Archive: Work

Remember remember… Woolies would be 100 today

5 November 2009 21:20

Categories: Current affairs, Nostalgia, Personal, Work

As regular readers may know, I worked for Woolworths until it closed down in January this year. You can read the series of articles I wrote in the aftermath of its closure.

In one of my articles, I wrote about the poster that appeared in the staff area this time last year. It announced:

Remember Remember the 5th of November!

In just less than a year, on the 5th November 2009, we celebrate our 100th birthday!

Watch out for more details coming soon…

Unfortunately we didn’t get many more details about the centenary celebrations. All we heard after that was stuff about trying to sell the company for a pound.

I regret not taking the poster to keep as soon as it was clear that Woolies would not emerge from the mire it found itself in through late November and December. Someone is selling one of these posters on eBay at the moment. The poster is a great piece of history — the 100th birthday that never was.

Or was it? Today, the new owners of the Woolworths brand have been celebrating the centenary nonetheless by putting on 100 promotions and giving away free Pic ‘n’ Mix with every order. That is what I like about the new Woolworths, owned by Shop Direct. Despite being a separate company, they are respectful of the name’s heritage. In fairness, they would be mad not to — the Woolies name must still have appeal, especially among those in a nostalgic mood.

Not everyone is so happy about it. The Woolworths Facebook page is often full of offended comments from people who feel that it is presumptuous and opportunistic of Shop Direct to cash in on the 99 years of Woolworths that preceded their involvement. There were, after all, around 30,000 workers made redundant at the original Woolworths last Christmas. Most probably aren’t in the mood to celebrate.

It is a matter of debate whether Woolworths is 100 really. Today is nothing other than the 100th anniversary of the first F. W. Woolworth store to open in the UK. The company had already been operating in the USA and Canada for decades before that. The UK company became separate in the 1980s when it was bought by Kingfisher. After that, Woolworths in the UK became a separate company when Kingfisher cast it off in 2001.

In the USA, the Woolworths name ceased to exist in 1997. But the original company still exists as Foot Locker, having decided to concentrate on sports goods. If the operation in the USA still counts, Woolworths is 131 years old.

You can still shop in bona fide Woolworths stores in Germany. These, like the British stores, were originally part of the American company and became separate in 1998. It declared insolvency this year, but struggles on.

(Supermarket chains named Woolworths in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have nothing to do with the original FW Woolworth apart from the name.)

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The value of GDP

10 September 2009 13:32

Categories: Books, Current affairs, Economics, Politics, Work

There was an interesting blog post over at the Telegraph by Geoffrey Lean over the weekend. He asked if GDP is “past its sell by date”, noting that “the EU is due to publish a paper which will conclude that GDP is too limited a measurement.”

I agree with the view that GDP doesn’t tell you the whole picture. I have written before about the obsession that the media and others have with what this or that will “cost the economy”. These stories normally come along with some kind of figure of the effect some trend or other will have on GDP.

GDP is quite a useful measurement in a lot of ways. As a barometer of how things are ticking along, it isn’t bad. When GDP rises steadily things are ticking along quite nicely. When it decreases people generally feel it. In truth, no-one needed to wait for the GDP figures to come round to work out that things were bad. But GDP does give us a vaguely useful way to quantify how things are going.

However, it omits a lot of useful information that might help us to measure our quality of life. Perhaps most strikingly of all, it takes very little account of leisure — surely the best part of life.

You can be fairly certain that the economy is producing more between 8am and 8pm than it is between 8pm and 8am. The economy goes into recession every night! But in which part of the day is your quality of life higher? The part where you’re slaving away in a stuffy office, or the part where you’re relaxing with a cold beer?

Enjoying yourself and relaxing, whether it’s having your nightly kip or spending an afternoon in the park, often means removing yourself from economic activity. This in turn leads to a reduction in GDP. That is “the cost to the economy”. This is despite the fact that sleeping and having a stroll in the park are both very valuable activities.

I am currently reading The Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg (I’m only 15 years late to the party). This book points out that GDP is also unable to account for the value of housework. If you pay someone to do your dishes, the value is counted in GDP figures. If you do them yourself, GDP is unaffected. But in both cases you have a rack of clean dishes of equal value.

Geoffrey Lean also points out that GDP fails to take the environment into consideration. An economist would say you need to internalise the externalities. But the question is how? (Pigovian taxes are a nice idea.) Some extreme environmentalists go further and advocate zero growth, an idea rightly lambasted by Adopted Domain.

I guess it all depends on what you want an indicator to tell you. GDP has become the one everyone talks about as a proxy for our standard of living, but clearly has deficiencies in that it leaves out important elements that contribute to our standard of living.

Unemployment figures are a possible alternative. On one level, it can be said that unemployment is the main thing that worries people. Despite the often-made point that unemployment is a lagging indicator, for many it is the bottom line.

But this has many of the same problems as using GDP. We look forward to our weekends, our holidays, and ultimately our retirement. Not working is actually a good thing. Few people want to work. They only want the money they earn from working. That brings us right back to GDP.

In recent years there has been a bit of hype about happiness economics (which I have previously written about). This field likes to measure Gross National Happiness. But this too is fraught with difficulties, not least the fact that it relies on shaky survey data based on people’s varying interpretations of what “happiness” is.

Perhaps you could stop paying attention to aggregate statistics in general. On one level, what really concerns me is my own personal well-being. How much I earn, how much disposable income I have, whether I have a job and how happy I am all concern me greatly. I am less concerned about other people’s well-being.

But that’s not quite right either. Even though I, like most people, am primarily worried about myself, I do care about the general well-being of other people.

It looks like we have to make do with GDP as the main measure to be concerned with. However, it does seem that it is creaking a bit with old age. No doubt there will be plenty of criticisms of GDP to come in the future, particularly from environmentalists.

Beware of the alternatives people advocate though. They will probably all be biased one way or another. Any proposed new measurements will probably be put forward by some interest group trying to manipulate the terms of the debate in its favour. Were that scenario to arise, I would rate myself 3 out of 10 happy.

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Growing up with the internet

7 August 2009 20:45

Categories: *, Current affairs, General, Internet, Media, Personal, Technology, Work

It is notoriously hard to get to grips with the youth. Advertisers hate it. The age group of 15–24 — of which, incidentally, I am still part — is notoriously fickle. They define themselves almost in terms of what they are not rather than what they are.

That is the explanation being given to the counter-intuitive finding by Ofcom that the proportion of 15–24-year-olds using Facebook has decreased in the past year. Facebook as a whole is still growing. But the problem is that it’s now full of parents and teachers, and it would be deeply uncool to be using a website like that.

In the same week, a Nielsen study has shown that teenagers don’t use Twitter. It has been long suspected that they never did use Twitter in large numbers, but now there are figures to prove it.

That came just weeks after a 15-year-old doing work experience made a splash with Morgan Stanley who were trying to get a grip on what the future might look like. Matthew Robson said, among other things, that Twitter is for old people only.

It probably comes a surprise to some. Even Mashable implies it wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t seen the figures. I am sure there are lots of people out there who imagine sites like Facebook and Twitter being full of youths donning virtual hoodies and organising virtual knifings. But young people are not so easy to pin down. The Ofcom report declines to tell us what young people actually are spending their time online doing, although we know for sure that they are online in their droves.

Mine is the first generation to have grown up with the internet. And like every shift in in youth culture, from rock and roll to video games, it gets people thinking about the possible downsides of growing up in a new environment. So they say that the internet gives you a short attention span. Or it dehumanises community life and leads to suicide.

I was recently emailed by a reader and occasional commenter here, Fran Walker. She was curious to know, what with me being a youth and all, if I have a life outside the computer?

As the worry of tinies not being able to interact with other humans, and the problems this may later lead to, is current news, it makes me wonder how you get on, as I regard you as one of the first of the “totally familiar with computers generation”? My son, who is 39 and lives in Taiwan, uses them for specific tasks, dislikes emails, prefers phone calls, and was in the first lot at school when computers were introduced, but he had a computer free childhood before that (say before 12 or 13), whereas, I suspect you had access to your parents’ computer since you can remember?

Like, I suspect, most people my age, I do indeed have a life outside of the computer, although it’s true I spend a lot of time on it. Partly this is because most of my work requires me to use the computer. Then, much of my spare time is consumed by the search for work, which is easiest to do on the internet.

There is also the plain fact that I love being connected to the internet for a whole host of reasons. Most of all, it brings me into contact with so many people I otherwise would not have. And it enables me to contact existing friends easily and comfortably. As Shane Richmond pointed out in his response to Vincent Nichols, the internet “enriches communication, it doesn’t destroy it.”

It is definitely the case that people in my generation are more familiar with computers. When I was young my parents had a BBC Micro, although it was quite old-fashioned even then. As far as I was concerned it was only really good for playing quite rudimentary games, when I could have been playing more sophisticated console games.

We only really got a contemporary computer in the late 1990s, and access to the internet came after that. By that time I was into my teens, so I can definitely remember a pre-internet era. I think for my generation, there were still a lot of people who didn’t have experience with the internet until they were fairly old.

I certainly remember when we started using the internet at school during my standard grades, aged about 15 or 16, there was at least one person in my class who had never used the internet before. Mind you, it’s true that I remember it so vividly because it was so unusual.

People often pose the hypothetical question, “could you survive for a day without the internet?” I recently went away for a short break, and I probably spent longer away from the internet than I have done for years.

Mind you, I expected to still be connected. But thanks to O2′s shaky 3G service it wasn’t to be. That was quite annoying because I wanted to contact people through Twitter. But it wasn’t the end of the world. I had a lot to do anyway, and was focusing on doing the things I wanted to do on my break.

As for voluntarily foregoing access, I think it would be difficult but not impossible. Certainly, one of the first things I do when I get up in the morning is check the internet, and it’s one of the last things I do at night. Would there be any point in not checking? I don’t think so.

A thought experiment like this is not terribly useful. You could try to “survive” a day without the internet, but what would it prove? Could you go for a week without reading your post? Or a month without reading newspapers? I certainly couldn’t survive a day without listening to the radio — I would go round the bend very quickly if I was deprived of it. Is that healthy or unhealthy?

For my generation, having a life outside the computer is no problem. Certainly, I spend a while on the computer. But many people might spend that time watching bad television or getting steaming drunk down the pub, which is much less healthy than spending your time reading Wikipedia.

But — and this is where I start to show that I am at the older end of the “youth” bracket — there is a but. My generation is not the first to grow up having not known a pre-internet world. In fact, I haven’t even had access to the internet for half of my life. So the real people to ask about the worry of an internet-obsessed world would be those who are currently 10 or under, and have never known a pre-internet home or school.

However, I would predict that, like Elvis’s dangerously swinging pelvis, we will come to view as quaint the fact that there was ever any concern.

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The failing economy of Kirkcaldy

5 August 2009 20:54

Categories: *, Current affairs, Economics, Famous Langtonians, Fife, General, Media, Newspapers, Personal, Politics, Scotland, Work

It was revealed yesterday that Gordon Brown will spend part of his summer doing voluntary work in Kirkcaldy, the town where he grew up which forms the major part of his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It is also my home town.

Some uncharitable people have suggested that his job may involve digging holes, something he has done quite enough of as Prime Minister. More cutting might be the observation that voluntary work is the only sort of work you’ll be able to find in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a piece about the economic woes which have hit Kirkcaldy which was a talking point among some of my friends. Aside from apparently inventing the demonym “Kirkcaldians” (I personally prefer “Langtonian”, named after the town’s old nickname, the Lang Toun), I think the article is largely a fair and accurate reflection of the town.

I have written before about the sorry state of the Mercat, the town’s main shopping centre which used to house my former workplace, Woolworths. Over the difficult Christmas period the Mercat went from bad to worse. But it gets just a passing mention in the Times piece, with its mere eight or more empty units.

Apparently there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty. What remains has been criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of a clone town (PDF link). Beyond that, particularly in the west end, what isn’t a chain store is most likely a pawn shop or a charity shop.

Perhaps this is not particularly unusual. The death of the High Street has been widely advertised, so this is not a problem unique to Kirkcaldy. The Times article briefly touches on the retail park. It sits on the north-western edge of the town, well away from the centre. But it is currently being expanded, a development which feels like a desperately-needed shot in the arm for Kirkcaldy.

The problem is that it just is not enough. Indeed, the clamour over the few new jobs that are available serve to bring into focus just how dire the situation is. I have lost count of the number of people that I know of applying for the same few jobs.

A new B&Q has opened, although the old one closed. A number of my former colleagues at Woolworths have ended up working there. PC World is another new store at the retail park. But so many people I know applied for jobs there. A friend who got an interview there was told that they had been bombarded with over 700 applications.

If you got rejected by PC World, you could always try applying for a job at the new Toys R Us. The only problem is that they apparently had 3,000 applications. Only a lucky 350 got an interview, with just 40 places going.

An Argos Extra has also opened up. They held an assessment day at the Jobcentre a couple of months ago. I saw it with my own eyes as I walked past it. There were two queues coming out of the Jobcentre, one in each direction. I have been told that the larger of the two queues stretched all the way to the police station, which sits at the opposite end of a street which is the best part of 200 yards long.

The store has been open for just over a week now. The good news on that front is that my friend, who transferred to work there from the existing High Street store, reports that sales have been very encouraging. Whether that is simply down to the excitement of something new opening in Kirkcaldy remains to be seen.

As for the Jobcentre itself, that continues to hire new people, including one of my friends. What they’ll do with the new staff when demand for the Jobecentre’s services is not so strong is unclear. But at the moment that feels like a distant possibility anyway. Whenever I went there I was often told they were short staffed.

In the Times article, there is a quote about the Jobcentre by a man called Tam Collins: “they expect you to stack shelves at Asda.” I got exactly that when I visited the Jobcentre. Going there is a fruitless task which I have now given up.

The Asda is a new store which has opened up in neighbouring Glenrothes. It is probably the most exciting thing in terms of employment to happen in Glenrothes for years. That is another place where a few of my former Woolworths colleagues have ended up. In a way they were lucky — Asda received over 7,000 applications for that one store.

Meanwhile, the town’s largest employer, a call centre called MGt, has recently shed 65 jobs as a result of the closure of Setanta. 65 looks like a small number compared to the amount that are already looking for work. But MGt has provided a lifeline to Kirkcaldy in terms of employment since it set up around a decade ago. Today it has around 1,000 people on its books. I dread to think what Kirkcaldy would be like if it wasn’t for MGt. That even MGt is downsizing is ominous.

But that sums up Kirkcaldy. It lost its way after the industrial decline of the previous fifty years. Now if you want a job in Kirkcaldy you need to either work in a call centre or in the precarious retail sector. And even then, good luck to you. After my previous experience of working in retail, I am avoiding it if at all possible.

Seven months since losing my job at Woolworths, and over a year since I graduated, I still haven’t found a full time job (although I’m lucky to have found bits and pieces of freelance work). I have well and truly hit the buffers, and I am now starting with a blank sheet of paper to decide on my next move.

One of my biggest mistakes was to focus my search too narrowly on a small geographical area. I certainly didn’t bet on finding a job in Kirkcaldy — it was bad enough before and clearly getting worse. But I planned on finding something in the eastern part of the central belt — somewhere within an area encompassing Fife, Dundee, Perth, Stirling or of course Edinburgh. No luck yet. I will have to broaden my search further and hope that something comes up, or hope that I will be able to rely on freelance work in the long term. I wouldn’t like to bet on relying on getting a job at a call centre in Kirkcaldy.

It is sad that Kirkcaldy is like this. This is the town of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who looked out onto the bustling Firth of Forth, full of trade ships, and was thereby inspired to investigate sources of wealth. Today he would only be inspired to investigate the weed growth in the derelict former workplaces.

Sadder is the role of Gordon Brown. Surely, some people say, if there was one man who could save Kirkcaldy, it would be the Prime Minister and former Chancellor, who grew up here and depends on the residents’ votes. Some are truly furious about it.

Others, as the Times article notes, inexplicably give him and the government the benefit of the doubt. Talking to people, it is genuinely true that there are people in Kirkcaldy who believe that Gordon Brown is a competent leader who has somehow been stitched up. Even for failed leaders, the halo effect is still in evidence.

That is the irony. The people of Kirkcaldy are probably the one set of voters in the country that Gordon Brown can afford to take for granted. Could it be that having the local man as Prime Minister has exacerbated Kirkcaldy’s problems?

It would indeed be harsh to lay the blame wholly at Gordon Brown’s door. Kirkcaldy had problems before, and most of what has happened in the past year can be put down to the global recession.

But the Labour Party is supposed to look after the interests of people who live and work in towns just like Kirkcaldy — a former industrial town that slips ever-further into the mire, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. On the evidence I see with my own eyes, the Labour Party have failed us.

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Gaps in the Mercat

21 April 2009 23:53

Categories: *, Current affairs, Fife, Scotland, Work

Yesterday, for the first time in a while, I took a trip into Kirkcaldy’s main shopping centre, the Mercat. I’m very familiar with the first set of shops that meet you from the entrance. I passed them all many, many times on my way to work at the late, great Woolworths.

This opening corridor is a very strange looking place now. The entrance to Woolworths lies at the end of the corridor, facing the entrance to the Mercat. It is the first thing you see as you enter. This alone makes the shopping centre feel dark and desolate. Instead of a bustling Woolies, there is now a large grey shutter, unflinchingly shut.

What is now striking about this section of the Mercat is the fact that so many other shops have shut since Woolies closed down. In fact, when you look at it, there is barely a shop between the entrance of the Mercat and Woolworths that hasn’t been badly affected by the recession.

At the entrance, on the left, is The Officers Club. This briefly went into administration just before Christmas. But a number of stores were saved, including Kirkcaldy’s. This is actually one of the few success stories of the Mercat’s recent past.

Opposite The Officers Club is The Works. This has been in the Mercat for a while. The only problem is, it used to occupy a much larger unit with two floors. The new Works is probably a third of the size. It occupies the slot that was vacated by Bookworld a couple of years ago.

The old home of The Works was filled over Christmas by Calendar Club, a makeshift shop that was only there for a couple of months. Today the unit lies empty.

Next to it lies the former home of Internacionale. This has become empty since Christmas. Presumably they have moved into the Mk One unit at the other end of the shopping centre.

Further along, we come to Passion for Perfume. This is another chain which unravelled in the run-up to Christmas. Today, it’s just another grey shutter left permanently down.

Opposite lies an empty space which is presumably a unit which has been vacant for as long as I can remember. This is next door to Card Factory which has also recently closed down. the Original Shoe Company, a JJB Sports subsidiary which was recently put into administration. Now the only thing on display there is the windolene smeared all over the entrance.

At the top of the corridor, next to the former Woolies unit lies the entrance to an actual JJB Sports. Ironically, this is actually a relatively new shop. It fills a unit that had been empty for a while. It was extensively renovated to accommodate JJB Sports. The shop itself is upstairs, residing directly above Woolworths. I reckon around 18 months was spent building just above our shop (and they were quite noisy about it at times too).

Then, mere days after JJB opened, rumours about its seriously poor health surfaced. I think it, just about, remains open. But I hear it is absolutely dead. I am not surprised given than you are presented with nothing but an escalator when you go through the entrance.

I have heard that JJB were actually reluctant to move in. I am told that the Mercat paid for all of the renovation work themselves. If that is true, they must really be kicking themselves. Not only did they build it for a shop that has been on its knees ever since it opened, they could now take their pick from about half a dozen empty units.

This is a stroke of bad luck really. Once you turn the corner past Woolies, the situation is not quite so bad. But the impression you get as you walk through the entrance is that the Mercat is half dead. Almost every store along the way has been affected by the credit crunch, the only exceptions being Greggs and HMV.

It may put people off proceeding further than Woolies. The whole place feels so dark and empty now. Instead of bright shop lights, you are presented with shutter after shutter. The contrast to twelve months ago could hardly be greater.

(With apologies to dad, from whom I nicked this post’s title.)

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