A WEIRDO’S GUIDE TO… WORKING IN A PUB

“You wanna run the place? Right well shut up then.” – Basil Fawlty

 

A fresh faced 18 year old boy turns up at a canal side pub for his first day of work. He enters and asks his new manager what he wants him to do. The manager tells him to collect dirty plates from outside and make sure everyone had enjoyed their food. The boy carries out these orders and after a while approaches a kindly old man with an empty plate. “Was your food okay?” asks the boy as he picks up the plate. The old man looks him in the eye, says “I haven’t tasted fish like that since my wife died” and winks at the boy.

That boy was me. And that old man is now long dead (probably). I’ve worked in pubs on and off since I was 18. I’ve worked for two pubs owned by two different breweries in the same town. Here are some things that I learnt.

DRINK DRIVING IS VERY REAL (AS ARE AFFAIRS) OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE LEAVING MY MORALS AT THE DOOR

Prior to starting work in catering I thought drink driving laws were largely obeyed by the public. With it, you know, being a law and all that. Turns out once you work with alcohol it’s treated like a weird little half remembered footnote. One of those weird state laws in America like how in Alaska it’s illegal to wake a sleeping bear to take a photo. The first time I saw someone get behind the wheel absolutely terracotta I couldn’t believe it. I mentioned it to a fellow staff member and they just shrugged. You become so deadened to it that you’ll stop feeling guilty and just hope they hit a tree when they crash and not a pedestrian/cyclist/school bus. We had one regular who would always drink two bottles of Pinot Grigio and drive home. By the time I left (and had started driving) I had a grudging respect for his abilities.

It’s similar for affairs. As someone who feels guilty about things that have nothing to do with them I was astounded at people (men) who would unashamedly bring their wife to the pub on a Friday and their mistress on a Saturday. I’ve been told this is fairly common at pubs off the beaten track as people think they’ll never be seen. Less common perhaps is when people take their affair to a far more physical level like, I don’t know, engaging in after hours coitus in the car park when the entire staff force are sat there drinking and smoking their misery away. One time a woman came in and ordered a bottle of champagne with two glasses. She sat and waited for a considerable amount of time until she received a phone call. I don’t know what was said but I do know she ended the phone call by saying “stay with your fucking wife then” and throwing the bottle of champagne at a wall. Normally you’re not directly involved in any way and you just stand and watch as these people destroy their lives but not always. Once I was sombrely called into the office to see our manager. Fearful, naturally, I sat and asked what was happening. My manager informed my “if X’s wife calls you can’t say he’s here or that you’ve seen him.”

You’ll meet some awful, awful people. That’s true of anything involving the public. The majority of people are horrendous. The tip to succeed in customer service though, is to be polite and courteous to all customers; whether that be a gentlemen with swastikas on his knuckles or Dave Lee Travis.

PEOPLE ON CANAL BOATS ARE WEIRD.

In the UK and Venice there are things known as canals. Essentially roads made of water they were used to transport things around the country until horses were invented. They exist now as picturesque references to a time before problem solving. Both pubs I worked at were situated on a canal.

This may come as a shock to some but a reasonable amount of people live on canals. Not in a house or a flat but in a boat. Working in a pub just next to a canal these people will make up a fair amount of your customers. These boat dwellers can be split roughly into two camps; ‘boaties’ and ‘old people who have retired to live on a boat’.

Boaties are people who seem to live on a boat because they have been shunned by the societies of dry land. I have known many and liked several. They will come into a pub, try all the ales (no matter how often they come in) and order a pint of the strongest one. They range from Bukowski inspired wastrels to would-be vagrants.

‘Old people who have retired to live on a boat’ are largely self-explanatory. They are invariably old people who have decided to spend their retirement living on a barge (canal boat). They’re Enid Blyton style folks, the like of which will be all dead and gone forever in the next 30 years. They must have had some odd, jingoistic, middle-England idea of canals and living on a canalboat but you can see in their eyes they regret choosing to live out their days sloshing about atop the UK’s largest septic tank.

For sake of ease drug dealers will be grouped in the boatie category and miserable, ill-thought out, middle class holidays will be grouped in the ‘old people who have retired to live on a boat’ category.

One of the pubs was within touching distance of a ‘lock’ which was used to raise or lower water levels so barges could continue on their journeys. For some reason this used to light a fire under customers and they would flock to see a boat navigate the lock. Nothing used to delight me more than to see middle class parents dragging little Toby and Rubella-Florence to watch this mundane act only to see a grubby boatie sat there scowling, smoking a roll up and occasionally spitting into the water.

The other pub had a canal running right alongside the road into the car park. On one of my few days off a taxi drove straight into it and had to be lifted out by a crane. The interesting things always happened on my day off.

REGULARS ARE THE WORST.

“You alright Dan?”

“Not really. The cancer’s back.”

Above is a conversation I had with a regular. A regular is a person who would come to the pub almost as often as you, even though they don’t have to and they don’t get paid. Some you will learn the first name of (e.g. Blind Harry), some will only be known by the name of an ale you sold 3 years ago because they complained so much when you stopped selling it (e.g. the Seafarers).

Some of them wanted a conversation. Some of them I’m pretty sure I was the only person they’d ever talk to. That’s fine. We’re not friends though. When I quit one of my pubs jobs I remember a regular saying “oh well, stay in touch.” No, I’m not going to stay in touch. I’m not even staying in touch with the staff. All I know about you is what you drink.

Being friendly is obviously heinous but equally I had innumerable regulars who acted as if they had been forced at knife point to come and sit in my pub and read their paper. Anything would warrant a tut or a passive aggressive shake of the head. These ones almost always believed they some how owned or had investment in the pub because they spent all their miserable lives there. This meant giving their opinion on everything from the lighting, my haircut and the price of their drink. I remember distinctly one time when the price of a pint had increased by 5p overnight and one such arsehole’s eyes went scarlet.

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS WRONG.

They are sometimes alright though, customers. The problem is you can have 10 polite, friendly, unstupid* customers in a row and one knuckle-dragging, hyper-aggressive cretin will make sure you forget that the concept of politeness even exists.

“Pint of Stella”

“We don’t do Stella”

“Well you did Stella last week”

No we didn’t. Do you know how I know? Because I’ve been working 12 days in a row and changing brands of lager is the equivalent of an orgasm when you’re this bored. I think I’d remember. I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten though, I remember seeing you drink your 7th Peroni with that woman who isn’t your wife.

I used to get stuff like that fairly regularly, people never entertain the notion that perhaps they’re mistaken. From the common or garden ‘when did you move the toilets?‘ to the lesser spotted ‘has that canal always been there?‘ there’s always some loudmouth offering their incorrect facts on the place you know better than the back of your hand. It’s fair to assume that most of the teenagers working don’t know much of what is going on but I’ve been doing this for a long time now and I don’t need you to slur out what you think aioli is.

YOU WILL FIND ANY AND ALL WAYS TO COMBAT BOREDOM

If you have no customers, it’s a blessing. But unlike almost any other industry, when there are no customers there is absolutely nothing to do. As in actually nothing. As in standing behind a bar staring straight ahead. In the winter especially you’ll find you have a lot of time to kill so you have to be creative. Very occasionally a supervisor won’t have locked themselves ‘in the office’ with ‘stuff to do’ so you’ll have to be subtle. Usually in this case I’d find ambiguous quotes from Adolf Hitler to write on the various chalkboards.

More often though you’ll be left entirely to your own devices. In this case I found playing golf with a broom, a dustpan and a tennis ball can pass a chunk of time. Another good one is the Ice Bucket Challenge, where you throw a chunk of ice into a bucket from a considerable distance. Sounds boring but smashing ice off a wall makes a significant amount of noise, especially if there’s only one customer in. Float Scratching, Float burned brightly but briefly, the premise being you put a pork scratching in someone’s coffee. If it floats then they see it and the game is ruined. If it doesn’t they get a salty kick at the end of their mocha.** Tabasco in drinks works in a similar way. Someone once put gin in my Redbull and that also worked.

Unfortunately boredom is not restricted to when there are no customers. When it’s exceptionally busy (and two members of staff have tragically fallen ill overnight even though you’ll see their Snapchat story later and they recovered enough to go to a nightclub and they don’t the shame to even try and hide it) customer interactions are reduced to the barest minimum. In this case you’ll be repeating the same handful of stock phrases so often you need something to alleviate the monotony. A classic my colleagues and I enjoyed was saying ‘wank you very much‘ instead of ‘thank you‘ which it turns out is only funny when someone calls you out on it.*** Pen Arm again works best with a busy pub. In layman’s terms you walk up to someone and draw on their arm with permanent marker. Double points if they’re talking to a customer. Tally charts used to feature on busy days as well. It’s a rare pleasure to listen to a customer say something stupid then add it to the day’s Stupid Questions tally.

Another favourite was locking people in the walk-in fridge. This was a speciality of several chefs I worked with and I managed to play a few times when I wasn’t the victim. This ended abruptly, however, when I locked the Area Manager in once and had to go and let him out. There were mixed results with chefs joining in on time wasting. We spent one happy evening playing Fry This, when we saw what would happen to various things in the deep fat fryer. Whereas another day we put a raw egg in a chef’s tea (raw egg will helpfully rest at the bottom of a hot drink) and he was the most angry I’ve ever seen anyone in my life.****

YOU WILL MEET SOME FANTASTIC PEOPLE (AND SOME ABSOLUTE GONKS)

Another half-heard, forgotten analogy: you shouldn’t pick your subjects based on your teacher. I.e. you should enjoy something for what it is not the people involved. I.e i.e. don’t stay in a job you hate because you get to hang around with people you like. Hospitality seems to attract interesting people by and large. People like me who would find sitting in a stagnant office all day cripplingly boring or people who are trying to make other things happen and need some money to fund it. I’ve met some of the funniest people I’ve ever come across in pubs, one of which I write and podcast with to this day (even if he is an idiot). These people  made some of the most horrific experiences of my life somehow palatable and many of them I now see in pubs even though I’m not financially obligated to do so (and mostly enjoy it).

Obviously I can’t end like that. I worked with one gentleman who followed me out for a fag break and read his poetry to me. He was fired shortly afterwards for unrelated reasons and I saw him at a supermarket. I stopped to talk to him and mid conversation he pulled a bottle of vodka out of his bag and started drinking from it. It still had the security tag attached. I remember ringing another much loved colleague once in a desperate attempt to get him to come in and help out as we were short staffed.

“Hi mate, any chance you can come in we’re seriously short staffed.”

“Oh sorry I can’t, I’m in Milton Keynes”

“You know you’ve just answered your house phone, right?”

“Oh.”

He didn’t come in. There was an 18 year old who I remember questioning a dear friend of mine who had been working in a kitchen for 5 years. They were arguing about which table a meal needed to be sent to and the teenager said “I think I know, I go to university and you’re just a chef“. Righteous fireworks ensued. By and large though they were okay or funny or boring or incompetent. A lot of them seemed to only work at a pub because it saved them walking to one after work.

PUBS ARE DYING AS WE SPEAK

That knob who ‘went to university’ sums up the attitude I experienced from working in a pub. “Get a proper job“, “why are you doing this if you don’t enjoy it“, “do something better with your life“, “why are you so rude?” that sort of thing was common to hear directed at me and/or the people I worked with. Fair points perhaps but equally the people saying this are in a pub as they say this. If you think it’s beneath us all to work in a pub that’s absolutely fine. We’ll all leave now but you’ll be the one who can’t have your ‘work do’ where you think you’re being a right laugh but the whole table calls you a dickhead when you’re in the toilet.

The UK is one of the few countries in the world where working in hospitality is looked down on and only ever considered a stopgap and not a career. Incidentally that is why you get so many foreign people working in hospitality. And I have no idea who Brexiteers think will soon pour their chestnut ale as they watch a game of cricket on a sun-kissed lawn or whatever chocolate box, Rudyard Kipling Britain they think they live in once they ban immigants.

Increasingly people are choosing not to do it. Including me. The money is appalling and the hours are even worse. You’re treated terribly by people. For the last 18 months I was working we were trying to find a chef. No one wants to do it though and I can’t blame them. As bad as working front of house is I’ve always thought working in a kitchen is tantamount to torture. Bad money, ridiculous hours, stress and working in a sweatbox. On top of this food allergy legislation is now so strict (rightly or wrongly) that breweries are choosing to outsource their menus and take any freedom away from kitchens and in some cases any real cooking. If you’re wondering, that is why managed houses (regardless of ownership) have almost exactly the same menu.

Overall I’ll look fondly on my pub jobs (with time). I’d recommend it to anyone who is bored and in their late teens or a social recluse who needs to learn to speak to people. Hopefully you can get an indulgently long blog post out of it.*****

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars 
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

 

*Irony; (noun) the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

**Becomes mean spirited with vegetarians and/or vegans

***A short spin-off of this involved swapping the word hunt for c**t. This lasted one round

****I think this was partly because we ran the egg through the till and made him go and get it and said someone on a canal boat wanted it.

*****Having said that my dream is still to buy both pubs, flatten them and turn them both into car parks

 

Winter in Retail: A Christmas Story

It’s a weird thing to walk into a job knowing you won’t be there long. It’s a weirder thing to walk into a job you’ve never done before at the busiest time of year. It’s a weirder thing still to watch two grown adults have an argument about a Paw Patrol toy.

After six months of waiting patiently in bed for someone to offer me a job, the money had run dry. As Christmas approached I sent out a flurry of applications to any and all of my local retailers. One got back to me within  12 hours. I had an intense briefing on why you should never mention the company that you work for on social media but lets just say it has quite a famous catalogue and you don’t shop for it. This unnamed store is unique in that it doesn’t have any of its products in the shop; you have to choose them from a catalogue and then they’re brought forth from a stockroom. For my interview I slipped effortlessly into a Hannibal Lector charm offensive and after a short trial run on the shopfloor (when I wrongful told an elderly man we didn’t sell computer software) I was offered the job. I stopped congratulating myself when I saw my fellow temps and I realised quite how desperate they were.

As it turns out being a Christmas temp is less about being an actual employee and more about relieving pressure on the actual staff so they can work a whole year without having a breakdown. As the only one over the age of sixteen this was especially true of me – initially I thought the glut of hours was down to how well I was doing but it turns out everyone else was at school during the week. The full time staff weren’t unfriendly but clearly didn’t want to waste time getting to know anyone who wouldn’t be around for very long. In other jobs I’ve got used to the current trend of having more managers, trainee managers and team leaders than normal members of staff and this was no different. One such miscellaneous leader made me sign up for a store card on my lunch break to help hit targets while another consistently called me Steve (early on I turned round to his shouts of ‘Steve’ to correct him but he instantly started talking before I could).

After a short introductory shift and a burst of e-learning (that I was encouraged to click through as quickly as possible) I started work on the 8th November. I was a ‘stockroom assistant’; ‘picking’ upstairs with a cheap headset in the fluorescent oppression of the stockroom. The job itself boiled down to an eerie female voice giving me a row number and a shelf letter (I now know the phonetic alphabet from start to end). Once the correct shelf was identified with me giving a check letter, a product number was listed. Then all that was left was taking said product and chucking it on a conveyer belt that took it down to the shop. I started timidly, placing stuff gently before firing the conveyer belt up. However when on my second day I sent a bin whistling past a supervisor’s head and it was laughed off – after that I stopped worrying quite so much. Through this process you could easily tell the seniority of the staff member; the longer they’d been there the more distain items were treated with on their trip downstairs.

The headset I’ve mentioned briefly but it was a huge, alien experience for me. Recently I’ve diagnosed myself with dyspraxia and whether this is true or not, I found it incredibly hard to concentrate on anything else when the headset was squawking in my ear. Full time staff members could have a normal conversation while getting a ‘pick’, but for me the fears and anxieties present in human interaction were exacerbated when I knew I had to extricate myself quickly or else a customer would be delayed. As if this wasn’t stressful enough, customers were given an estimated order time when they bought their crap and someone thought it would be a good idea for the headset to let us know when this time had elapsed. In busy periods every instruction would be broken up by ‘booooop X amount of customers have been delayed’. My record was 15. I didn’t actually mind getting stuff and putting it on a belt, it felt a bit like a live-action video game. Not a good one though. Not Fallout 4 or Age of Empires; Pacman or a rudimentary The Secret of Monkey Island. Although when it frequently wasn’t busy, the headset became torture, needing you to confirm you were still there as you wandered aimlessly around a cavernous stockroom. I spent many a long evening arguing with the headset as Frankly Mr Shankly played on repeat in my head. After a couple of hours of this psychological torture you feel like the Phantom of the Opera, when the acceptable faces of the store come upstairs to use the toilet and glance piteously at you, rocking in the corner. The headset also used a very basic voice recognition system that provided more fun. Mine regularly mistook ‘kilo’ for ‘bulk’, denied all existence of the number 9 and thought my shallow breathing was me saying ‘zulu’. Whoever makes such decisions also, in their wisdom, decided to bring in a new headset system a week before Christmas. This at least took away everyone’s individual issues with voice recognition and instead gave the whole team the blanket problem of never recognising ‘okay’ – the one termed used in every command. The first Saturday after it was introduced the store reverberated with ever louder and more panicked cries of ‘OKAY’.

Occasionally this rigmarole was broken up by either deliveries or working downstairs. Some deliveries came as early as 6am, when you were required to pull huge cages full of crap off a truck, while a driver stood smoking a roll-up, laughing at your weedy struggles (a Yorkshire deliveryman called me ‘softlad’ and I think that’s probably fair). In all honesty I don’t look like a warehouse operative. I look like an IT technician. When working downstairs (the same job just handing things to customers rather than a conveyer) people would regularly ask ‘do you want a hand with that?’ as i panted towards them, sweat dripping into my eyes. Mostly it was okay. It was just a job, it was manageable. Apart from the customers. I struggle with people. A few months of unemployment didn’t really help this much.

I could have written this entire thing about arguments I had with customers over the new carrier bag charge. You get a terrifying look into a person’s psyche when they ask for a bag for their brand new iPad but storm off in disgust when you tell them it costs five pence (this would happen two or three times an hour). I challenge the most patient people in the world to react with decorum when a customer says: ‘oh I didn’t expect it to be that big’ as you hand over their full size pool table. Although one of my personal highlights did involve me taking a 60-inch TV to a bloke’s car. Immediately it was obvious it was not going to fit in his Ford KA but I stood and watched a beautiful little fable on the issue of greed played out in front of me. I left him in the drizzle with his Panasonic and his frustration, chuckling. I’ve been asked before how someone with mild sociopathic tendencies can stand to work with the public. The truth is I challenge anyone not to develop a strong hatred for the person choosing a toilet seat cover who is the only thing standing between you and your first cigarette for 6 hours.

The stuff we sold caused me no end of frustration as well. There was some homeware and a bit of tech but the vast, vast majority were kids toys. I haven’t paid attention to kids’ toys since I was one. Although I don’t think there was a Chad Valley Child’s Smart Phone fifteen years ago. Much less Thomas the Tank Engine’s First Tablet. With my vaguely anti-consumerist agenda it took a lot of effort at times to restrain myself – as people huffed and puffed over this shit – not to grab them and slap them and recite some Fight Club diatribe in their stupid faces. Managers were the same, I stood and watched in disbelief when a man in his forties was close to tears over the disappearance of a Minions Fart Gun. Part of the justification for the low wage was that the staff didn’t need to know anything about the things they were selling as it was all explained in the catalogue. So when someone (between gum chomps) asks me if whatever she is holding uses batteries I have to say sardonically that I don’t know. Can you find someone that does? Another time; will this ink cartridge work with my printer? I don’t know. It’s a Canon MXP100XJZ. I don’t know what that is.

And that was how I spent the winter months. Either circling endlessly in a cavernous fluorescent room waiting for Godot or suffering the slings and arrows of the heaving, sweating masses. An intense couple of weeks. All while waiting to be dropped unceremoniously when I’d fulfilled my purpose. Such is the life of the Christmas temp.

The days came and went. Black Friday was a flop of epic proportions, with nearly thirty members of staff catering to a hundred or so customers. The week up to Christmas was busy and Christmas Eve was passed laughing at the tat people were scrabbling together at the last minute. The Boxing Day sale was as depressing as anyone could have expected. And then suddenly it was over. Like my Mum says to make herself feel better whenever she’s had a shit time – ‘it was an experience.’ On the 31st December after just under two months I walked towards the exit for the last time, smuggling as much sellotape as possible. “Isn’t this is your last day Steve?” And like that I was gone.

Working Black Friday: Why the UK is already over it

Remember the halcyon days of yore when next to no one knew what Black Friday was? And the few that did thought it was a phenomenon localised to the US – like Walmart or health insurance or gun crime or diabetes.

‘Black Friday’ is the first shopping day of Christmas and its origins are attributed far and wide – from the day retailers start to turn a profit to the best day to buy slaves. Regardless, Black Friday has come to be a staple of American consumerism* and a cultural phenomenon. Said phenomenon first truly hit the UK in 2014 after some marketing prick at Asda had tentatively introduced it in 2013. After a slow start it was last year when American style chaos crossed the Atlantic in style leading Asda** -amongst others – opting out of the celebrations in 2015.

This Christmas I took a job as a Christmas temp in a leading UK retailer in my small market home town. Even in my brief job interview Black Friday was mentioned with something approaching awe; a looming presence on the horizon. The manager puffed out their cheeks in solemn respect for the enormity that lay ahead – questioning if I had the bottle to even attempt to take it on. After quickly proving I could stand upright unaided, I signed my contract with less than a month until ‘B-Day’. Time passed and on 27th November I left the store at 6pm, to return at 6am the next day – Black Friday was upon us.

As I crawled from bed at 5.00am I slipped into my cheap polyester shirt and met with my two reliable early morning companions; Cutter’s Choice and Nescafé. I dragged myself to the store and was let in. Six members of staff were already in the store when I arrived (some since 4am) and, after being admonished for only arriving two minutes before my shift started, I stood around for an hour waiting for a last minute delivery of bargain goods. More and more staff arrived during this hour, including five drafted in from the mysterious ‘head office’ to help us out***.

The delivery came, went and was put away – still with very little sign of customer activity. Time passed. More staff arrived. Customers did start to filter in and out after about 9am but the presence of what was now approaching 20 staff negated any rush****. I spent most of the morning sweeping the stockroom to relieve boredom until 11.15am when I was sent on an unprecedented break of 2 hours and 45 minutes with the proviso from my manager: “I’m expecting the rush to come later.”

I returned at 1.55pm. The cabal of managers and supervisors continued to wait for Godot and the rush they were sure was round the corner. In all truth it did get busy – it just wasn’t the crash-bang we’d been promised. It certainly wasn’t the glamour we’ve come to associate with the media’s portrayal of Black Friday; the masses, the drama. I’ve been constantly assured it was busy a year ago but I can’t help thinking my town had their fill of Black Friday then and there. The rest of the world was in chaos but we were cursed, as it always seems in this little town, to watch ruefully from the sidelines as the rest of the world exploded into chaos.

As the day dragged by, customers came and went – getting their hands on a discount tablet here, £5 off a chest freezer there. The shift ended much as it had started with me sloping off into the darkness. Leaving an empty store (that would remain open for two hours) I trudged home – in spite of an easy, if long shift – feeling the day, so long looming in the near future, had been nothing but a huge anti-climax.

Had Black Friday just been overhyped? Was the worldwide shift to online sales the death of Black Friday? This wasn’t really a localised phenomenon as retailers pushed online discounts and sales spread across several days after the carnage of last year. Black Friday was an anti-climax across the UK. My experience, however, said less about UK shopping patterns and more about the depressing nature of small town life. Let’s face it, regardless of the preventative measures, it was busy in the bigger cities.

This is why Black Friday cannot work in the UK. It’s the small market towns, it’s the isolation. In London, Birmingham, Cardiff there’s hype and people to fill it. That’s what the emails and the crisis meetings and the decorations are for. But there isn’t the demand in Dunstable or Aylesbury, no one wants to queue at 5am or fight over a toaster. Small chain retail stores get the same pamphlets and posters as the superstores in main cities, the same memos, the same motivational leaflets. They react as if they are in the eye of the storm, batten down the hatches and brace themselves for a crisis that never comes. My various managers and supervisors seemed desperate to have hordes knocking the door down or people scrapping over the last injection-moulded piece of tat; yet not enough people came.

This is small town life as it’s purist. It looks similar to real life but it’s empty. You’re dressed the same as the X-Factor contestants but you’re dancing in a Wetherspoons, hoping you can telemarket tomorrow with a vicious hangover. For every one branch of Currys in a big city there are tens in small, dead-end towns where the staff waited eagerly for their chance to join in with the big boys. Of course Oxford Street was rammed and some shops employed a hundred members of staff but mostly it was retailers in small market towns bracing themselves for a rush they were doomed to be left waiting for. Their biggest day of the year got rained off.

Britain had enough of Black Friday last year and the novelty has already worn off. Everyone in small town retail was yearning to join the big leagues and share something with the big apartment stores. Anything to relieve the monotony. The employees had looked forward to Black Friday catapulting their lives out of the dulldrums for just one day. Yet the small towns up and down Britain just gave a small shrug and wandered past the store fronts without a second glance. Perhaps this is where we differ from the Americans; every year yanks punch and kick over TVs and stereos but we’ve given up – it’s too exciting all this fanaticism, we tried it once so we won’t bother again.

 

 

*www.blackfridaydeathcount.com – 7 fatalities at the time of writing

**Cowards. This was all their fault and they couldn’t see it through

***We had one customer during this time and he was there to pick up something he’d ordered online.

****A fellow Christmas temp told me he was on ‘carrier bag duty’ for nearly 4 hours. That involved bagging stuff for people who had bought a carrier bag.