Exigencies of Retailing
I recently told my hermitically-inclined daughter who wants to take the business on, that it is no good just liking herbs, you have to love people as well.
That said, I have a colleague, who although invariably willing to go that extra-mile to help out a friend, tells customers who irritate him to piss off and stop wasting his time. Actually he puts it a bit more strongly than that, but this is a family blog and read by Americans so one has to adopt a tone suitable for grannies and those of an excessively sensitive disposition.
Such is a sharp contrast from my own attitude; when I get a complaint, usually involving one or two per cent of our mail orders a year, I thank the customer for his feedback and, unless it’s a complete try-on, return his money without question. Is this stupid? I ask, Is it completely uncommercial? After all, the disgruntled customer never comes back, it costs me time and money and in spite of his non-conciliatory attitude, my mate still has punters crowding around his door enthusiastically pushing tenners at him
Obviously in these economically-straitened times, there will be more people who will try it on, either that or they are irremediably thick and, like the designer of this web site remarked of a patrician stately-home owner who couldn’t find our plant list on it, “some people are so stupid as to be beyond help”. Thankfully you are not included amongst their number or you wouldn’t have got this far down the blog. The colleague above once had a conversation with a chap who said that he wasn’t going near Arne Herbs again as all the plants we sent him had died. It transpired that he hadn’t realised that they had to be removed from their packaging and potted before they would grow. I believe that he was one of those my friend told to get lost. The customer had previously asked me why he couldn’t find “Spanish Fly” in any herb growers’ catalogue. Oh dear!. Sometimes the public are just so embarrassing, it’s best to simply chuck the money at them and (metaphorically) run. Such was the woman who came up to us on a slow day in Bristol market clutching a pot containing some water-logged compost and a limp expiring plant “I have never seen a vine weevil before in my life” she screamed at me and anyone within earshot, “but look at this plant you sold me two weeks ago, it’s full of vine weevils, you can see the holes they emerged from” Clearly she had mistaken the long term fertiliser granules for weevil eggs (she is not the first) and drowned the plant. In the market, one has better things to do than give lectures on economic entomology to the educationally-challenged, so I didn’t point out that if the weevils completed their life cycles in the month during which her plant had been potted, they could well audition for a horror movie “Killer Bugs Take over the World” and win an oscar. Then there was the owner of a Somerset dance school who complained with tears of fury about our standard packaging charge for a couple of hyssop. (£9.80 including post until the rates go up in April, so get your orders in now) If I could have got a word in edgeways, I would have explained that packaging to our standards demands a certain expertise and expertise costs money, let alone the cost of taking the parcel to the post office. And that’s not counting the bureaucracy, the printing out three copies of the receipt to show the tax man that we had made a zero-rated sale. All this would have cost the same had she ordered say, a Mentha gattefossei or a small Slippery Elm, and what I should have said but was too polite (OK, too slow) was that if you want half a dozen eggs, you go to your local corner shop not Fortnums, similarly I bet the silly girl could have found half a dozen garden centres within a couple of miles absolutely stuffed with Hyssop they would have been flogging off cheap to make room for the new year’s stock. Or she could have bought a packet of seed for £1.50 and had dozens of the things for next to nothing. The lesson drummed into my head long ago by that late great entrepreneur, Reg Peplow, who used to run Herbs from the Hoo, was to always cost out my time. If time was given for free it was being expended on a non-commercially viable activity.
On “Try-ons”, we are frequently asked why we only send by TNT or Special Delivery. We long ago discovered that unless the parcel is signed for, the unscrupulous will complain that they had never received it and demand a “replacement”. Equally if the post office loses it, a suspicious customer will think we have trousered their money and kept the plants unless we can show proof of posting. What nasty cynical times we do live in!
The first of the two customers to complain last year was an ex-pat who had initially said how glad she was to find us because no other nursery in
One customer who did send her plant back was the
I am told that approximately 2.5% problems a year is about average for retailing, though as far as I am concerned even that is too many. All the same with the likes of many of them, it is hard to see how to reduce the number further.
A final thought is that for the customers in the long term at least it is a win-win situation, in that if a retailer consistently sends out garbage and doesn’t replace the plants or money, all the punters will just go away and the vendor will go bust. Either that or he sends the money back, which, in order for the business to remain viable, will have to be costed into the price of future sales. Thus if he makes a habit of peddling rubbish, the higher prices will put customers off and he will go bust just the same. So providing the customers go to a long established business, they should be all right. It certainly keeps the retailer on his toes.
When you get a junk phone call, what do you do with it? If I am in the house, I stick the phone on the radio and go back to the computer. This can lead to all manner of unexpected outcomes. I did just that a few months ago and later got a tetchy message from the Performing Rights Society alleging that I was heard playing music to my customers and staff and I therefore had to pay the PRS a hundred quid. In fact on the basis that one person’s taste in music is a drill painfully boring holes into the brains of another, staff here are discouraged from bringing radios to work and definitely banned from using them without head phones. Rosemary Titterington (doyenne of the post-war herb industry, for younger readers) once memorably described the workers in a rival’s music-polluted packing shed, as being “like a lot of mindless battery chickens”. This is no good when you are handling a food product and you want your workers on the ball to intercept the odd caterpillar and mispicked toxic leaf. Anyway, the PRS wrote again ….and again and again, providing loads of paper on which to print out the second and third copies of invoices. Eventually on a bleak chilly November day. they sent an investigative human. “Do you play music to your staff?” she asked “What staff?” I replied. She looked around and couldn’t see anyone, not surprising, this nursery extends over several acres and I lose people here myself. I suppose if they were all equipped with ghetto-blasters, they would be less trouble to locate. “Well customers then?” she persisted. That was an excuse for me to launch into a tirade against “hold” music on telephones. Why do courier companies and taxi firms invariably have the loudest and most hideous noises known to mankind? Or the civil service massacre the unfortunate Handel? Anyway by the time I had got on to piped music in pubs and supermarkets, I think she must have realised she was on a loser and bogged off. I told this story to the manager of a very large wholesale company. He said all his staff had “music” going all the time and never heard a peep from the PRS from one year to the next so I suppose they just go for “soft targets” but the mind boggles at the cost of each “hit” they eventually make. If I say that with such imbecilic semi-official enforcement organisations around, it’s scarcely surprising the country’s broke, I will be accused of being a grumpy old misanthrope. Well, yes, actually I am; needless to say, I love you all nevertheless!!!!. .