Day: March 1, 2015

Customer Satisfaction

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I think I may have mentioned that our Oxfam shop has gone from being in the doldrums and not doing very well at all, to being classed as ‘outstanding.’

(I may have to mention this once or twice again – we are very pleased with ourselves.)

Previously we had an area manager who had, shall we say, very definite views on how things should be done and was very definite about the absolute need to do them that way.

Then we had her replacement who said more along the lines of ‘ don’t know if that idea will work, but give it a go and see.’

Now our sales are up by 17% etc etc.

Anyone with a management development background or just a smidgen of common sense will know that this is not rocket science and a dictatorial management style is only of any use in very limited circumstances.

Should any Army officers be reading, I am sure they could fill us in on when that style is not only advisable but necessary – but an Oxfam bookshop is rarely going to fall into any of his/her categories.

But I didn’t mean to go into a long essay about management styles, I wanted to mention some of the satisfaction you get when you work in the shop.

I was upstairs the other day and the intercom phone buzzed and a colleague said there was a man in the shop looking for any books on Nordic history.

Not something we get a lot of. However, I found a book written in Danish on Nordic gold hordes which I had put to one side because the pictures were lovely and I thought we might be able to sell it in a display on art books.

I went downstairs and found a young man looking like as horny-handed son of toil who looked at the book doubtfully – as well he might.

“ Mmm,” he said, “not quite what I was looking for.”

I asked him to tell me what he wanted in some more detail and then we would take his number and if I can across anything more useful, I would call him.

“Runes,” he said. He told me he was carving runes and wanted some images to copy and use as research.

So, I went back upstairs to look on the shelves where we put ‘esoteric’ – a term which covers anything from ghost stories and angels-spoke-to-me books to Australian ley lines. (Actually had he wanted any of those books, we had copies.)

The trouble was that a landslide of donated books needing gift aiding were in the way, so several hundreweight of books had to be shifted to get to the shelf and no, there was nothing on runes.

I went to head back downstairs when the colleague who had helped me shift the books said, “Wait!”

And of course, dear reader, there it was – a small book with detailed drawings and picture of runes.

The book cost the customer £2.49 but it gave us all a lot of satisfaction.

Celery and AA Milne

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I find it sometimes depressing how many donated-to-Oxfam books I throw away instead of taking them home to read.

But you can’t read all of them – and I could almost feel as if I have read all the Waverley novels by dint of the number I have touched and, I afraid, consigned to recycling.

Also, as I have said before, there are a lot of books that never should have been written – including the complete oeuvre of Jeremy Clarkson.

Anyway, I did, one day recently, pick out a small book by AA Milne. Although I knew he had written more than Pooh books, I had never read anything else by him nor really come across anything.

So, when I found it lying in amongst some dog-eared Jane Austen I bought it.

It is called ‘Not That It Matters’ and is a collection of essays about all sorts and not much.

(I would be tempted to say something about how these could have been great blogs if that wasn’t such a crass statement, so I won’t – but of course they could have.)

One is about eating celery and is called, ‘A Word for Autumn.’

This is how it starts:

‘ Last night the waiter out the celery on with the cheese, and I knew that summer was indeed dead. Other signs of autumn, there may be – the reddening leaf, the chill in the early-morning air, the misty evenings – but none of these come home to me so truly. There maybe cool mornings in July; in a year of drought the leaves may chance before their time; it is only with the first celery that summer is over………..

‘There is a crispness about celery that is of the essence of October. It is as fresh and clean as a rainy day after a spell of heat.’

I am so enamoured of AA Milne’s writing that I am tempted to type out the whole essay but I will desist. (After all supper calls.)

I like this essay – ad many of the others – because it says so much about the social mores of 1928 and the expected reader – of course you would be somewhere where your celery was given to you by a waiter.

Further on he writes about how outraged he is when a fellow diner – ‘Another diner came in and lunched too ‘ – who reached across and took the celery.

After some explanation of how he had been keeping the ‘sweetest and crispest shoots till the last, ‘ he turns to the fellow diner and celery-stealer – ‘He realized later what he had done and apologized, but what good is an apology in such circumstances?’ ( interesting that AA Milne or at least his publisher, used American spellings)

I also love it because it says so much about how to write well about nothing much – something I would love to be able to do.

And finally, I like this essay because it reminds me that celery was once seasonal.

Being a bit of a foodie in my spare time, and having lived sur le continent I like to think that I do seasonal stuff – asparagus in its time, lamb in spring but mutton in autumn etc.

But celery is always in my fridge, I love the stuff and had completely forgotten that in my childhood it came in autumn and was not around in summer.

So, I sit here in March looking out on a great sunset after a hail-storm and after I have heard the first larks on the Downs and am ashamed.

But I am going to make celery gratin tonight and eat it with relish.