were the new kings of retail, and nobody would ever
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touch them. Well, that’s what they thought. A little American bookseller came knocking called Amazon which, coupled with European discounters, have since chipped away at their dominance. One thing that has not changed though is independent retail. We are still here and if we continue the service role that makes us stand out above the rest, then we will be here for many decades to come. Oh, and I hear you ask: ‘What was the first thing
you sold?’ Well, it was to an elderly lady who wanted bulb fibre. I tried to explain that you needed to buy the whole light bulb, not just the element part. It was soon pointed out to me what she actually wanted. It was October and she was planting her hyacinths for Christmas. That’s why I remember it. Lesson learned there, I think.
• Keith Crowther is the owner of La Cookshop, which is part of the Milkhope Centre: an award-winning conversion of traditional Northumberland farm buildings in Blagdon.
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