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Archive: Edinburgh

Identity crisis

12 January 2009 23:30

Categories: General, Media, Nostalgia, Personal, Television, Work

(Almost) 100 years of Woolworths

A series of posts

One widespread criticism of Woolworths was that its stores were in bad nick. There’s no question that a lot of buildings were old and hadn’t really been looked after properly. The labyrinthine stockrooms of the Leith store had to be seen to be believed! But I never saw Woolworths stores as particularly drab. What perhaps hurt the most about this frequent comment was the fact that Woolworths had recently embarked on an extensive re-fit programme that plainly hadn’t worked.

Some press reports noted that if Woolies had seen through Christmas there would have been “yet another revamp“. A few months before Woolworths closed for good, its logo changed to a self-consciously modern all-lower case affair. At least one new store’s workers in Northern Ireland had new black uniforms.

Maybe a new image was required, but latterly there was a strange focus on minutiae of the store set-up. The rules by which our in-store displays were set up were tweaked. We were always told to keep to the “planogram” (the plan which our displays were to adhere to). But beforehad we had been encouraged none the less to fill the shelves with as much stock as possible.

Now we had to adhere to the planogram exactly as it appeared on the page, right down to having the shelves on the right notches. I saw one person leave a comment on a news story caustically pointing out, maybe if area managers weren’t sent around counting shelf notches Woolies wouldn’t have got itself into such a mess.

The situation was not helped by the fact that the size of products as they appeared on the planogram often bore no relation to their size in real life. Someone in head office obviously worked out how to squeeze a big picture of a product onto a small picture of a shelf, but they forgot that you can’t so easily squeeze a physical box. Problems were exacerbated whenever a product’s packaging changed, which is more often than you might think.

The obsession with shelf heights pointed to an unhealthy interest in homogeneity. The idea was seemingly to make Woolworths stores up and down the country stock exactly the same products in exactly the same way. But what was the need for this? It takes no account for the fact that different areas have different needs. The result was an inflexible store that sold more or less the same products regardless of what the local rivals were.

Moreover, many stores were not allowed to have top shelves. We were usually not allowed to have bulk stacks. And did you ever wonder where the dump bins of reduced CDs and DVDs went? I believe that they were not allowed either.

Presumably the idea was to make stores tidier. But in my view there was no need to make Woolworths look tidier. Most shops I go into look like a complete bomb site compared to our Woolworths store, and the likes of bulk stacks and dump bins are practically de rigueur in any store that likes to offer value for money, or simply make money from its stock rather than letting it gather dust in the stockroom. At a time when sales were falling, to actively be offering less stock for sale seemed suicidal. By the looks of it, it was.

The identity crisis on the shop floor was reflected in a more general marketing malaise. Historically, Frank W. Woolworth was not a big advertiser, normally restricting the company to advertising new store openings. But in the 1970s the UK arm threw its weight behind showy advertising campaigns brimful of familiar faces.

Woolies eventually became famous for its advertising campaigns and delightfully alliterative slogans like “The Wonder of Woolworth” or, my personal favourite from my childhood, “Woolies Winter Wonderland”. A more recent, delightfully punning slogan, said that Woolies was “Well Worth It”.

At its height, Woolworths was buying entire ad breaks. Check out this whopping two minute long advert from 1981.

The advert is wonderful. It is somehow cheap and cheerful at the same time as being ridiculously extravagant. It is also something undeniably of its time. You’d never see an advert like this today. But it fits Woolworths perfectly nonetheless.

Not quite in the same league is this more recent advert starring Jackie Chan in the fictitious sitcom “The Wooly & Worth Show”. It lasts one minute, but mostly focusies on Jackie Chan rather than Woolworths. It only tells you about a handful of products, and worst of all Wooly even decides not to buy the products that the advert is supposed to be about!! WTF?!

I was never the biggest fan of Wooly and Worth. No doubt an attempt to create a lovable comedy duo à la Wallace and Gromit, Wooly and Worth ended up just being faintly annoying. I was amazed, though, when a customer recently told me that she would miss Wooly and Worth on the television! Maybe most people found them lovable after all. My indifference towards the characters didn’t stop me buying Wooly and Worth keyrings as a memento in the final weeks of the store’s life.

Can you remember the company’s final slogan? I doubt somehow that “More great news from Woolworths” will be remembered as fondly as “The Wonder of Woolworth”. The recent slogan said absolutely nothing about the store and wasn’t an ounce of wit in it. Meanwhile, the classic taps right into people’s nostalgia for the store and its role as shop for special occasions. What about another recent slogan, “Let’s have some fun”? I’m still trying to decode the meaning of it.

One thing that was crystal clear in the media coverage of the collapse of Woolworths was that almost everyone had very fond memories of the store, even if they ceased to shop there in great numbers. Yet its heritage ended up overwhelming Woolworths. Creaking under the strain of almost 100 years of history, the company began to get a serious identity crisis. Straddling a line between changing with the times and continuing to give people what they remember from the past proved to be too difficult.

Meanwhile, the stores — which Woolworths once took great pride in — began to crumble. Recent re-fits misfired, leaving Woolworths with a reputation as a dingy shop.

Wooly and Worth in happier times, posing for my discount card

« Previous in series — Next in series »

1 comment

What Kezia Dugdale’s retirement says about blogging

8 October 2008 02:39

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Politics, Scotland, Technology

I was sorry to read that Kezia Dugdale has ‘retired’ from blogging. Jeff has the full details and an interview with Kezia herself about the matter.

It’s a blow to the Scottish political blogosphere for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Kezia was a great blogger in her own right. But perhaps more significantly she was one of the few Labour bloggers in a field that is increasingly dominated by nationalists.

She was not quite the only Labour blogger. There are a few others, but mostly centred around Edinburgh Council — with Ewan Aitken and Andrew Burns standing out.

For a focus on national politics though (either in the Scotland- or UK-wide sense), Kezia Dugdale was the one everyone would visit for the Labour view. Just as you’d visit Stephen Glenn for the Lib Dem point of view, Scottish Tory Boy for the Conservatives and James at Two Doctors for the Green view, Kezia was the Scottish Labour blogger.

Of course, one of those, Scottish Tory Boy, closed his blog last month — but he returned the following week! Kezia’s exit, though, does feel rather more final.

I have long admired Kezia for her blog. In her interview with Jeff, she makes a point about anonymity in blogging. She seems to believes that bloggers should not be anonymous. I happen to disagree with her on that matter. But there is no doubt that it would have been a safer option for her to adopt a snappy pseudonym and let rip. Instead, she had her name up there in big bold letters and even had a photograph. You’ve got to take your hat off to her for being principled enough to make her identity so clear.

No doubt this affected the tone and content of the blog. The aspect of Kezia Dugdale’s blog that I liked the least was the fact that it toed the Labour Party line rather too much for my liking. I wonder if, as the blogosphere’s best-known Labour face, she felt obliged to stick up for Labour a bit too much. Perhaps with one eye on the future.

At the same time, that all undoubtedly made her a target for cybernats. There is, as Kezia points out, a poisonous streak in certain parts of the blogosphere. As the primary voice for a Labour Party that is currently deeply unpopular, Kezia Dugdale was always going to be at the receiving end of some pretty robust, negative stuff. Just another reason why I was amazed at how she continued blogging regardless.

I think Kezia is wrong, though, when she says this about blogging:

…it’s a very seedy environment – the vast majority of bloggers operate anonymously. And with anonymity, accountability completely evaporates…
Blogging is no longer, in my view, a proper vehicle for debate. It’s been saturated by partisan venom and that can be quite debilitating.
I’ll write a post and then 95% of the comments that follow will be negative. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong every single time…

She is not totally wrong. But in my view, the problem is not with blogging per se. It is with comments. As I have argued here, people who run their own blogs tend to be articulate, reasoned people. The reason for that, as Will Patterson points out, is:

Sub-standard blogs, full of rubbish that’s plucked out of thin air, just won’t get read. Or they’ll get read a couple of times then people will move on. So weaker blogs get isolated, while stronger blogs gain a following. That way, every blogger is accountable to their readers.

In the comments, though, it is a different matter. Some people post in the comments simply because that way they are guaranteed an audience. Rather than make the effort to set up your own place — which people might not visit — to express your views, why not go some place else where you will definitely be heard? Of course, not all commenters are like this. But it is a sad fact of comments, that some people hang out there simply because they’re not good enough to sustain a blog of their own.

Luckily, this blog doesn’t have a big problem with comments. Of course, like all of us, I have received terrible, offensive comments that I simply couldn’t publish. But it’s not a regular problem that I have to deal with day-in, day-out as some bloggers no doubt have to. But it is a problem that the blogosphere as a whole has. It isn’t enjoyable to surf around Scottish websites and be confronted time and time again with swivel-eyed cybernattery.

I don’t like to blame this completely on anonymity. As I hinted at above, I think that there are perfectly valid reasons to wish to remain anonymous — or pseudonymous anyway. I certainly don’t think it’s feasible to expect all bloggers to go around using their real names all the time. But the comments issue is for another time (though I’ve already written about it here).

Whatever, I am quite sad that Kezia Dugdale has hung up her keyboard. A lot of bloggers need to take a break every so often, and a lot of the time bloggers on hiatus come back after a while. Blogging is slightly addictive. Once you’ve got used to using your little platform, it is difficult to stop using it forever. So hopefully Kezia will return to the blogosphere one day.

In the meantime, there is a huge void in the Scottish blogosphere. Who is going to stick up for Labour now?

7 comments

Why is technology news not news?

17 July 2008 16:57

Categories: Commuting, Current affairs, General, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Radio, Technology, Television

Hello.

I’ve been wondering a bit about the way technology news is still ghettoised. I don’t mean news about the latest rubbish web 2.0 start-up with a ridiculous name. I mean quite important stuff. Security problems and the like.

Take what happened last week. A patch to fix a major flaw in the DNS was released. It is pretty important stuff. But the only mentions of it have been ghettoised in the darkest recesses of the technology sections, cordoned off in yellow and black tape with “warning: geeks only” written on it.

I don’t watch the television much these days, so I might be wrong. But I saw no mention of it on the news. I heard no mention of it on the radio. You certainly don’t hear people talking about it on the streets or in pubs.

You might think, “So what? Security update for X, Y and Z are released every day. You can’t have the news reporting it every day.” But something extra happened with that security update that was released last week: it crippled many users’ computers. Including my parents’ computer.

It is just as well I was still able to use my computer to try and find out what the problem was and how to workaround it. It turned out that ZoneAlarm threw a hissy-fit after Windows XP had updated and prevented users from accessing the internet.

In fairness, the BBC reported this on their website — but that’s not very useful if you’ve got no internet. Perhaps there are still people scratching their head about why they’ve not been able to access the internet for the past week.

The problem is twofold. One, the mainstream media seems quite averse to any technology story unless it’s to do with [say this like a caveman] “GOOGLE” or “APPLE”. Or “GOOGLE”. Simply, if you want to find out anything meaningful about technology you have to really know where to look for it.

And this brings me on to the second part of the problem. The people who don’t know where to look for information are also the most vulnerable users. There are people who, for whatever reason, can’t be motivated to take proactive measures to prevent themselves from the various security issues that inevitably arise when you use the internet.

I have a friend who bought a new computer a few weeks ago. The other day he complained to me that his new computer has already got spyware on it. The thing is that it’s not difficult to protect yourself really.

I’m not really a computer expert in the slightest, but I know the basics of how to protect myself — essentially keep all your software updated with the latest patches and don’t click any dodgy links. I don’t think it’s really a difficult concept. And — touch wood — these basics have worked for me. Since I got my own computer early last year I’ve never had anything worse than a tracking cookie on my computer (as far as I know — I just know that this is an invitation for my computer to explode under the weight of pop-ups tomorrow…).

But even simple measures like these that anyone can take are difficult to get through to some people. So many people still treat computers with awe. It is sometimes easy to forget how foreign computers are to many people.

I remember a couple of years ago when there was a really bad signalling failure on the train line into Edinburgh. Basically every train was cancelled. An old lady pointed to the automated departure monitor and asked why it said a list of trains towards the bottom of the screen were still listed as being on time.

This is what she said in protest (as though it would make her more likely to get on a train to Edinburgh): “I thought computers were wonderful things that never ever went wrong.” But even my basic knowledge of how computers work told me exactly why the trains were still listed as being ‘on time’ — because they hadn’t even departed from their start station, so hadn’t passed any sensors and weren’t technically late at all. The computer was none the wiser for obvious reasons.

This can be put down to the old issue that people in their thirties and younger have been using computers for almost all of their lives and understand what a computer is good for and what it isn’t. Youngsters who have lived with computers all their lives understand how a computer works, but for many people older than that computers just work by magic.

The thing is, that divide between young and old is not so clear cut as I used to think. I was listening to iPM yesterday and there was an interview with Clive Sinclair. He pointed out that back in the 1980s computer users really understood computers because they had to in order to get them to work. Today’s youngsters growing up with computers generally don’t understand computers at all.

So we come back to my friend who is the same age as me and has a problem with spyware. I have had a few conversations with him where I have tried to persuade him to use Firefox. For him, the internet is the internet and he doesn’t understand how one browser can be better than another. Even though I have told him about all the superior features and better security that a browser like Firefox or Opera can provide, he persists on using Internet Exploder version bum point poo.

Many people, through ignorance, don’t take the simple measures to keep themselves safe on the internet. I’ve had a look at the stats for this website to see what bad browsers visitors to this site are using.

In the past month, an amazing 20% of visitors used Internet Explorer 6. This is a web browser that was originally released seven years ago and last updated four years ago. It is notorious for its security problems. The more up-to-date Internet Explorer 7 was released almost two years ago.

You would expect Firefox users to be smarter, right? Not always. In the past month, 243 Firefox users that visited this website were using a version of the browser that is considered unsafe (which I defined as 2.0.0.14 and below). This included 19 people using 1.5.0.12, 11 using 1.0.7 and 8 using 1.5.0.3. Most amazingly, 4 visitors were using Firefox 0.9.1, a browser that has been out of date for four years. I dread to think what kind of security problems these users have been getting themselves in.

It got me wondering. If this many people are using dodgy browsers, how many people are still trying in vain to unsubscribe from spam emails? How many don’t know that even viewing an image in an email alerts a spammer that your email address is active? You could go on.

I don’t mean all this in a preachy kind of way. I completely understand why it is difficult for people to keep up to date with all the security issues that arise. I just find it really frustrating that simple awareness issues are not, well, made aware to people.

Things don’t get much more ubiquitous than the internet. It is impossible to imagine that someone growing up today will not be a regular internet user in some form or another. And there are real dangers on the internet that aren’t to do with [say this like a caveman] “PEDOPHILS” and “CYBER BULLIES”. But the media reports on made-up dangers like “KNIVES” and “YOOFS” and “KNIVES” as though we are on the verge of bladeageddon.

Yesterday I was listening to Digital Planet. They had a chap called Stefan Frei on reporting that around 60% of all internet users are using an out-of-date browser. He had a really smart way of thinking about software security. You should think of software as being perishable, just in the same way as foodstuffs. You wouldn’t eat a mouldy slice of bread, so why would you use a browser with a huge security hole in it?

It’s a really smart analogy that should be spread far and wide. It’s just frustrating that the place I heard it was on Digital Planet, which is probably listened to mainly by people who already know that they should be updating their browsers.

10 comments

Hang on, didn’t Jamie Stone have a point?

23 February 2007 22:28

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Politics, Scotland, Sport

“Xenophobic” is certainly the wrong word. Xenophobia is the hatred of foreigners, and I am certain that SNP members as a whole do not hate all foreigners.

A more accurate word might be, well, nationalist. Hardly a slur, to some. But as I said a couple of weeks ago, I do find slightly distasteful an ideology that thinks the most important thing is where policies are made rather than which policies are made.

The comments might have resulted in the SNP rolling with faux-outrage. But I think we all know the certain kind of thing Jamie Stone was talking about, and it has a certain ring of truth to it.

Most SNP supporters probably call themselves nationalists (correct me if I’m wrong), but the way some of them react when somebody calls them the Scottish Nationalist Party is quite telling in a way. They know that the N-word sounds bad.

The E-word is even worse, and the SNP now goes to great lengths to make it look as though it quite likes (or is at least ambivalent towards) England. Not that I believe this is merely cynical political gameplay. I am sure that the majority of SNP members and the SNP party itself are not Anglophobic.

The problem for the SNP is the independence movement as a whole. Ask the average independence-supporting Joe on the street why he wants Scotland to be independent, and you are more likely to get an incoherent anti-English rant than any talk about the finer points of the economy.

So now rather than thinly veiled attacks on England or Britian, the official, SNP-led pro-independence voice is all about how successful small countries are. Although this doesn’t square with the SNP’s recognition that Scotland needs more immigrants. That is how you improve the economy, not divorcing Scotland from England.

Despite the SNP’s official line, there are little glimpses of what the SNP is really about from time to time. There are the claims from some SNP members that an independent Scottish Parliament would be inherently better than Westminster. It is never explained why though. Or why the Scottish economy would suddenly blossom once you erect a barrier at the border. Surely if Scotland was such a great nation it wouldn’t need to be independent to have a wonderful economy.

Take also the recent issue of the theatre in Berwick-upon-Tweed that was accused of being racist by SNP MSP Christine Grahame. What a cheek! Here is the SNP bullying a private theatre that is in a location that it would rather was in a different country! So much for independence then. It reeked more of scoring a point against England than anything else.

Christine Grahame was at it again when she made her offensive remarks bemoaning media coverage of cricket, “which is only of marginal interest in Scotland.” It played on the popular myth that cricket is a sport for English toffs and Scots are completely uninterested in it.

The problem is that it is actually a bare-faced lie because cricket is a more popular participation sport in Scotland than it is even in England and has a longer history in Scotland than even football.

And before you all start, I am very well aware that Christine Grahame was born in England. But this makes the point all that more important. Because I think the very fact that she feels the need to take these pot-shots at England and its culture is very revealing indeed.

A lot of people will claim she has a valid point about London-dominance in the media. It is a common complaint. But the points about media coverage are all rather silly if you ask me.

If Scottish independence even changed the face of the media, it would only mean that the news would be Glasgow-dominated (with a bit of Edinburgh if you’re lucky) rather than London-dominated. Big whoop if you’re in Glasgow. Not much cop if you are one of the majority of Scots who happen not to live in the big two though. We have enough Glasbolisation as it is.

New Labour is all about embracing the free market, getting rid of Clause IV and generally being nice and middle class. And every so often a Terry Kelly comes along to remind you what goes on when you scrape beneath the surface. By the same token, the SNP’s cuddly image can let you forget about some unsavoury elements of the grassroots independence movement.

In my post a couple of weeks ago I said I was considering voting for the SNP. As things stand at the moment, I won’t be. The debates over the past couple of weeks have reminded me why I dislike nationalism so much. I respect the Liberal Democrats that little bit more as well.

4 comments

Kids who order World Cup tickets for £410 from a scam website then get a proper World Cup trip funded by the government can just fuck right off

21 June 2006 21:52

Categories: Current affairs, General, Politics, Sport

This story makes me angry on so many levels.

First of all, if I ever got a school trip it was to Edinburgh Zoo, not the bloody World Cup. These kids were on a “Â£410-a-head tour”. Where do schoolchildren get that sort of money to fritter away on a school trip? Where is this school? Zurich?!

Also, if you order World Cup tickets from a website that looks like this, you must be the most gullible person in the world and need to be taught this lesson anyway.

So what happens instead? The bloody government gives them tickets to grab a headline. Bastards.

I wonder if the government would be so forgiving of a company that pissed money down the drain like that.

Chris Applegate:

Wonâ€™t someone please think of the children? Well, fuck â€˜em. Theyâ€™re not the first people to be diddled out of their money, and they certainly wonâ€™t be the last. It would have been a valuable lesson in life – never, ever trust a tout. Instead the lesson theyâ€™ve learnt is to make a big moan to the papers and rely on cronyism to bail you out for your foolhardiness.