It’s just over 2 weeks before Christmas and the shop is
buzzing. My colleague is already busy
with a customer and I can see another one coming up the steps to the shop. The
phone rings. Do I answer it or leave it
for the answerphone so that I can serve the next customer? I gamble and grab the phone, after all it may
be an enquiry I can deal with quickly and still get to the customer who’s just
arrived....
“Good morning. Wines
of Interest” and I wait for the person who’s called to speak. Before they do there is the unmistakable
sound of a call centre in the background and my heart sinks. We get calls like this at home as well. No doubt you do too. You know what’s coming and within only a
fraction of a second, sure enough, there is the distinctly Asian voice at the
other end is asking to speak to “the person who deals with our gas and
electricity”. It’s not always gas and
electricity of course, nor necessarily Asian (Glasgow
and Cardiff
Our burglar alarm company rang up last week to arrange a
“service review” (which means they want to sell us something) and apparently it
had to be done that week. We were
actually quite pleased when the chap due to visit phoned in sick. Not pleased he’s sick you understand, just
grateful that an unnecessary December distraction could be moved to January
when the customers have all gone into hiding and we actually have time to deal
with such things in the careful and considered manner they deserve.
Visiting another small local business last week (where the
owner is a prominent local businessman and keen champion of similar businesses)
my colleague was discussing Small Business Saturday with him. Apparently he had been invited by the
powers-that-be to go to Norwich
The icing on this particular cake of idiocy came in two
formats last week. Firstly an envelope
landed on my desk from the Office of National Statistics asking for our
turnover figures for November. A piece
of legislation dating from 1947 meant that I was legally obliged to
respond. Failure to do so would apparently
result in my family being tarred and feathered and my business partner hung,
drawn and quartered. Distractions we
could do without frankly. Many thanks HM
Government...
Then the email landed.
It was from a publication called “The Wine Merchant”. Hard copy of this lands with us every week
and is a decent read – it is clearly written by people who seem to understand
our part of the trade. The email
contained a link to a survey which had been designed to ask us what particular
challenges faced businesses like ours at this time of the year. I hit reply (ignoring the survey) and typed
“The biggest challenge to our business at this time of year are people wanting
us to complete surveys asking what the challenges facing our business are at
this time of year”. They seemed terribly
surprised... they’d obviously not thought about it either!
I have concluded that next time I have “Michael from Mumbai”
on the phone I shall simply ask him how many pallets of Champagne he wants...
just to see if that might make him think about it (probably won’t though).
Just for the record, our December blog articles are not
written when we should be busy doing other things like selling wine. We write them in our spare time, usually at
4am when we can’t sleep because we’ve been lying awake thinking about ordering,
stock levels and how we can best avoid conversations like the one below which
occur annually on about 22nd December:
Customer: I’d
like a case of ABC please”
Us: “I’m very sorry, we’ve run out of ABC”
Customer: “What do you mean you’ve run out of ABC? It’s Christmas!”
Us: “Yes, we know. That’s why we’ve run out”
Us: “I’m very sorry, we’ve run out of ABC”
Customer: “What do you mean you’ve run out of ABC? It’s Christmas!”
Us: “Yes, we know. That’s why we’ve run out”
Seriously chaps...
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