My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday by Jason Ayres

Author:Jason Ayres
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Chapel Street Press
Published: 2015-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Sarah

March 2018

The two years following my romantic interlude with Carol in Paris passed relatively uneventfully.

I enjoyed the social life and travel that my newfound vocation brought, whilst continuing to skilfully avoid doing any actual work.

The weekly planning meetings were a source of much amusement to me. It was full of young graduate trainees all clamouring to impress me. They were incredibly eager to get their voices heard and climb the corporate ladder, but I just found them irritating.

Kissing the boss’s arse and asking as many knowledgeable-sounding questions might have worked on some people, but I saw right through the falseness.

There was a general sense of panic around the building due to the dire times that the company had fallen on in recent years. After decades of being one of the major food retailers in the country, the 2010s had brought one crisis after another.

A surge of popularity for foreign discount chains undercutting prices had seen many former loyal customers desert our stores in droves. Various food scares and other scandals had dogged not just us, but the other big retailers as well. Most of them were also struggling, but not as badly as us.

To try and combat the decline, it seemed we had launched all manner of initiatives, none of which seemed to have made any difference. So now, in these weekly meetings, my eager young charges competed desperately, trying to be the one to come up with the genius idea that would turn the company’s fortunes around.

Listening to the various suggestions it seemed to me that we had completely lost sight of the golden rule of focusing on the customer. Everything seemed to be about money and manipulation – coming up with clever promotional ideas that worked well on paper, but were insulting to the customer’s intelligence.

The whole BOGOF (Buy One, Get One Free) offer had been completely abused in recent years. Once a great way of giving customers fantastic deals, it had been cynically manipulated to try and trick the shoppers into believing they were getting a bargain when they weren’t.

Modern shoppers weren’t falling for it. They were more clued up than ever before, thanks to price comparison sites and other resources. They didn’t like being taken for mugs and voted with their feet, heading off to the discount stores instead.

Most of the ideas that were brought up in the meetings were just variations on the same old themes. Sometimes I decided to take the piss and throw in an utterly ludicrous idea to see what the reaction would be.

“I know,” I said, one summer morning when I would much rather have been elsewhere. “Why don’t we forget about tired old BOGOFs and introduce Buy One Get Three Free instead? That will pull them in. No one’s ever done that before. We could do it on say, blocks of cheese. All we have to do is raise the price of the cheese from say, £3 a block to £10 and we’ll be laughing. They’ll be getting four for

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