On Saturday we popped into Bridlington. My grandma used to live there and when I was training to take over the Scarborough branch of Shoefayre, I took the train across every day to work in branch 196 which is right next to the harbour.
They were certainly one of the old school of retailer. None of the branches had a phone and we used to have to go to the local phone box to ring in our weekly sales every Friday tea time. Staff had to hand write a receipt which listed each purchase. Each receipt was then copied to a day sheet and a total for the day was calculated by adding up the columns. You soon became very adept at doing this and I can add up a column of figures much quicker in my head that using a calculator. As long as the money on the day sheet balanced with the amount in the till, and exceeded your sales target, all was well. Every three months, someone would come along and actually physically count the stock. You had to have a 'leakage' figure of less than 3% but I could usually get it down to a few quid every quarter of a million pounds! The system was supposed to be water tight but in practice there were many ways that you could adjust the figures and if they had a dishonest manager wanted to, they could have fleeced them. My regional manager related several stories of how some branches had 'fiddled' and he simply couldnt see how!
Anyway, this picture shows the Brid branch. It was really tiny but all those upper floors were crammed with stock! There was nothing worse than having to run up three flights of stairs to get another size on a busy Saturday afternoon.
Another world, but I learnt so much about retail. My Scarborough branch enjoyed often very good sales but sometimes we took very little (January in the snow) I am not at all surprised that they went under. Good value, quality shoes but no control over the stock levels!
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