A MESS FROM HEAD TO TOE - WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SHOP DRESS STANDARDS?

A MESS FROM HEAD TO TOE

I was a retail manager, of supermarkets mainly, for the best part of forty years, starting out in Northern Ireland (Stewarts Supermarkets, Penneys, BHS), then around various parts of England and that has given me more than a fair degree of inside knowledge.  If I add many more years as an observing customer, I think I have a valid point of view on a number of factors concerning shops, shoppers and shopping.  The world changes, of course, but in some cases, not for the better.  I will highlight one area that has become sloppy – employee appearance.  Department stores and smaller shops are of a higher standard, generally speaking, but supermarkets let the side down badly.  Of course, there are some supermarket employees who take pride in their appearance but they are in the minority.

The standard of dress/appearance of supermarket staff has gone downhill fast and it is depressing. I come from an era (starting in the 1970s) when Staff Managers, rather like old-fashioned Matrons in hospitals, would do a daily patrol of all staff and managers to check compliance with the dress standards code in the employee handbook. They were strict but effective. We were all terrified of them but, particularly in comparison to today, what they did worked well.  They were policing an important part of the company image. It was ‘old school’ but it worked. Anyone or anything not complying and the employee would be sent away, including back home, until their appearance was deemed acceptable.

A typical inspection would assess whether or not each employee was well-groomed, in ironed clothing, wearing clean footwear and free from body odour. In addition, male staff would be observed for unacceptable beards or sideburns and female staff would be examined for any excessive ear, neck and finger jewellery.  Clean fingernails were expected from everyone and female staff, specifically, were encouraged not to use garish nail polish. Visible tattoos on both sexes were taboo.

Nowadays, nobody wants to hurt anyone's feelings because everyone has "a right" to be an individual, the right of freedom of expression, the right to dress and look as they darn well please. Well, in my humble but experienced retail opinion, both as manager and customer, it is unacceptable.

Every time I shop in a supermarket of whatever brand, I see at least one grubby-looking employee preparing, handling and serving fresh food, working checkouts, or mooching about the shop doing whatever job they are employed to do.  But whatever role they play, each employee should be conscious of how they look.  If only they did that three-word check before they start work – neat, clean, tidy – oh, how things would improve dramatically. 

The most recent example was a lad on a fish counter. He was a mess from head to toe, greasy, uncombed hair, shaggy beard, quite a bit of face jewellery, tattoos from his wrists to the edge of his short-sleeved shirt and filthy fingernails.

In another store, the young man on the checkout had clearly been dragged through a hedge backwards and was in some kind of razor-denial cult.  He looked dreadful. But, then again, he was allowed to start work looking like that. His fault? Yes. Management fault? Definitely.

A girl on a delicatessen counter in a different supermarket was wearing her trilby hat at a jaunty angle, choosing to see it as a fashion accessory rather than a head cover.  It was as if a Frank Sinatra impression was more favourable than a testament to hygiene standards.

Who is recruiting people like this? Who is managing standards of appearance these days?  The way employees look in some customer service environments has been pushed way down the management agenda. In fact, it may have dropped off the supervisory radar altogether. Bring back the HR retail Matrons, say I.  But that’s not going to happen because anything goes and if it is not reined in, then, by default, it becomes acceptable policy.  I repeat - lank hair, tattoos, face jewellery, stubble, scuffed shoes, dirty fingernails and on and on, coupled with poor manners seem to be the order of the day.  Surely store managers see the same things I and other customers are seeing, or perhaps they need to book appointments with Specsavers.

Supermarket bosses seem to talk about variety, offers and customer service when trying to explain their successes or their woes. But the big players in the industry are all trading on common ground. Price and choice are very similar.  Customer service is all over the place, inconsistent and a lottery.  The management gurus talk about ‘points of difference’ when comparing companies but, for me and I am certain for many other customers a big difference would be neat, clean and tidy staff especially in meat, bakery, deli, pizza and fish departments et al.  Pristine customer servants (let us not gloss the job) would increase trust immediately.  Add to those essentials an obsessive, compulsive attitude to frequent hand washing in fresh food areas and I would be a regular and faithful customer.

In order to get close to the ideally presented supermarket person, recruiters must be ruthless in hiring employees and managers on a day-to-day basis must insist on high standards of appearance.  I am not really that nostalgic for Matrons of old but I do think a modern equivalent should be found.  We should applaud managers and staff who make the effort and take pride in themselves. We should never accept the scruffs.

BOOK REVIEW - BACK IN OUR DAY BY STEPHEN CLEMENTS

Back In Our Day

by

Stephen Clements

The Blackstaff Press 2017

https://blackstaffpress.com

https://www.facebook.com/radiostephen/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Back-our-Day-Caravanning-slippery-dipping/dp/0856409995/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511367026&sr=1-1&keywords=stephen+clements+back+in+our+day

Some time ago I was listening to a singer/songwriter who declared that he detested nostalgia, that there was no point in looking back. Life, to him, was about the present and the future – and then he went on and on about all the things he did in the past. Go figure. In recent times, I have been looking back into some family history including memories of my Belfast childhood and even though there have been sad moments, they are far outweighed by the happy times.

So it was with much delight that I noticed a new book out by broadcaster Stephen Clements and it has been such a joy to read it, to share his memories, some of which triggered things in my own life that I had forgotten, and to wallow in something that should never be detested - nostalgia.

It is part autobiography and part scrapbook. The presentation is lively as is the writing. Stephen talks with enthusiasm about caravan (burnt orange and chocolate interior) holidays in Portrush and Newcastle, salivating about fish and chips, amusement arcades, kids’ chocolate (finger of fudge) and adults’ chocolate (Fry’s Five Centres). In later years, there were ‘forn’ holidays to the likes of Corfu.

There are memories of a ring-fenced Belfast City Centre in the bad old days of The Troubles. (I worked in British Home Stores in those days and queuing to get into work really was a pain in the backside.) It was a time of fire and bomb damage sales for obvious reasons and buying singles and LPs from Woolworths, ‘the place for music’. Sexy girls on the covers of Top of the Pops albums seemed to be okay back then.

And long before Halloween and Christmas became commercially monstrous, kids could have fun in a time before gadgets. Halloween was about masks, costumes and, in retrospect, pretty tame fireworks. Rockets were about the whoosh, the bang and lighting up the sky and as Stephen recalls back then it was “the most exciting light show I’ve ever seen’. Apart from the excitement of Christmas Day with all the presents and food, the big event was the festive edition of the Radio Times. I remember it in our house. It started off in pristine condition and by New Year it was a ragged mess having been well-thumbed and thrown around a lot.

The section on eating brought back memories of The Skandia restaurant where I took my girlfriend at the time. It felt posh. I think she was impressed. Chicken Maryland was exotic to Belfast taste buds. As was Chinese food and there is a particularly funny anecdote about ordering food and another about the near-lethal combination of cider, Chinese food, Polo Mints and vigorous teeth cleaning. It is one of those ‘you had to be there’ stories but thank your lucky stars you weren’t.

There are so many recollections here from schooldays to holiday cassette tape mixes to lager cans named after girls that to list them all would spoil the surprises in the book.

Stephen Clements has written a thoroughly enjoyable book, illustrated with many family photographs. Although these are universal experiences and reminiscences about growing up, I think there has been an advantage in my case as a Belfast kid, to find many personal connections in the stories. Buy it, read it and be entertained by it, and use it to trigger your own memories from back in your day.

I loved it. You will too.

This blog post has been shared on Digg, Tumblr, Google+, Facebook and Twitter

BLACK FRIDAY

Black Friday, get in a queue and wait,
dressed from head to toe in combat gear,
who dares wins, shopping with no fear,
eyes on bargains, gathered hordes salivate,

wearing elbow pads, shin pads and hobnail boots,
atmosphere rising to fever pitch,
the mild-mannered become bastard and bitch,
battering and bruising, not giving two hoots.

The lucky ones hold their prizes high,
triumphant in their quest to win the day,
victorious survivors of the fray,
while the disappointed hang their heads and cry.

And after all the sales are rung and checked,
both store displays and shop staff nerves are wrecked.

THE LAST TYPEWRITER

I am making an educated guess that this photograph was taken in the early 1980s, not because of my boyish good looks but because of where I was and what I was working on. The room is the smallest one in our first house as a married couple in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. The scattering of books and paper is research material for a manuscript that eventually became a biography of film star Stephen Boyd. But the significant curiosity in this modern era is that I am using a typewriter. I was not a trained typist and now that my healthy looking dark fringe has turned a tad whitish, I still only use one finger to type, two if up against a deadline and, on really adventurous days, a thumb as well. I remember all the palaver of changing messy black and red ink ribbons, struggling to align perfectly carbon paper in between two sheets of A4 paper, keys sticking when my typing became too frenzied and the slapstick joy of working with Snowpake correction fluid. My older sister Mary was the fully-trained and qualified typist in the family. I’ll come back to Mary later.

These were the days, children, before the information super highway and all of the things we take for granted nowadays like Google, online shopping, YouTube, Twitter, music streaming and all the other layers of world wide web wizardry that now obsess mankind for good or evil.

Five years ago on 20 November 2012, the manufacturer Brother claimed to have built the UK’s last typewriter in its North Wales factory. Since 1985, when the Wrexham operation opened, the site had produced nearly six million typewriters but demand in these islands had declined sharply, although there were still healthy markets for the machines in other parts of the world including the USA and the Far East, where Brother continued to manufacture typewriters.

As far back as the 16^th Century, a number of inventors had a go at experimenting with ‘impressing letters onto a page’ using a machine and historical pictures show all manner of contraptions in their bids to come up with something that would benefit communications and printing. The first patent for “a machine for transcribing letters” was issued to Henry Mill, an English engineer, in 1714. The patent read, (in the days before spellchecking): “That he hath by his great study and paines and expence invented and brought to perfection an artificial machine or method for impressing or transcribing of letters, one after the other, as in writing, whereby all writing whatsoever be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from printing.”

The first claim for a practical typewriter as we would recognize it today came from four American inventors working together including Christopher Sholes who designed the familiar QWERTY keyboard layout. It was the first typewriter proven to be faster than handwriting. There is a plaque in Wisconsin to record that “at 318 State Street, C. Latham Sholes perfected the first practical typewriter in September 1869. Here he worked with Carlos Glidden, Samuel W. Soule and Matthias Schwalbach in the machine shop of C. F. Kleinsteuber. During the next six years, money for the further development of the typewriter was advanced by James Densmore who later gained the controlling interest and sold it to E. Remington and Sons of Ilion, New York.”

Remington further developed the typewriter idea with various models and in a matter of years, offices were getting used to the clatter of keys and margin-reached pings. In turn this led to a boom in secretaries and personal assistants, as well as multi-staffed typing pools, jobs mostly done by women. Eventually manual machines gave way to electric typewriters and many brands and versions emerged in the 1950s and beyond from manufacturers like Olivetti, Casio and Smith-Corona. Typewriters with electronic memory functions arrived in the late 1970s to be superseded in time, of course, by computers.

Whilst it may have been hard, tedious work typing business letters, reports and news stories all day, typewriters were seen as cool gadgets for writers and you don’t have to look too hard to find nostalgic photographs of Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Anthony Burgess and many others posing, some with a cigarette or a pipe (not Agatha), next to their machines. For a jolly burst of nostalgia, it is worth heading to YouTube to listen to The Typewriter tune composed by Leroy Anderson and first performed in 1950 by the Boston Pops Orchestra. It is a brilliant piece of music making the most of keys, bell and carriage return.

Rather like vinyl LPs, the typewriter may not be extinct just yet. I am sure there are many people still using them and revering them as trusty old companions. Of course, even in this age of technological overload, computers are not universally loved. The actor Tom Hanks has stimulated interest by writing a book of short stories, each one featuring a typewriter and, it is reported that he is a collector with around two-hundred typewriters in his loft. On Desert Island Discs, he chose as his luxury a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter and paper.

Some nuggets from the typewriting archives - the writer Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men, etc) bought a Lettera 32 Olivetti in 1963 for $50. It was sold at auction a few years ago for $254,500. Mark Twain, it is said, reckoned Tom Sawyer was the first novel ever written using a typewriter. J. K. Rowling said: “I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” As mentioned earlier, the last typewriter made by Brother in Wrexham was donated to the Science Museum in London because it represented the end of a technology that had been important to so many lives.

My sister Mary tells me that she learned to use a typewriter at Lisburn Technical College around 1968. She used an Olivetti manual machine and the teaching itself was interesting. A wooden box was positioned so that the student could not look down at the keyboard. It was not only a skill to get all the fingers choreographed, it was a memory test. Each student had to memorise the position of every letter, number, symbol and function of the keyboard. Mary’s typing speed achieved 80 words a minute and she remembers loving the sounds of hitting the keys and the growl of the carriage return. 

A text book at Lisburn in those days was The Early History of the Typewriter by Charles E. Weller who was an advocate of the practice drills of typing over and over again phrases like ‘now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’, ‘now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country’ and the classic ‘ the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, a popular teaching phrase or pangram, as they say in the trade, because it uses every letter of the alphabet, (for the pedants, using a few letters more than once).

Mary’s skills led her to a great career, starting at 17 years old in Belfast with Solomon and Peres, the music, entertainment retailer/distributor for Decca, RCA, Brunswick and Coral Records in Ann Street and then to Cyril Lord’s, the carpet people in Bangor before moving on to several Northern Ireland civil service jobs doing secretarial work, shorthand and typing. She describes leaving a typing pool, in which she punched away at manual typewriters, as “escaping that enclosure”.

We are so sophisticated now with our finger and thumb gadgets that most of this modern generation of texting and phone-checking obsessives is oblivious to a good old-fashioned typewriter. But in the history of QWERTY from its outset, there are people of past generations, mostly female, who could recall their days, for good or otherwise, on automatic pilot tapping away at the behest of their bosses, mostly male, in industry, politics and media. Without typewriters and typists in the past, the whole commercial world might have ground to a halt and the brown fox and the lazy dog might have been redundant. Time moves on, as do methods for typing, but there is still, and hopefully, always something that reminds us of where it all began. My sister Mary reminds me of many great things but I am in awe of her mastery of the keyboard.