The famed american economist J K Galbraith once said that "Meetings are indispensible for those who would do no work" and I'm beginning to see where he was coming from. We have a new Area Manager at work (in fact the first area manager we have ever had) and true to the above dictum he has started his period of employment with a flurry of meetings. There have been meetings to introduce him to the shop managers, meetings to introduce him to the suppliers, he has had meetings with the staff within the shops to introduce himself and to introduce his ideas. Today he has a meeting with the wholesalers, the results of which he will report back to the bosses in a meeting tomorrow. The only fly in the ointment is that at some point - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point he will have to do some actual work.

Now this may come as a shock to him, but you see in order for the buisiness to make any money there has to be stuff on the shelves. And this stuff has to be put there. And when those unmitigated bastards called customers take it off either to pinch it, dump it somewhere else in the shop or, least likely, to buy it - it has to be put back again. This you see is called work. If we by any miricle actually make any profit at the end of the day, this is where it comes from. The man - no doubt a very nice guy - has got the idea into his head that we need 'a corporate image'. He stood at the front end of our shop (in a meeting with our manager) and told him that "I want to be able to stand at the top of every isle and see an unbroken wall of stock, neatly placed with no gaps, no spaces and uniform to the planogram on the wholesalers website. Well if he carries out his plan as it stands he may well get that wish coming true sooner than he realises because we won't have any customers left to disrupt his 'unbroken wall of stock'. You see inorder to get people to come into a shop to part with their hard earned, you have to do two things. You have to give people what they want and you have to give thwm what they can afford. It's no good replacing items that do not conform to the planogram if these are your good sellers with high profit margins - the more so if the items you are replacing them with are both less desirable to the customer and more expensive. Our man does not seem to have grasped that the wholesalers in creating their planogram of what items should be where on the shelves, are looking after their own interests. These are the items that make them the most money, not us. These are the things they want us to buy in  order to give them the maximum profit.

Our man says he wants 'an extra 50p in every basket going out of the shop. Easily done, but not much use if in so doing you halve the number of  baskets going out a day! To run a corner store is a balancing act, a juggling act where thousands of lines are tweaked and adjusted untill a point is reached where every meter of shelf space generates the maximum profit it can for the buisiness. Products that fill up space without moving are jetisoned, new ones are added that give better profit margins over a given time period and the whole thing is orchestrated with a gentle hand so as not to set the whole edifice tumbling. To do what this man suggests in all the stores is to completely misjudge the nature of corner shops, where more so than anywhere the needs of a particular 'type' of clientel must be catered for depending on the location. Standardisation will only result in loss of profit here because i) the requirements of different communities differ and lines cannot be adjusted to accomodate this and ii) the sepparation of wholesaler and retailer (as opposed to say Tesco where one company carries out both rolls) means that what bennefits one does not neccesarily bennefit the other. In constructing their 'standard model' the wholesaler is bound to place their own best interest above that of the retailer.

We are to keep baking bread and hot bakery products untill late in the evening - wastage levels are not our concern. OK - I'll do what I'm told but perhaps someone should remind our man that there is a reason why every fish and chip shop in the country closes at three o clock - because they don't sell any fish and chips after then! In a hot bakery situation you do not have every product available until the time the shop closes - you'll be throwing away most if not all of the profit for the days trading. A point comes in every day where instead of the customer buying what they want to buy instead they have to buy what you want them to buy. To get this right is not easy, but over time you get a 'feel' for what is needed on a given day and you do that amount. You tweak it as the day goes on, baking a little more here, a little less there and with a bit of luck you end the day with good sales and not too much waste. If you get it wrong and run out of stuff too early then bake a bit of quick stuff (not too much) then call it a day. If you are too late to bake ie you've missed the window, then console yourself with the feeling that every thing you have sold today is for profit. There is nothing worse than bagging up 25 items for reduction at the end of the day. You might as well not have bothered. The one thing you cannot do in this type of area is run to a standard daily model - the net result will be ruin. If you can't judge how the numbers should be altered to account for given circumstances on a given day then leave well alone because the people who do the job on a daily basis can!

There is not one of us who could not go into any shop and start pulling it to peices. "This isn't done, that is wrong" etc. There is no skill in this. The skill lies in finding out why something is wrong and then dealing with that. Example. Our man came into the shop one Saturday at 1pm and found only one pasty in the warmer. He brought this up a dozen times in 'a meeting' with the staff, but not once did he ask "Why?" Lets look at the possibilities.

i) The staff on duty were crap.
ii) The staff on duty were ok but do not organize their time correctly
iii) The staff were overwhelmed by the workload on this the busiest morning of the week and were thus unable to find time to fill the oven and restock the warmer (nb serving customers is the first priority in the shop and must take precedence over all other activities.)
iv) The bakery sale pattern for the morning had been slow leading to a decision not to cook until some sighn of purchasing activity was seen in the customers. When it came this was very high resulting in the rapid and near complete emptying of the warmer.and thus the staff were 'caught short'
v) The top shelf products were not selling leading to the decision to hold back on pasty cooking untill some of the exess had been cleared.
vi) The shop had run out of pasties.

In the case of iii, iv and v above the situation, rather than pointing to the failings of the staff, on the contrary point to their diligence in pursuing the activities as required by their breif and in giving thought to their work rather than just automatically perfoming duties with no thought for the shops best interest. Item vi is beyond their controll and item ii refers to a failing which any one of us could be guilty at times. So in only one of the six possible causes for their being no pasties in the warmer were the staff in any way at fault. To fail to adress the 'why' of any situation arising in the shop is to fail to adress that situation at all.

To come into the shop and criticise is of no importance to us who perform the work (there - that nasty word again) on a daily basis and can justifiably be ignored. To come in and ask "How does this shop perform, with the given amount of labour allowed, in carrying out the work that has to be done", this is a relavent question. Anyone can criticise anything - to see the true situation as the above question illuminates, this is where the skill comes in. To say for example that there is two people working at what needs to be done at all times is fallacious; one of those people is tied to a till at virtually all times. "Ah yes but that person can be doing other things while at the till between customers". Nonsense. To assume this is to assume there to be large blocks of time between customers where significant amounts of alternative work can be done and this is, more often than not, just not the case. The true picture is of very short increments of time between customers where little of value other than a bit of soft drink facing or cigarette filling can be achieved. In the face of this to expect large tasks of long duration (eg cleaning shelves etc) to be done is to expect the impossible and is rightly ignored by those on the 'front line' who actually do the work. Similarly, there is no point in telling me that I should be doing this or I should be doing that all the time. Look on the cctv. I'm working from the start of my shift untill the end and doing what I think is important in the order I think it needs to be done. If I'm getting it wrong, fine - tell me so; but have the good grace to tell me not just what I should be doing, but also what other thing it is that I should not be doing while I am doing what you say should be done, because I can't magic up time from the ether to perform all these tasks.

Well thats about it. I'm gyessing that you get the idea that I might not be 100% enthralled with the idea of paying a man 25k to tell us to do what any one of us could have spun up if we were interested in running the shop as though it was a 'painting by numbers' game (a game incidentally performed only by rank amatures who don't know the first thing about what they are doing). But time will tell. If this guy pulls it off I'll be the first to applaud it and eat my own words - but in the meantime can I give just one small warning of a pitfall to beware of. Just because you have an idea it doesn't necessarily follow that it's a good one!