Our largest UK boxstore is 'B&Q', which with it's mail order wing 'Screwfix' has a lion's share of the market. Some years ago their policy was to only recruit young people, until it was pointed out that most of senior management and the board qualified for free Senior Citizen bus passes! Permission was grudgingly given for 2 stores to employ some old fogeys on the shop floor. Amazingly, those stores immediately went to the top of the sales charts! Those old timers had the one thing an energetic but acned youth ain't got - experience. Customers with questions instinctively homed in on Grandpa, for after all, what would someone younger than your son know about hanging wallpaper or what size wire to get? So, you got good advice on a product, the ancient one would tell you how to, sell you the right amount of the right stuff and then point you to the tools rack, the consumables, the ladders - you get the drift. And of course they came back for other stuff as their confidence improved. QED. Having skilled 'managers' is useless unless there is a source of experience and common sense on the shop floor for them to manage.
Now chaps, don't knock the US of A too hard! My friend Robert just got back from visiting his aging folks in Detroit, [he never went home after USAF service], raving about the vast range and real low prices at the box stores. Had me drooling I can tell you, after the miserable experiences shopping for tools and matl.s we get here. Surly un-cooperative unsackable staff, little stock, wait weeks for delivery of basic items, vastly inflated prices [ EXAMPLE: a basic Legrand din-rail 3ma differential main breaker I saw just today, 231 EUROS = US$320!! ], get turfed out of stores at midday for their 2+ hour dinner break, "..never heard of it".. "no demand for it".. "we don't carry that! ..."
I can get stuff delivered from New York via t'internet faster than from 3km up the road, at half the price inc. US Mail, with the added pleasure of a follow up email telling me to "have a nice day"! Cliché it may be, but I usually do when I get me a parcel!
