AN INDEPENDENT REMEMBERS AN INDEPEND AN INDEPEND DENT REMEMBE
ERS
“THEY’D STAMP THEIRSTAM FEET RA THER THANTRAT K WA
ADMIT BLACK W ASN’TWA THE SAME AS WHITE”
AT 1
982 was to be a memorable year with Michael Jackson’s Thriller war with Argentina, and the raising of
e year e year
r,, r,,
Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose, sunk in 1545. I was certain that my boss, an ex-naval man, had been at sea for so long he might have carved his initials somewhere on the hull. It was a year of extremes, with the lowest-ever temperature and highest (r ecor ded) unemployment figure. It was the start of tabloid bingo, the banning of corporal punishment in schools, and the people at Buckingham Palace really did need to have a word with me about security I’m still waiting for the call.
ut security Not standing stock still
By this time, most new items of stock were inspir ed by what customers asked for. When one woman, who’d just been burgled, asked us for a security mortice lock, in my ignorance I sold her a plain Y es, I know! It
old Union 3-lever. Ye es, I
was the Crime Pr evention Of ficer who told her she needed something like an Ingersoll 5-lever,r, so fr om that point onwar ds, we began keeping ff.ff At least
in some pretty serious stuf
posh locks stopped the villains from getting in the fr ont doors, so to gain entry,, they simply movedy , they simply moved r ound to the back windows.
Radio Times for Blackfriars wood dye, we wer e inundated with yet we didn’t have a
r equests,
stockist. Same with Milliput, the epoxy putty: we just couldn’t find out wher e to get it to satisfy the public’s insatiable demand, and sometimes they looked pr etty damn
20 DIY WEEK 9 FEBRUARY 2018
Thanks to the little adverts in imes for Blackfria
y..
A year to rememberr, a new wholesaler on the block, and infuria ting customers. Our independent hardware retailer takes a step back in time with part 18 of his stories from the shop floor .
mean when we didn’t have it, because we wer e supposed to.
W ith today’s information highway as thorough and far- reaching as it is, it’s dif
s, it’s difficult for ff
the under -30s to r ealise just how dif ficult it was for us to find stuf f to sell – even when we knew the brand name. We
W e had one edition of Ye e had one Yellow
Pages that served the local ar ea, and it was acceptable to consider that this should r epr esent the sum total of our world – which, believe me, was smaller than a spot on a tick’s bottom. Despite alr eady having ar ound 20 suppliers, they weren’t doing a great job of servicing us.
New boy on the block
Then a new wholesaler turned up, a one-man-bander who, having been a hardware retailer himself, appreciated the issues of supply and pricing from both sides of the trade counter . He told us how difficult it was for him to open accounts with new suppliers, such as Humbr ol, because the only trade r efer ences he could provide wer e fr om fellow wholesalers with who he was now in competition. But he managed, somehow
how w,, and over the
years Ron was to become a good sour ce of information and advice. One of his most valuable gems was the benefit of stocking a brand- leader as well as a lower-priced alternative: a simple, yet priceless, sliver of wisdom to incr ease the chances of a sale.
He had something in common with the boss, having also been a joiner in a pr evious incarnation, and he spoke fondly of fitting bathr ooms in houses during the 1960s, with two blokes trundling up narr ow staircases, wearing cast-iron baths
like a turtle. One of his stock lines was an old, well-known pr oduct for touching-up marks on furniture – Waddicor ’s Tr
Wa
Transparent Varnish. I wonder if any of you remember this, in its attractive and traditional bottles? I can only assume they’re no longer around.
Va
Of course, with all of these new stock items, we wer e fast running out of space and I spent mor e and more of my own time workin g on the alterations. The boss’s wife bought me a Black & Decker 2-spee d drill
for Christmas ,
which of course came in handy for fastening battens to the walls, ready to take the 8 x 4 sheets of pegboar d. Those walls were as r ough as a bear’s bottom (not that I’ve ever been close enough to inspect one, you understand), and one section needed to be pulled down and rebuilt because it had settled, the stones forming a huge letter ‘U’ right beneath one of the ceiling support beams. Yeah, Sod’s Law strikes again.
Ye Felt feeling not so good
One of the most infuriating aspects of
sh op work was the gene ral inability of some customers to compare like with like. Hell, they’d shout and stamp their feet and vow never again to shop with us rather than admit that black wasn’t the same as white.
“This felt you sold me is rubbish, young lad,” one man said. Nowadays we have a wealth o f internet experts, but this is nothing new because we had self-pr ofessed armchair experts back then, too.
TA
d
And he was one of them. “This crappy felt has blown clean of f me dormer fi t bit ’ i d
r,, first bit o’ wind, ruined the
decorations – and they’d only just been done. The wife’s livid, says I’ve to claim.”
“Good job you have insurance,” I said. He looked at me as if one of us was stupid. “She means to claim fr om you!” he spat back. “It’s your fault for selling shoddy crap. Y oung lads like you don’t know their arse from their elbow . This stuf f is for sheds, not houses.”
Yo o
I r eminded him that he had asked me for “some of that felt like they put on sheds”. At the time he’d said nothing about his house r oof. “W they do put it on sheds,” he said, “so what’r e you gonna do about it?” Sometimes, don’t you just
We Well, feel
your eyes starting to close and wish it was home time?
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