How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [56]
In short, ambulance crews summoned to the assistance of someone whose head is still attached to the body and who does not have gangrene or Ebola should be allowed, if they see fit, to burn the person’s house down. Or, if they are kindly souls, to take an item that has roughly the same value as the call-out, so that it can be sold by the NHS on eBay.
In the meantime, perhaps the Met Office would be good enough to consult its supercomputer for the weather forecast instead of telling us what Jonathon Porritt thinks.
Sunday 21 December 2008
Save the high street – ditch bad service and ugly sales girls
I fear I may have seen Vietnam for the last time. As the jet lifted off from Saigon in September, I looked out of the window and thought: ‘I’m forty-eight. I’ll probably never get the chance to come back here again.’ And it made me sad.
I’m also sad that, in all probability, I shall never again fly in a jet fighter or ski down a black run or make fumbling lurve in the back seat of a car. In fact, the list of things I’ve already and unwittingly done for the last time is endless and, if various reports are to be believed, includes shopping.
According to the men in braces who put our money somewhere and can’t quite remember where, up to fifteen big high-street retailers will disappear from town centres in the coming months. And if my local town is anything to go by, they will undoubtedly be joined by all those little boutiquey delicatessen bijou cubbyhole shops that smell of sun-dried tomatoes and potpourri. The ones run by stick-insect blonde women and paid for by their husbands to stop them running off with the gym instructor.
Each town will be left with nothing but two giant retailing cathedrals in which you will be able to buy everything from smoked salmon to soil. The meat will be scarlet, the prices will be low and they won’t be shops as we know them.
They’ll be filling stations for the stomach. They’ll be horrid. They’ll be American. I shall never set foot in one. I shall simply buy everything I need from the interweb.
And that’s sad too.
And so what I thought I’d do today is provide a handy cut-out-’n’-keep guide for the high-street moguls of this world, and the stick-insect women, explaining what they’ve been doing wrong, what might be done to stave off their demise and, with it, the demise of every town centre in the land.
Because let’s face it, the pubs are going too, and the estate agents and the building societies.
First of all, then, we must address the problem of the physical purchase. At the moment, when I buy something, a man in a nasty suit sits me down and asks all sorts of impudent questions about where I live and my telephone number. Wrong. I know that this has nothing to do with my guarantee and everything to do with you profiling your customers so you can get a man in India to call up at an antisocial hour in six months’ time to sell me a washing machine. Pack it in. Take my credit card. Give me the product. Get me out of there as quickly as possible and do not sell my details to anyone in India or I will come round in the middle of the night and burn your shop down.
Next. Have everything in stock. I know this is expensive and complicated but I really don’t like going to all the bother of trying on a pair of shoes, only to have the silly girl emerge after ten minutes from a non-existent storeroom to explain that she doesn’t have the style in my size and would I mind coming back in a week. Yes, I would mind very much.
Retailers need to understand – and they really don’t – that while there are a great many people, usually those with bosoms, who enjoy mooching about in the shops because it’s safer and less complicated than shagging the gym instructor, the rest – those with zips down the front of their trousers – do not enjoy it much at all and would like the whole process to be over as fast as