Bird's Eye View
Page 48
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Ribble Record
By The Hawk
PREVENTIVE maintenance practised by Ribble Motor I Services, Ltd., is showing remarkable results, according to figures supplied to me by the general manager, Mr. H. Bottomley. Last month, road delays of 10 minutes and over occasioned by mechanical defects dropped to a record average for the fleet of one in every 277,817 vehicle-miles. This figure does not, of course, include tyre failures.
Mr. Bottomley tells me that monthly summaries of the number of breakdowns at all the company's 26 depots are circulated among the mechanical supervisory staff, so that they know how each depot is doing in relation to the others.
Reversing the Trend
COMPLAINTS about traffic congestion in our cities come thick and fast • . • and even authorities on the subject of roads are frequently baffled.
But not so the old-established quality store of Finnigans, Ltd.. in Manchester. Realizing that the city centre is no fun for the motoring shopper, the company have arranged to close the present headquarters of the business in Deansgate and to transfer most of the activities a dozen miles away to Wilmslow. There ample parking space will enable car-owning customers to come and go.
From all this it might appear that the Finnigan organization was taking the lead among British stores in the adoption of an accepted American retailing practice. In the case of • the Manchester company, however, it is merely a matter of history repeating itself, B14
Originally established in Market Street; in the 19th century, the business was compelled to move to the then more secluded thoroughfare of Deansgate in order that the carriage folk, who were its customers, might not have
to struggle with the already-increasing traffic. .
The newest Finnigan effort is by way of being a variation on the " staggering " theme which 1 recently discussed in this column.
Sales Talk
ABODYBUILDER visited a North London furniture remover to try to sell a pantechnicon with a low step at the rear to allow easy entry for the porters.
"You don't know much about the removals business !" said the remover. "It's essential for us to be able to pin responsibility for loading on one man. Our system is to entrust the loading inside the vehicle to the foreman. All the porters do is to bring the furniture from out of the house and hand it up to the foreman in the van. Porters never enter the vehicle. A walk-in body is no good to us."
"To be fair," countered the bodybuilder, "would you ask your men's opinion about walk-in bodies ? "
The remover agreed, summoned a foreman to his office and said to "Brown, Mr. X, here, is trying to sell us a walk-in van. He thinks we might try the system whereby each and every member of the crew can enter the vehicle and—" "But that's what we've been doing for the past two years. sir," the foreman interrupted.