On The Move, "Shrinkage" and "Huddles"
Life after marriage moves along with a deal of well-meant advice from friends and family. It felt odd, we had known each other from school and had been married 13 years and of course had our two boys…the latter hurt the most. I had no idea how they were on a daily basis, what they thought about Dad not being around anymore or if that bothered them in any way.
We set up a visiting timetable for the boys to come over to my place, which more or less worked but space in my tiny “in the heavens” flat was cramped for one human let alone 3…so…time to move.
Now, acquiring this flat had been done via my new girlfriend, from work…she knew I needed a place to move out to rather than sleep on family and friends sofa’s and suggested this vacant flat/room. As it happens the landlord was her’s and she actually also had a flat in the building…handy? Odd?
No matter what you may think, or assume, she kept to her flat and I kept to mine…we let the dust settle for a number of months and naturally I didn’t want to confuse the boys about this new woman in my life…I believe we did the right thing under the circumstances.
By now the months had rolled on and I told my girlfriend that I would be looking for a new place, somewhere that had enough room for the boys to stay comfortably.
And so the conversation went down the route of, why pay two lots of rent, why not move into her flat…her flat was a ground floor decent sized three bedroom set up…so hey, yes, that’s what we did.
Part of the motivation was also finances as by then I had also made a private agreement with my ex-wife to an amount of money I would pay to support the boys…an amount incidentally which was larger than the Child Support Agency would have actually levied, but, again, trying to do the right thing…but with that, rent and living expenses, obviously this made a biggish hole in the bank.
Judge me if you will on the above, but keep in mind that my wife and I had always agreed on where our relationship had gone.
On the work front, things were always busy. Internal and external theft were always concerns, and, like any business, we had targets to meet. Keep the shrinkage (losses) down. When I started the job, the store's average shrinkage was 5%…that’s a lot of loss!
Within the first year, we, as a team, got the shrinkage down to 2%! Yay us!
By year 3 we had maintained shrinkage at 2%…unheard of lol.
In year 4 of my time at the store, all the Security Managers from stores around the country were called to a meeting in London. Oooh a day out in London, see how the other half live eh?
The Director of Security for the company along with various Retail Directors and such presented long and boring facts and figures about the company and its current standing in the retail sector. I say long and boring as none of it was news as such as we had weekly “huddles” (Managers meetings) which covered every aspect of the business.
From memory, the meeting was around 7 hours long and tiring and we all looked to what the catering effort would be in the number one store, that was hosting the meeting, would be.
Buffet…urgh…
Please Note the following image is in no way representative of a company buffet, which I am sure many of you can attest:
Don’t get me wrong, we were all thankful to get refuelled before winging off back to our homes, but don’t you find buffet food, at company gigs, tend to be a bit lame, especially when it’s been laid out for many hours?
Fed and watered, checking my watch to align with train times (yes we used watches to tell the time back then), I was heading for the door when the Director of Security called me over…
He started by telling me how well our team had done in bringing down the shrinkage and maintaining it for 4 years and shook my hand…and then in a half whisper: “Watch for my visit early next year…be ready for change, tell no one”.
Oh dear…what next?
Until Next Time
Make sure you check out next week’s issue:
“The Writings on the Wall”
“Heating the Streets of Hull”
“Another Pivoting Move?!”
Some more of my Newsletters:
