playing at shops

I was right about the shortage of customers, but wrong that nothing would be going on at the plant centre.  It turns out that we are going to have the tea room for this season, and the builders start on Monday, moving the radiators and making a couple of extra windows.  When I arrived for work on Saturday the shop was in a state of flux, with the display cabinets in random groups around the room as if they'd been caught up in an ocean current, then stranded.  I had a choice of tasks for the day, to clean up dead leaves in the polytunnels (guessed that one right) or help rearrange the furniture in the shop.  I don’t rate my skills as a shop designer particularly highly, but it was very cold in the polytunnels, so I thought that as somebody who had done some shopping I would hunt for my inner Mary Portas, or at least make myself useful clearing debris and rejected shop fittings out of the way.

The owner had an idea that customers ought to be directed diagonally across the shop and back again, rather than being allowed to go straight to the till.  I expect this is based on sound retail theory, but most retailers aren’t dealing with shoppers who may have a metre or two of tree sticking out of the back of their trolley.  The width of the aisle required to allow customers with trees to negotiate the bend was so vast that we ended up losing about a third of the floor area of the shop to this gigantic runway.  Besides seeming wasteful and looking rather silly (not helped by the exposed acreage of concrete floor), this didn’t leave enough room for all of the display cabinets.

It became clear that various improvised structures made out of shabby tables and old packing cases swathed in black landscape fabric were going to have to go.  It was a pity about the picturesque wooden vintage port crate, but there was simply not enough space for the amount of furniture.  Two or three metal display racks, that seemed to occupy a volume out of all proportion to the quantity of goods they held, were evicted into the snow as well.  After some debate a large dovecote was moved outside, and we ended up with some wooden bookshelves, and the purpose built cabinets, which are quite nice ones with glass shelves.  My colleague, who has a really good eye for that sort of thing, hit on the notion of placing them on the diagonal instead of flat against the wall, and the whole layout began to come together.  The owner got her diagonal route into the gift area, but we kept a straight run from the door to the till as well.  She is still not fully reconciled to that, but she will be if she makes us get rid of it, after a few shelf-fulls of china have been swept to the ground by a passing tree.

We moved the cabinets that had been placed along the edge of what’s going to be the tea area.  Sitting next to a wall of glass shelving felt claustrophobic, and it’s going to be quite a tight squeeze fitting 10 tables and 40 chairs into that amount of floor space, which is the plan.  Putting shelves of bone china mugs and glass flower vases in range of people’s flailing arms and coat hems as they sit down to their tea seems to be asking for trouble, so I thought there should be not too much stuff there, and what there was should be non-breakable.  My new colleague, whose previous retail experience has given him a jaundiced view of humanity for one so young, added that it should be low value, since it would be easy for people sitting at their tables to slip things off the bottom shelf into their bags.  We compromised with a few cabinets, not too tall.

My colleagues managed to move all the display units with their contents still in place and without any of it falling out.  I don’t know how they did that.  It saved a lot of time, but meant that things ended up all over the place.  This morning I volunteered to rearrange, which the rest of today's shift agreed to.  I don’t normally clean and tidy my own house that much, so wiping glass shelves with windolene and arranging things on them nicely is not really my forte, but it seemed preferable to picking up leaves in the polytunnel (although first thing this morning it was only –3.5C and not –10.5C like it was yesterday).  The shop at work tends to go in for artistic displays, because various staff members like doing them, and believe that if the place looks attractive and eye-catching we will sell more.  I don’t regard shopping as a pleasurable leisure pursuit, so as I’d volunteered to sort out the muddle I did it my way, which was to make it efficient.  So I put all the bridge scoring sets together, and all the gift bags and tags on one shelf, and all the mugs in a china section.  My view is that if you want to buy a mug you would like to know that you have looked at all the mugs there are, ditto if you want to buy a bridge scoring set for a friend who likes playing bridge, and so on.  Mixed displays that combine napkins, greetings cards, candles, soap, a biscuit tin, a hand trowel and some raffia, all colour co-ordinated in carefully chosen shades of pink and green, are very good in moderation to add to the ambience, but not the way to present your entire stock.  I was commercial enough to put the toiletries in the middle where people would see them (and felt a glow of pride when this afternoon we sold a set of two sorts of handcream in a stand), and banish things that seemed out of season or never sell at the best of times to the edge of the room.

I’m sure that within a month it will all have been changed round, but the way that I did it was very rational.

Addendum  The supper was quite amusing and my apple crumbles arrived intact and did not turn to apple-flavoured quicksand during the drive to the hall.   The committee members were not even required to do the washing up, which came as a welcome surprise.

taking stock

The owner and I walked around the garden first thing, with the latest draft of the garden guide, checking that everything mentioned occurred at the point where the text said it would (it did) and adding in extra trees worthy of mention.  There was lots to see, with big fat bunches of snowdrops almost fully open, and camellias and witch hazels in bloom.  As Monday mornings go, being paid to walk around an interesting garden is well up there as a good way to start the week.  The dog came along, and more or less stayed with the owner for the entire tour.  Apparently on Saturday she was taken on a shoot and disgraced herself, charging around uncontrollably.  Today, truffling about in evergreens against the wall of the plant centre, she flushed out a large muntjac, which ran away in a lumbering and slightly non-urgent fashion.  After a long pause the dog followed, without conviction.  She is a terrier, not a hound, and doesn't seem to consider that chasing large beasts of the field is part of her remit.  It's just as well, really, as she gets lost often enough running after rabbits.

Things went downhill after the positive start, and I was required to scribe for the shop stocktake.  Stocktaking the shop is a task of such awful, tedious grimness that I think it is worse than doing my tax return, if that is possible.  The stuff in the shop comes from umpteen different suppliers, and we don't have bar-codes.  Records of stock brought forward and ordered during the year are entered on an excel spreadsheet so large that the printed version is stapled together in four separate sections, because it is too fat for our staplers to cope as a single document.  The person doing the counting announces what the stock item is, and the scribe has to hunt for it in the vast spreadsheet.  Sometimes whole minutes elapse between the counter saying how many items, and the wretched scribe finding the right page, by which time both have forgotten the answer and the counter has to count them again.

Insecticides.  Fertilisers.  Fungicides.  Garden lanterns.  Lamp oil.  String.  Gloves.  Mugs.  Watering cans.  Raffia.  Hose connectors.  Toiletries.  Vases.  Trugs.  Metal obelisks.  Garden hand tools.  Jam pot covers.  Vegetable peeling bins.  Bird boxes.  Bird feeders.  Plant supports.  Bird food.  Plant supports.  Books.  Greetings cards.  Tea towels.  Soil testing kits.  Plant labels.  Wooden fruit.  Notepads.  Bridge sets.  Candles.  Tea cosies.  Shopping bags.  Swiss army knives.  Seeds.  Door stops.  Boot jacks.  Garden kneelers.  Beneficial miccorrhizae.  Coat hooks.  Plastic tubs.  Toasting forks.  Nutcrackers.  Scrubbing brushes.  Tissue box holders.  Place mats.  Seed storage tins.  Kitchen roll holders.  Gift wrap.  Paper napkins.

We sell all of these and more, mostly in multiple sizes and colours and varieties.  You wouldn't believe how many different sorts of gardening glove we stock, or how many varieties of string.  Sometimes the boss has loaded the stock code on to the spreadsheet, but sometimes there is just a description.  Sometimes the boss's description doesn't pick up on the key word that appears on the packaging, so a 'power saw' is recorded as a 'folding saw' (probably a more accurate description, looking at it).  The scribe then spends a long time trying to match what the counter has told them to the spreadsheet, without success.  Sometimes similar items appear in more than one place on the spreadsheet, so gloves give way to wellington boots, but then over the page there are suddenly some more gloves, as the spreadsheet fails to run in stock code order.

It would be too simple if all of the watering cans were together, or all of the string in one place.  To make the shop appear more tempting there are themed tables and ornamental displays.  One of my colleagues put together a display of green things.  It was quite cute, in a sort of Gardens Illustrated shopping section way, and mixed up string, raffia, candles, vases, watering cans, candles, kitchen waste caddies, bottles for making infusions of herbal oil, gloves and a textile door stop, all coloured different shades of green.  In all it ran across at least a dozen different categories of the stock sheet.  My colleague would tell me that the next thing was a glove code TML406S.  I would spend five minutes trying to find my way back to gloves.  She would say 'There's one of those', and on we went, hunting this time for the green metal vertical sided vase.

The new member of staff starts tomorrow.  Poor sod, he is going to have a baptism of fire.  After the stocktake things can only get better for him.