AN INDEPENDENT REMEMBERS


“THEY LOOKED BLOODY GOOD”


Sizzling sales, unruly children, and time for some own branding. Our independent hardware retailer takes a step back in time with part 32 of his stories from the shop floor


J


Warmed up At


anuary 1983 and for the first time ever we suffered the New Year doldrums. Having spent December buoyed


up, with sparkling Christmas trade in our bigger store, we were now experiencing life in the slow lane. And it was cold too.


around this time, a shop- owned co-operative wholesaler, whose name I don’t remember (membership of which was around a grand a year), was in financial difficulty, despite


its


profits being used purely to fund its overheads, whilst providing absolute rock-bottom cost prices for its goods. I don’t know what had gone wrong, and I felt a bit sad because someone’s clever idea had somehow fallen flat. But, as what happens in such cases, it was good for us because, desperate to shed its remaining stock, we were able to buy our butane cabinet heaters from here, which certainly made a sizzling difference to us in those dark times. We didn’t heat the public areas and I know it sounds mean, but those were the days when parents’ ideas about disciplining their children were becoming somewhat revolutionary – or rather just plain old non-existent. Translation: they didn’t bother – well, not many of them did – and they allowed their children to run up and down the aisles, like they did in the supermarkets, without any thought for the dangers. Well, we didn’t want little fingers getting toasted when they were poked through the heater grilles, so we kept the heaters out of the way. We found that polite notices asking people


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to watch out for their children – or even ones asking children to keep their parents under control – didn’t go down well, even though we were trying to protect them, so our policy was to get those harrassed parents served and out of the shop as fast as possible.


One such parent, plainly over- faced with minding his very young son, just happened to be a TV actor. The child was running up and down the aisles, sweeping stock off the shelves and kicking anything that met his little, if lethal, feet. The actor was doing his best chasing after the miscreant, trying to coax him into behaving himself, speaking in rather gentle tones as if it were a big funny game. In and amongst he was calling out to me what he wanted, and I was sorting out the stuff and getting it packed and ready for him to take. In the end, having failed miserably to round up the kid, he apologised and said he’d be back. The next time I saw him, he gave me a couple of quid to compensate for cleaning up after his son. He didn’t mention the items I’d kept aside for him, and we only ever saw him again on television.


Packed up


Back in the very early Stax days, they sold plastic bags and header card kits for shops to make up their own pre-packs. The


effort


spent doing this, perhaps during quiet periods, was rewarded later in vast time savings, when it came to selling, say, cabinet hinges and not having to spend countless minutes sorting out suitable screws. Now, in an attempt to step up a level, I thought we should have our own branded header cards, but first I needed to source the plastic bags, so as to get cards printed the right size to fit them.


“Polite notices asking people to watch out for their children didn’t go down well, even though we were just trying to protect them.”


This should be easy, I thought. Our usual paper bags merchant had them, but their price for little plastic bags was far more than the ones at Stax that came complete with cards. In the end I had to buy these from out of town to get them at an acceptable price. And when it came to ordering card headers to suit, I went to the local printer; a smallish place a couple of streets away. I mean, you’re always better with a local firm, aren’t you? You know, someone who’s familiar with the local economy and in tune with the size of the local pockets and lengths of arms that reach into them. Yeah. But I hadn’t reckoned on the assumed status of this small firm that reckoned it should be up there with the big boys and so,


priced its work accordingly. Here we were talking ruinous figures for printing that would go some way to paying off the National Debt. I couldn’t believe it. When asking them to check their calculations, they reacted as if I’d made an indecent suggestion. Needless to say, there was no budging on price. Like with the plastic bags, we were trading in the same arena, yet it might as well have been uptown New York, the pricing was so out of this world. Eventually, I got the printing done in yet another neighbouring town, by an even smaller firm that used an antiquated press that thumped the cards so hard they looked embossed, which was taken as a sign of quality. And, these people didn’t charge an arm and a leg, like the other lot, for stamping out the euroslots for the display hooks. In the end, having put the mileage in, we had the best looking hardware pre-packs in the area; distinctive and eye-catching and, if you can get excited about such things, they looked bloody good.


08 FEBRUARY 2019 DIY WEEK 13


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