My phone rings. It is someone-or-other from the European Union.
Am I interested in a story about how much the EU will be spending in our region up to 2020 and would I like to talk to people about how they are going to spend it?
Of course - there could be some opportunities for local businesses in this. So a chance to look at how the money would be spent locally would be great.
It's never that simple with the EU, though.
To find out about how money will be spent in the East Midlands, they want me to go to a three-day event.
In Brussels.
"But if you're spending money locally, wouldn't it be better to talk to someone here, on the ground, to see where it will be spent?"
Bafflement. Silence follows.
"So it is best I say you are not interested in the story?"
No, I'm definitely interested, I said. But I explained that I couldn't spare three days for one story, never mind one in Brussels.
This did not compute. How could someone not want to go to Brussels...to speak to Commissioners...at an event?
I did think about throwing something in about the irony of a story about a local initiative being done abroad, but it would have been lost in translation between one version of English and another.
In any case, we were clearly inhabiting different universes already.
"OK...so you can't do the story."
"Yes, I can do the story but can we not talk to someone here or over the phone?"
"Erm...it's for this event...OK we leave it there."
C'est la vie.
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Monday, 22 August 2011
Sickies, slackers and an Age of Entitlement?
Business has never been easy, but these days it is punishingly tough. In many companies there are fewer people doing more and more, and increasing costs eating away at standstill prices.
While I’m on the cynical side of when-the-tough-get-going strategies (because that’s what you should be doing anyway), there’s no question that work these days is about working harder and longer without additional reward. Can it be anything else in this climate?
Apparently it can. There’s a suggestion that at least a few people think a four-day week, cruising through the day and dashing for the door at 5.30 are all you need to do to bring home a good wage.
Who are they? According to George Cowcher, they are our future. What the chief exec of Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber is referring to is a generation of kids, some of whom seem to think that work means money for the taking.
Now, I normally take a pretty sceptical view of those who shake their head and mutter dismissively about ‘the young people of today’ or suggest it wasn’t like this in my day etc.
But George Cowcher isn’t that kind of bloke, and he was referring to the hard evidence consistently flagged up in a survey of small businesses in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
His starting point was the continuing puzzle of consistently improving exam results versus the consistently poor standards of literacy and numeracy displayed by people who turn up for job interviews.
That, he believes, may be down to the generation of kids who went through schools before a heavy emphasis was placed on those key skills. Exam passes are one thing, practical everyday skills another.
But the apparently poor work ethic is less straightforward. According to Mr Cowcher, at its worst this manifests itself in people who think it’s OK to throw sickies on Mondays because they’ve overdone the pop at the weekend. But it also extends to graduates who think a degree is the automatic route to a handsome pay packet…even when they can’t keep a phone conversation going and rely on a Word spellchecker for their communications skills.
“It is surprising in this climate,” he told me. “But there is a cohort which doesn’t see work as the major driver in their life and wants something for nothing.”
There is a debate here to be had about whether a decade of economic growth, easy credit and the rise of the consumer economy has led to an era of entitlement, an age when people grow up thinking that a high standard of living is something you are entitled to rather than something you have to work your socks off for.
It may be that we’re going through a period of adjustment, and those that go through the educational system from 2007 onwards will emerge with a more realistic expectations about the relationship between rights and responsibilities.
In my experience, there have always been people who think the world owes them a living and moan loudly when it isn’t served up on a plate. And debates like this have a habit of occurring in cycles.
But you can also criticise individual businesses for the way they took their foot off the gas - and their eye off the ball - during a bubble that was never likely to last.
The surprise for me was someone like George Cowcher – an experienced operator who usually chooses his ground very carefully – delivering some unequivocal criticism.
Does he have a point?
While I’m on the cynical side of when-the-tough-get-going strategies (because that’s what you should be doing anyway), there’s no question that work these days is about working harder and longer without additional reward. Can it be anything else in this climate?
Apparently it can. There’s a suggestion that at least a few people think a four-day week, cruising through the day and dashing for the door at 5.30 are all you need to do to bring home a good wage.
Who are they? According to George Cowcher, they are our future. What the chief exec of Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber is referring to is a generation of kids, some of whom seem to think that work means money for the taking.
Now, I normally take a pretty sceptical view of those who shake their head and mutter dismissively about ‘the young people of today’ or suggest it wasn’t like this in my day etc.
But George Cowcher isn’t that kind of bloke, and he was referring to the hard evidence consistently flagged up in a survey of small businesses in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
His starting point was the continuing puzzle of consistently improving exam results versus the consistently poor standards of literacy and numeracy displayed by people who turn up for job interviews.
That, he believes, may be down to the generation of kids who went through schools before a heavy emphasis was placed on those key skills. Exam passes are one thing, practical everyday skills another.
But the apparently poor work ethic is less straightforward. According to Mr Cowcher, at its worst this manifests itself in people who think it’s OK to throw sickies on Mondays because they’ve overdone the pop at the weekend. But it also extends to graduates who think a degree is the automatic route to a handsome pay packet…even when they can’t keep a phone conversation going and rely on a Word spellchecker for their communications skills.
“It is surprising in this climate,” he told me. “But there is a cohort which doesn’t see work as the major driver in their life and wants something for nothing.”
There is a debate here to be had about whether a decade of economic growth, easy credit and the rise of the consumer economy has led to an era of entitlement, an age when people grow up thinking that a high standard of living is something you are entitled to rather than something you have to work your socks off for.
It may be that we’re going through a period of adjustment, and those that go through the educational system from 2007 onwards will emerge with a more realistic expectations about the relationship between rights and responsibilities.
In my experience, there have always been people who think the world owes them a living and moan loudly when it isn’t served up on a plate. And debates like this have a habit of occurring in cycles.
But you can also criticise individual businesses for the way they took their foot off the gas - and their eye off the ball - during a bubble that was never likely to last.
The surprise for me was someone like George Cowcher – an experienced operator who usually chooses his ground very carefully – delivering some unequivocal criticism.
Does he have a point?
Thursday, 18 August 2011
John Lewis: Unknowingly undersold?
I’m no technophobe, but neither am I a technophile and I like to know that, whatever I’m spending, I’m making the right decision.
I seemed to be heading in the right direction thanks to a young assistant who came over, asked me if I needed some advice and identified the TVs in my range which offered better picture quality. He went off to check stock and look at delivery options, so we were on the verge of a deal.
Only it turns out he didn’t work for John Lewis.
I discovered this from another assistant who came over to respond to the delivery query. His opening gambit: “Can I just ask what exactly you were looking for as he isn’t employed by us and he shouldn’t have been talking to you about televisions?”
The scenario isn’t quite as disturbing as it might sound, but it does throw an interesting light on the way retail sometimes operates.
The young ‘assistant’ actually worked for a company selling TV sound systems (which explained why he had started talking about an iPod dock) which had been given time to demonstrate and sell its wares on the John Lewis technology floor.
But he was on the verge of selling John Lewis short and leaving me with a TV which wasn’t actually the best option. The assistant who took over (an experienced old salt who knew what he was talking about and explained things clearly and convincingly) steered me in the direction of a TV which was £250 more expensive – but, technologically, far better. So, in the end a result.
What I found disturbing was not so much the fact that I got collared by someone who had no authority to sell me anything, but that it had happened in a shop where trust is a central part of the sales proposition.
The selling of particular products by people who work for the manufacturer or agent rather than the retailer isn’t unusual – you see product or franchise concessions in loads of stores. But it has to be flagged up – I thought my needs were being met with a product recommended by someone from John Lewis but that wasn’t the case and I wasn’t told. So something, somewhere went wrong.
I like John Lewis a lot. It remains a standard-setter on the high street. To borrow a catchphrase, in this case John Lewis itself was – nearly - unknowingly undersold.
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Retail: What will it take for independents' day to happen?
A shattering silence on this blog for the past couple of weeks because I’ve been up in Northumberland on holiday. There was a shattering silence there, too – in all sorts of ways.
While the rest of Britain was (I’m told) gripped by the riots frenzy there was a smashed window at a small police station somewhere near Sunderland and, er, that’s it.
I stayed in the middle of nowhere a few miles outside Alnwick. Beautiful rugged countryside, so dark only a couple of lights were visible in the distance at night, while the only noise was the distant hiss of tyres from a road up in the crags and the sheep being driven into a different field. Bliss.
It took me a few days to get used to the total absence of an internet connection and an intermittent mobile phone signal, though. But they were an early clue as to why this – and other parts of Britain - remain unspoilt.
The biggest clue was in Alnwick itself. It’s an attractive market town just off the A1 whose major draw is the Castle, where some of the exteriors for the Harry Potter movies were filmed. It’s also the only town of any size for miles around.
What struck me was how few national retail fascias there were on its main shopping streets. Yes, there was a WH Smith, a Boots, a Dorothy Perkins a Morrison supermarket and, outside the centre, a Sainsbury superstore.
But its main retail pitch was nearly all local – a butcher, a hardware store, a kitchenware and furniture business, an estate agency, the usual charity shops, a couple of pubs/bars, the odd local country clothing/fashion store, some gift/trinket shops. There is also Barter Books, which is a story in itself. A clone town it ain’t.
Is that a good or a bad thing, though?
Well, there’s been an ongoing debate about the loss of independent retailers and the dominance of national chains serving up the same flavour wherever you go. Indeed, a government-ordered review into this very subject is currently being carried out by Mary Portas, the former Harvey Nichols branding director who found fame as TV’s Mary Queen of Shops, advising independent retailers.
She’d find plenty to occupy herself in Alnwick. Some of the independents were excellent (notably the butcher, which does a damn fine pie). Some weren’t and they clearly lacked either turnover or imagination (or both).
What that translated into was that there was no compelling reason to go to Alnwick and shop for the sake of a browse and a casual purchase. The independents did not serve up the range or the consumer experience that national chains do.
I’m guessing that the national chains will tell you that the demographic data of a community as sparse as rural Northumberland simply doesn’t stack up for them. They’d ask you to hop in the car and drive down to Newcastle or hop on the train up to Edinburgh if you want the full-on shopping show.
Was my experience that of city people tragically hooked on shopping not knowing what to do? No – it was a story about the way the economy works. Major retailers need big catchments with a good wodge of money within a short drive. If it isn’t there they won’t come.
The independents who do set up shop would need to be very savvy to make good money – especially in a town like Alnwick, where tourism makes demand seasonal.
Yet they clearly survive, and there were few empty shop units that I could find.
Could the debate about independent shops learn something from a place like Alnwick? May be – but I’m not sure it’s an entirely optimistic message.
None of the independents were what I’d call indulgence shops. They were in the main places where you go because you need something. The only independent which you could really call a magnet – Barter Books, the book swap-shop housed in an old railway station – is unique, almost a national institution.
Alnwick’s independents survive because there is little competition. They are small-scale enterprises which didn’t look like they made a lot of money and they benefit from being in the only sizeable centre for miles around.
Tellingly, I suspect that the one Sainsbury store on the edge of the town employs more people than a dozen of the independents in the centre.
This isn’t an argument in favour of big retail – national chains are one-size-fits-all operations who have questions to answer about their treatment of supply chains and their regular failure to invest in great service.
But their absence doesn’t guarantee an alternative high street full of brilliantly run or endearingly quirky independents with a distinctive regional flavour. Some of the shops I saw were either utilitarian or just off the pace.
Good retailing is a mix of good products and great service coming together to provide value, and that doesn’t have to be the preserve of big national chains. But it would take a clever, committed and resourceful independent to meet those criteria.
Are they out there? I'm not sure. And the irony underneath this article is that it was drafted while sitting in Alnwick's newest retail arrival - Costa Coffee...
While the rest of Britain was (I’m told) gripped by the riots frenzy there was a smashed window at a small police station somewhere near Sunderland and, er, that’s it.
I stayed in the middle of nowhere a few miles outside Alnwick. Beautiful rugged countryside, so dark only a couple of lights were visible in the distance at night, while the only noise was the distant hiss of tyres from a road up in the crags and the sheep being driven into a different field. Bliss.
It took me a few days to get used to the total absence of an internet connection and an intermittent mobile phone signal, though. But they were an early clue as to why this – and other parts of Britain - remain unspoilt.
The biggest clue was in Alnwick itself. It’s an attractive market town just off the A1 whose major draw is the Castle, where some of the exteriors for the Harry Potter movies were filmed. It’s also the only town of any size for miles around.
What struck me was how few national retail fascias there were on its main shopping streets. Yes, there was a WH Smith, a Boots, a Dorothy Perkins a Morrison supermarket and, outside the centre, a Sainsbury superstore.
But its main retail pitch was nearly all local – a butcher, a hardware store, a kitchenware and furniture business, an estate agency, the usual charity shops, a couple of pubs/bars, the odd local country clothing/fashion store, some gift/trinket shops. There is also Barter Books, which is a story in itself. A clone town it ain’t.
Is that a good or a bad thing, though?
Well, there’s been an ongoing debate about the loss of independent retailers and the dominance of national chains serving up the same flavour wherever you go. Indeed, a government-ordered review into this very subject is currently being carried out by Mary Portas, the former Harvey Nichols branding director who found fame as TV’s Mary Queen of Shops, advising independent retailers.
She’d find plenty to occupy herself in Alnwick. Some of the independents were excellent (notably the butcher, which does a damn fine pie). Some weren’t and they clearly lacked either turnover or imagination (or both).
What that translated into was that there was no compelling reason to go to Alnwick and shop for the sake of a browse and a casual purchase. The independents did not serve up the range or the consumer experience that national chains do.
I’m guessing that the national chains will tell you that the demographic data of a community as sparse as rural Northumberland simply doesn’t stack up for them. They’d ask you to hop in the car and drive down to Newcastle or hop on the train up to Edinburgh if you want the full-on shopping show.
Was my experience that of city people tragically hooked on shopping not knowing what to do? No – it was a story about the way the economy works. Major retailers need big catchments with a good wodge of money within a short drive. If it isn’t there they won’t come.
The independents who do set up shop would need to be very savvy to make good money – especially in a town like Alnwick, where tourism makes demand seasonal.
Yet they clearly survive, and there were few empty shop units that I could find.
Could the debate about independent shops learn something from a place like Alnwick? May be – but I’m not sure it’s an entirely optimistic message.
None of the independents were what I’d call indulgence shops. They were in the main places where you go because you need something. The only independent which you could really call a magnet – Barter Books, the book swap-shop housed in an old railway station – is unique, almost a national institution.
Alnwick’s independents survive because there is little competition. They are small-scale enterprises which didn’t look like they made a lot of money and they benefit from being in the only sizeable centre for miles around.
Tellingly, I suspect that the one Sainsbury store on the edge of the town employs more people than a dozen of the independents in the centre.
This isn’t an argument in favour of big retail – national chains are one-size-fits-all operations who have questions to answer about their treatment of supply chains and their regular failure to invest in great service.
But their absence doesn’t guarantee an alternative high street full of brilliantly run or endearingly quirky independents with a distinctive regional flavour. Some of the shops I saw were either utilitarian or just off the pace.
Good retailing is a mix of good products and great service coming together to provide value, and that doesn’t have to be the preserve of big national chains. But it would take a clever, committed and resourceful independent to meet those criteria.
Are they out there? I'm not sure. And the irony underneath this article is that it was drafted while sitting in Alnwick's newest retail arrival - Costa Coffee...
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
An Irish saga at Southreef
You’ve heard of planners bringing development to a halt, but a foreign government?
We haven’t had confirmation, but it looks like that’s what happened with Southreef on Canal Street, which may be in the running for the prize of Nottingham’s longest-running development saga.
A £30m mixed-use scheme which occupies a prominent pitch in the city’s prized Waterside zone, it features a mix of apartments, offices and other commercial space.
Or it will do when it’s eventually completed. By any measure, Southreef was an ambitious landmark on an important route into the city centre and it ticks many of property’s most important boxes with ease.
Timing isn’t one of them, though. First unveiled in 2005, it finally got underway in 2007. 2007 was, of course, property’s annus horribilis, the year when a tidal wave of mortgage defaults pulled the rug from underneath any investment in bricks and mortar.
The problem for Southreef lies not in the design or the developers, all of whom have long-established track records round here. It lies with its backers, over-extended Irish banks who eventually had to accept bail-outs from the Irish government…in return for security in the shape of some of the assets they had title to.
These passed into the hands of Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (based, ironically, in Grand Canal Street in Dublin). Which is why an unfinished landmark in Nottingham has, arguably, been at the beck and call of the Irish government.
Administrators were called in to take over Southreef Properties, the business responsible for trying to finish the development, last week. One assumes that’s because no more money has been forthcoming from Ireland.
It won’t stop the development being completed. Southreef is already earning money from high quality office occupiers like Crytek and tenants inside its apartments.
Southreef will be a great development when it’s eventually finished, as it will be. Just as it may be a while yet before that happens, so it will be sometime before it shakes off its undeserved status as an outpost of the Irish economy.
We haven’t had confirmation, but it looks like that’s what happened with Southreef on Canal Street, which may be in the running for the prize of Nottingham’s longest-running development saga.
A £30m mixed-use scheme which occupies a prominent pitch in the city’s prized Waterside zone, it features a mix of apartments, offices and other commercial space.
Or it will do when it’s eventually completed. By any measure, Southreef was an ambitious landmark on an important route into the city centre and it ticks many of property’s most important boxes with ease.
Timing isn’t one of them, though. First unveiled in 2005, it finally got underway in 2007. 2007 was, of course, property’s annus horribilis, the year when a tidal wave of mortgage defaults pulled the rug from underneath any investment in bricks and mortar.
The problem for Southreef lies not in the design or the developers, all of whom have long-established track records round here. It lies with its backers, over-extended Irish banks who eventually had to accept bail-outs from the Irish government…in return for security in the shape of some of the assets they had title to.
These passed into the hands of Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (based, ironically, in Grand Canal Street in Dublin). Which is why an unfinished landmark in Nottingham has, arguably, been at the beck and call of the Irish government.
Administrators were called in to take over Southreef Properties, the business responsible for trying to finish the development, last week. One assumes that’s because no more money has been forthcoming from Ireland.
It won’t stop the development being completed. Southreef is already earning money from high quality office occupiers like Crytek and tenants inside its apartments.
Southreef will be a great development when it’s eventually finished, as it will be. Just as it may be a while yet before that happens, so it will be sometime before it shakes off its undeserved status as an outpost of the Irish economy.
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
What those customer services letters really mean...
I’ve been shaking my head in pity at Simon Dare’s vain attempts to get Virgin Media to wake up out of its self-satisfied slumber and realise that when it asks customers for their opinions it might not be a bad idea to turn its ears on.
It’s not fair to single out Virgin Media, of course, because I think we all know that the one area where consumer-facing businesses are always consistent is in being pretty crap at customer service.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer satisfaction surveys, the complaints handling or the new product roll-outs, this is what they really meant to say in that welcome letter...
Dear [insert your misspelt name here]
After carefully considering our own views, we’ve concluded that one of the best ways to continuously improve our business is to continuously empty your pockets (again).
Accordingly, we’ve decided to make a series of changes to your service which will make it cheaper for us to deliver it. That, of course, means that we will have to take a load more money off you.
These clear and simple amendments, which won’t make any difference to anything we do, are explained in the enclosed 96-page booklet of completely impenetrable terms and conditions.
We’re sure you agree that any ideas which improve service will make your life easier. If you can think of any, please tell our customer services team, because they’ve been a bit busy recently trying to flog you something.
If you have any queries about the changes we haven’t made, don’t hesitate to use our new, 13-stage process for getting in touch. Our advisers are always available to talk to you, as long as you call our premium-rate 0845 number, at an hour to suit you – specifically, 3am to 4am on the 12th of Never.
If you have any additional comments about our service, please tell a mate down the pub.
Assuring you of dim-witted indifference,
Mr Illegible Signature
Head of Customer Response Analysis Programme
[C.R.A.P]
Thursday, 14 July 2011
A lot of noise and a real scandal
It involved practices which are indefensible, often beneath contempt, and saw ordinary people suffer unforgivable intrusions and prominent people dragged through the mud for no good reason.
Journalism is a trade where gossip is a way of life, and at least a few of the 'revelations' about News International didn’t seem to me to be revelations at all (not least because quite a few of them – notably Gordon Brown's 'allegations' - appeared in a book published three years ago). Neither are they confined to News International.
Before mobile phones came along, hacking was preceded by private inquiry agents going through the rubbish bins of celebrities and politicians. Dark corners of the Metropolitan Police would exchange information for drinks or money as long ago as the 1960s. And Fleet Street's favourite bars have regularly been propped up by numerous fixers, fraudsters and chancers.
So this modern scandal is, I'm afraid, only the latest iteration of tabloid journalism's eternal desire to find ways of teasing out private, often embarrassing and shocking, information. Sometimes they have done so by routine inquiry, forensic guile or simple luck.
Hacking was not routine or forensic, though. It was brazen law-breaking. In particular, the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was despicably warped.
Beyond its extremity, the problem with hacking is the dirty 'principle' which lurks underneath it: for entirely commercial reasons, the end justified the means. The News of The World played with fire. Rightly, it got burnt.
The fall-out from this issue is not black-and-white, though, for three reasons.
First, the accusers.
No journalist will enjoy the spectacle of politicians wagging their fingers at the media and offering sage observations about the shameful decline of professional ethics. In that respect, many of them are long-term residents of glass houses and really shouldn't be lobbing boulders (and that includes Mr Brown, whose serial scheming and media manipulation is documented in Andrew Rawnsley's book The End of the Party).
Similarly, it is difficult to take seriously the lofty pronouncements of other media, not one of whom is a disinterested party. Some have unpleasant skeletons of their own.
Yet while their observations may be hypocritical and partial, they are all true.
What I do take huge exception to is the sly suggestion that if national newspapers did this then may be locals did too? This is self-serving nonsense for which there isn't a shred of evidence.
Local newspapers don't need to engage in vile subterfuges because they don't operate at a distance from their community. They depend on a long-term relationship built on respect, and any newspaper which stomped like a hooligan across its circulation area would pay a swift and heavy price. For the regional press, there is no logic on any level in tabloid bombing raids.
The second issue is where you draw the line in terms of privacy - which is, I suspect, what politicians will surely try to do.
Politicians and regulators have grappled with this issue many times before, struggling to come up with a definition which doesn't compromise the right to know or the right to privacy.
The issue has become more complicated still in the online era, where rules in one part of the world have been rendered meaningless by online publication in a different part of the world of the world which is available to all.
The third issue is one of proportion.
It is a clear matter of public interest when a prominent part of one of society's major institutions – in this case, the Press - behaves in an anti-social manner and betrays public trust.
But it is only a part of that institution. The direct impact of its activity is confined to a comparatively small number of people. The indirect impact is that millions of newspaper buyers were unaware of the basis of some of the stories they read.
Nevertheless, the News of The World is now history, so are the practices associated with it. An inquiry into Press ethics might usefully outline the bounds of acceptable conduct and how they should be policed, but I suspect it will draw conclusions recommending practices which are routinely followed by most of the media already.
The day-after-day prominence of the hacking scandal reflects not its importance to peoples' everyday lives, but the navel-gazing tendency of the media and politicians - whose desire to exert influence over the media is riven with self-interest (especially in the wake of their own expenses scandal).
The relationship between public, media and politicians does need to be a healthier and more respectful one. And the phone hacking scandal is a lousy reflection on media standards - perhaps another example of a period when the chase for financial reward led up a disastrous blind alley.
But this 'scandal' will not cause long-term damage to the social or economic fabric of Britain. Communities will not be devastated by it, no one will suffer enduring hardship.
My last blog was about the disastrous decision to deny Bombardier a rail contract. That is a scandal and it will cause lasting damage.
Yet in London, little is being said.
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