There was a shoot on the estate today. We could tell that because there were only two radios left in the office for three members of staff. One of them was the boss's radio, which is permanently stuck on channel one since he dropped it and the knob that changes channels broke off. I like having that one anyway, because it can't accidentally twiddle itself to the wrong frequency in my pocket.
There were some classic examples of things that go wrong in a retail plant centre, or at least go wrong in ours. A couple arrived to collect two trees that had been paid for and reserved 'ages ago', except that the trees were not with the other reserved trees, and nobody had recorded any details of them in the book of reserved plants. Fortunately the couple remained extremely placid throughout, until one of my colleagues in a moment of real inspiration managed to find the lost trees. They were not anywhere we normally put reserved plants, but with the small collection of pot-bound trees that have been reduced to half price, with their prices cut off and reserved under the first names of the couple who had bought them, in about August. I mean, why wouldn't they be?
Later on another couple arrived to buy a tray with a picture of an elephant which we had ordered in for them specially. I knew we were trying to get hold of an elephant tray, which somebody wanted to give as a present to somebody else who liked elephants. My colleague who does orders for the shop had been so keen to get them their tray before Christmas that she had rung them to say it had arrived before the boss had given us a sales price for it, which left us with the task of working out a price. The paperwork that came with the tray had actually got a cost price to us on it, which is more than delivery notes usually do, but none of us had been told the gross mark-up we were supposed to use for shop items. We tried to work this out from the stock records on our computer, but it wasn't entirely obvious which columns did and didn't contain VAT. We decided that if we were to charge £29.99 for the tray we wouldn't be robbing our employer. However, by then the customers had decided it was not the right elephant tray, and didn't want it. The woman was convinced that the one she saw before had a lighter background. My guess is that there is only one design, and her visual memory is not that accurate.
Some customers were easier to please. A lovely old boy came to collect two lime trees as a present for his nephew. Last year he gave the nephew four Wellingtonias which are apparently doing very well. A mother and daughter who are regular customers came in for some mistletoe, and we wished each other happy Christmas and chatted about the gardening year and the floods.
A chap with the sort of thick Suffolk accent you don't often hear nowadays came in with his mobility scooter bound companion for coffee and cake. I summoned a colleague who is less squeamish than I am about serving food in compost-dusted clothes to do the refreshments, and it turned out that they knew each other from my colleague's previous job at Nottcutts, and that the old Suffolk boy and his wife had just come from there, having tried to get coffee and been turned away because the cafe was given over to Santa's grotto. They had a long chat about peat free compost, and the difficulties of looking after plug plants. The customer raises hundreds of these each year, and sells them in aid of the children's hospice, and as he talked about the illogicality of UK gardeners being banned from using peat when the Irish were still burning it in power stations, the folly of shipping coir half way around the world, and various articles on peat substitutes he'd read in the RHS magazine, it became clear that he was a more accomplished and thoughtful gardener than most of our customers. His last job before retirement was in the garden section of B&Q.
At the other end of the gardening spectrum, a customer possessed of a notable local garden and a double-barrelled surname paid for over two hundred pounds worth of shrubs with his Coutts credit card.
We struggled slightly with the last of the Christmas trees. Those that were left were mostly large, crooked and partially bald, and while some people bought them, there was a steady trickle of disappointed punters asking whether that was all that we had. One man even brought one back, after he'd got it home and realised that it was too large to fit into his house. Should have used a tape measure, mate. Someone rang up asking whether we had any good quality trees, to which my colleague could only answer truthfully that we had trees, but that they were not as bushy as Christmas trees usually are.
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