Counter Attack

As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I love shopping.

There have been corporate jobs I have done with actors where a retail call has actually been built into the schedule. With any business trip abroad I allow time in my schedule for me to browse the airport shops. I feel a sense of unfulfillment if I am boarding the plane without an extra package added to my hand luggage.

 I was brought up in a shop. My grandparents ran the village shop where we lived. Actually there were two shops. A general store which served everything from tampax to teabags and opened at seven every morning in order to catch the miners coming back from their night shift and people leaving for the start of a day at work in the town nearby. At seven every evening the door to the general shop was closed and the door to the off-licence was opened. Here my grandfather would dispense draught ale from a set of pumps to people who would bring jugs and bottles across the village green. Evidently at the age of two and I was lifted up and stood on the sill tray, my full bodyweight would just pull a pint.

It was exciting living behind the counter of a shop and of course I wanted to work there at the earliest possible opportunity. Child labour is part of the culture in Yorkshire and it was a good alternative to being taken down the pit by my father at the age of five!

My grandparents and then my parents who took over the shop in 1968 instilled in me a set of  service values I still expect to see today. Smile when you greet the customer pleasantly. Ask them how you can help them. Say please when you tell them how much they have to pay, and thank you when they've actually paid it.  I don't think they are difficult concepts to grasp and  fullI don't think you need to go on a training course to do so, but sadly they are concepts that seem to be missing from service in many stores on Britain's high streets today.

Currently set for series  record on our new sky plus box is the programme “Mary Queen of shops" in which the style and business  guru and fashionably latent lesbian, Mary Portas is campaigning for an improvement in the level of service in shops. It's a campaign I wholeheartedly support. I am the customer. I have the money. If I wasn't shopping in their retail outlet the people serving me wouldn't have a job. It's as simple as that. It's not too much therefore to ask for a smile, to be treated well, and to hear a please and thank you, but actually to get those things feels like retail utopia.

Yesterday in Zara in Croydon was a case in point.   We were looking for a birthday present for Richard's niece who has her 12th birthday this week. I always used to think of Zara as quite a classy shop. When it first opened it was innovative and had some great items. My waistline has long since passed their maximum size, but I can still avail myself of their full range of accessories - a scarf in Paris last week for example - and it's always a place I look into when I'm buying presents for younger people. Recently every branch of Zara I've been into including the rather chic one on the boulevard Haussmann in Paris last weekend, looks like Primark on sale day.  Garments scattered on the floor, sales staff as  easy to find as the Frank family in Amsterdam, and a general lack of regard for any positive retail experience.

Having found the perfect article as a present we headed off to pay for it. There was one till open, and a queue of at least 11 people. The assistant working the till seemed to be in no hurry, and had absolutely  no concern as to the fact that people wanting to purchase something in the store that she worked in might have to wait for up to 10 or 15 min. It's on occasions like this that Mary encourages us to speak up.  Find a member of staff and ask for another till to be opened. Make sure the rest of the queue can hear you do it. They may do the very English thing of looking away and wishing you hadn't complained but in their hearts they too are wanting to be served quicker. There's a chance that someone might even join in and support you.

  I asked a young male shop assistant who happened to pass, scurrying along in order that no customers might actually notice he was there. “Sorry can you open another till please as  there's quite a long queue?"

At this point you might  thought that I'd asked him to provide the answer to world peace! He looked stunned. “Sorry, you want what?"

 A young female assistant passed by, obviously somebody had just upturned the stone they had all been hiding under.  The male turned to her and said “the customer wants me to open another till!" As though I'd asked him to just single-handedly take on the ascent of Kilimanjaro. To his surprise, and to mine also, she turned round and said “okay, I'm just going to do that"

The second till was opened and we all got served a great deal quicker.

So don't just stand there and accept it.   In times like these the shops need your money. They want your custom. So make them work for it. If you can't find something that you want in the store, ask an assistant and ask them to find it for you, don't just ask where is it. If there is a big queue at the till, and quite frankly people in  the larger retail shops shouldn't really have to wait more than 3 to 4 min to get served, ask them to open another till, or take your business elsewhere.

If you get good service in the shop comment on it and thank them. We went across to Marks & Spencer's after our visit to Zara where Rich wanted to look for a pair of trousers. He was greeted with a smile as he took the trousers to the fitting room, the assistant took the trousers from him leading him to the fitting room and made the trousers ready for him to try on. Good service. It's a rarity these days, but it is there so praise it when you find it, but don't accept the shit that passes as service in the vast majority of high Street stores.

If we all turn around and do something about it, then things might, just might, change.