By Isle of Wight Observer
I bought my first suit from a Freemans’ catalogue. It cost just 50 pence a week for 26 weeks. The money came from my evening paper round – I was too lazy for mornings.
Whitton School uniform was essentially black, so my sharp new three-piece was a close enough match. I looked great in it, much better than a boring old blazer. The headmaster, Mr Ball, only noticed it and my orange flower-power tie once.
Later, one of my first jobs was in a menswear shop exactly like Grace Brothers. Ladies upstairs, men on the ground floor. It had a stilted formality that seemed very old-fashioned, even then.
The general manager, Mr Winter, was thrilled if you managed to sell a shirt and tie to anyone who bought a suit. Sell a pair of shoes, too, and Mr W positively purred with pleasure! Heaven help you if your customer left empty handed. Mr Winter regarded that as a catastrophic failure.
As a sales trainee, I soon learned that, when someone wants to buy, making even the most casual enquiry, you must ‘take them out of the market’. Should you fail to do so, someone else will steal your customer. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, clothes, building materials, or services, when someone expresses interest, you must satisfy their demand.
You often encounter people in the front line of businesses, who don’t appear to realise they are selling. They wrongly believe they’re just answering the phone or offering advice. Our Mr Winter explained that attitudes like those don’t pay the bills. Perhaps that’s why so many companies now rely on scripts, or dispense with humans altogether. Better to place your trust in an algorithm than lose precious sales.
My Mum worked for Pan Am in the ’70s – selling airline tickets over the phone. The challenge was upselling additional flights to places the passengers hadn’t realised the extensive Pan Am network reached. She offered intercontinental hotel stays too – the chain was then owned by Pan Am. Her calls were closely monitored by supervisors and managers – to ensure reservations staff didn’t miss a trick.
At Peter Stone Menswear, when we didn’t have a suit that fitted, and very few ever seemed to, we assured our potential customer that ‘our tailor’ could easily make the necessary alterations. In reality, once we’d roughly pinned up the jacket sleeves and folded up the trouser legs as best we could, we took full payment and a tailoring fee. We ran the ill-fitting garments up to the nearby dry cleaner, who did the necessary alterations. I’m not sure what awful fabrics those suits were made of, but I never saw one on sale that I’d have bought myself; all of them were hideous. Immaculately dressed Mr Winter insisted our suits were ‘inexpensive, never cheap’. Cheap was a word no-one dare utter in Mr Winter’s hearing.
I’ve noticed Sir Keir Starmer always wears a well-cut suit. He’s clearly a man who likes the very best and, frankly, if I were Prime Minister and a millionaire, I too would employ a decent tailor. Unlike Sir Keir, when presented with the bill, I’d pay it myself, not rely on a party donor. Our new government was elected on the premise that they would be better than the Tories – certainly more honest. Now it seems, Starmer is no better than Boris Johnson.
We already knew Sir Keir had taken 20 grands-worth of clobber and glasses; now we know he didn’t bother declaring his wife’s designer clothes either. Starmer has form as a freeloader; perhaps he’s never heard the expression, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch.’ I’m hugely disappointed. Why can’t the Starmers just buy their own clothes – like the rest of us?