AN INDEPENDENT REMEMBERS


STEPPING BACK IN TIME


As his regular look back at the ‘good ol’ days’ of DIY reaches part 40, our independent retailer reminisces about the old club rules and classic payment


Before I joined the company my boss used to accept payments by cheque just so long as the customers wrote their addresses on the back. I think he relished the idea of going out in the evenings debt-collecting, but I’d had enough of that while I was working for a bank. There we’d usually go out in pairs and hopefully return intact. The scenarios we were


faced


with were almost always identical; husband, wife, children, and a brand new colour TV (which were expensive and considered luxury items back then). When they were told that unless payments were forthcoming we’d need to arrange for bailiffs and the colour TV would be the first thing to go, well… the kids began to cry, then the husband cried, then his wife. The dog would howl too, if there was one. Being the junior, I rarely spoke apart from to agree that such and such a thing would need to be done, arranged, seized, whatever.


But not being the bank’s spokesperson gave me opportunity, from where I was standing and trembling, to look around the room and spot piles of cigarette packets and multiple bottles of spirits. The outside doors often bore signs of previous forced entry, the decorations hadn’t been done since Queen Victoria was a girl and the kitchen taps dripped like Niagara Falls.


Stickers


out from the cash register. At that time,


M


In the club Then


one day filling stations used hand


written chits around 80mm square, that were ready printed with the seller’s details and VAT number, and we thought that we could do with something like these. I called a local printer and guess what? The price was a joke, each receipt costing over 5p.


in walked the


membership rep for a trade federation, the only one that catered exclusively for hardware suppliers. I can see the rep right now; a Scottish gentleman with a thorough knowledge and understanding of the pitfalls for small hardware shops – a kindred spirit indeed. I could have been forgiven for assuming he


8 DIY WEEK 28 FEBRUARY 2020


arch 1984 and the more we sold, the more we were asked to provide receipts – and not those that peeled


had cut his teeth serving nails from behind a counter. Maybe he had? I don’t remember. We were told that members enjoyed, amongst other things, cheap but high quality carrier bags – yep, we needed some of those. There were discounted display materials such as grass mats on which to display lawn mowers. And not only that – they had snow grass mats for Christmas displays, or for when we had snow shovels to flog. There was a clearing house system for paying any number of suppliers (and even the VAT) by writing just one cheque; a big saving in bank charges. Oh yes, and there were those


receipt pads printed with our details so we could feel to be elevating, status-wise (and they looked smarter than those from the filling stations). Then there was the monthly magazine with its own insider column (and it was only a column, too, not like the full page DIY Week was so proud of). So we


joined and it felt good to be part of something big. Even credit card transactions were charged at peanut rates as we were classed as one branch of a huge organisation. Bliss! Ridicule me all you like, but with our framed membership certificate and window stickers, success came as part of the package. In fact we were fully paid up members for 27 years, but then the magazine refused to acknowledge a unique book that one hardware man had written about running a hardware store. It was a shame, really, because it would have been a good read for so many members but the federation wouldn’t spread the word. All good things come to an end, my boss used to say.


Checking the cheques With today’s plethora of cashless payment methods, cash itself may soon be a thing of the past,


so


looking back to the days when cash or cheques were the only options is like an excursion into history.


I didn’t want any of this now so I stuck up stickers that said we’d only take cheques with a bank guarantee card, which at that time was good for purchases up to £50. Naturally, banks could still refuse payment of a seemingly guaranteed cheque by detecting deviations in the delivery of the discharge – or, in layman’s terms, the shop worker not doing a proper job. I made certain that in our shop we did it right, just in case. But whilst visiting other shops, I spotted more flaws than a tall skyscraper because staff simply didn’t read the rules. Cheques were supposed to be signed in front of the shop assistant; not a lot of people knew this. I witnessed many who didn’t even compare the signatures for a match. The shopkeeper would write the card number on the back of the cheque, yet wouldn’t check that the card was still in date or even had the same name as on the cheque. One of our customers, a shop owner himself, told me he didn’t have time to bugger around with such nonsense. I wondered what he did with all the rubberised cheques he must have had in his collection.


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