STEPPING BACK IN TIME


AN INDEPENDENT REMEMBERS PART 47


Our independent DIY retailer recounts some his experiences of working within a small business that will no doubt resonate with many readers who have also been there and done it, and may still be doing it themselves.


I they


have already mentioned that I was doing a weekly trip to a Black & Decker


Service Centre ferrying


items for repair and service, as well as to buy stock at superb dealer prices, something quite impossible when buying through the traditional wholesale system. Here are some details to show there was obviously something very wrong with the wholesale side of the B&D selling strategy, whereas the little known practise of buying from the service centres was better for all who stumbled upon it, like we had, quite by chance.


Whittled Okay, so maybe it wasn’t good for the wholesalers, but I reckoned that if the difference between the price from them and that from buying from the service centres accounted for the wholesalers’ profit margin, then


were


and re-launch? And to finance this, so I was told, they organised for a management buyout of the service centres. That’s right: zapped. Gone. Or as good as. They were renamed with a forgettable abbreviation with poor branding and a pitiful lack of charisma.


The smartly turned out B&D staff in their uniforms were no more, and the ones that were retained for the new company must have felt like they were working on another planet. Yes, it seemed like a recipe for disaster and after a few years it did indeed cease trading. I can only explain that as a previously loyal customer to the brand this was a huge blow, like waking up in some dystopian reality. And I wonder if the company itself ever thinks ruefully about trading a highly respected service operation for what appears to be a low-key paint-slapping system.


quite happily


making far more than the pittance that the retailers were allowed to make. And let us not forget that the shops had to spend time demonstrating, assembling, fitting 13 amp plugs and dealing with any returns. Let’s use an actual example of a hammer drill (H720) that sold for £29.99 incl 15% VAT and cost us £22.87 ex-VAT. We were left with a profit of £3.21, less credit card (£1.20) and bank charges. And I lost count of the number of times a customer wanted us to throw in a plug for nowt. Buying from a wholesaler meant that our profits were being whittled down like a wood carver on speed. At least buying the new way meant that my boss could no longer tell me there was little or no profit to be made selling power tools. But for how long could this last? By this time I was reasonably


proficient at performing minor repairs, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Many of these included replacing damaged mains cables,


24 DIY WEEK OCTOBER 2020


carbon brushes, switches, gears and so on. For major stuff it was usually cheaper for us to sell the customer a B&D ‘full repair’, where the tools were thoroughly gone through and any suspect components unlikely to last a reasonable length of time were replaced, and the tool returned with a warranty. No other manufacturer did this. The Black & Decker Service Centres were a superb and highly proficient after- sales strategy.


Skittled So where are the service centres now? What I’m about to tell you I have gleaned only from hearsay and what the industry insiders told me some time in the late-90s, so if anyone has further information then please send a message to DIY Week and it will be passed to me so I can update everyone. Here goes: In the early-80s there was the Black & Decker Paintmate system, making the painting of walls much


“Buying from a


wholesaler meant that our profits were being whittled down like a wood carver on speed”


easier, with a backpack filled with special paint supplied by Berger, and a gadget that oozed it out. It flopped – not the paint, which would have meant some catastrophic sagging, but the take- up of the system itself, though no doubt some company die-hard will claim it was an enormous success. But if so, then why in the 1990s did they feel that they needed to invest lots and lots of money in a re-vamp


Cabled You may remember that we had also taken on Bosch power tools, for which only selected service agents existed. On one occasion we returned a jigsaw for repair as the blade’s rear support roller wouldn’t tighten. After a few weeks it was returned to us (not the customer, as with B&D) fixed – but also with a replaced mains cable and a hefty bill that our customer was furious about. Guaranteed B&D items were always returned with everything sorted, including things that may have been damaged by the customer, but I can say there was nothing wrong with this one when it was brought in, because I always checked. When queried, the repair agent claimed there had been extensive fraying of the plastic insulation with the copper inners visible. I can only suspect that they wanted to make a bit more than the standard Bosch fee and charged a premium price for what was then a 75p length of black cable and 15 minutes’ fitting and testing. I never trusted that firm again.


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