…is the hate mail.
Of course, the majority of our ex-customers were sweet, charming and kind people who paid their bills on time, some were not. The one thing I found dealing with the inhabitants of that village was that there was a nasty streak of intolerance that ran through their genetic makeup. Maybe it was because they lived in a semi-rural backwater with no prospects and no chance of ever bettering themselves. Perhaps it was that they were so closely related to each other that even the simple task of breathing exhausted their poor, befuddled, inbred minds.
I don’t know. I don’t want to know. All I know is that every so often one of these dolts would rise up, do their best to express their thoughts on the page and then post said letter to us. This would often be accompanied by a cancellation of their papers and a debt unpaid to “show us a lesson”. Yeah, whatever. The silly sods might think they were teaching me a lesson but I invariably wrote off the debt and claimed it back via the tax man at the end of the tax year. In the end, the debt gets paid.
So the first exhibit in this rogues gallery (I’ve actually lost a couple of the corkers when that car crashed into the shop), is a letter from someone who missed a newspaper. Now this happens and this often happens when you employ a new delivery boy. It also happens in the winter when the boys haven’t properly woken up. It also happens when they fall in love and are consumed with soppy thoughts. A newspaper delivery boy in love is no use to anyone and so we just used to have them put down humanely with a bolt gun – the same device they use on cows at the slaughterhouse down the road. <---- JOKE
In this instance, a newspaper boy failed and instead of us being informed and the problem being dealt with in a sensible way, the customer involved took pen to paper. They also didn’t pay their bill. Boy did they teach me a lesson!
One of the people who lived at that address where that letter originated and where we (albeit unsucessfully on two occasions) delivered newspapers ended up going to prison for a long time for kiddie fiddling, I kid you not… God pays debts without money.
Now the next letter relates to a skirmish with an employee and the opposing version of the story (the shop version, if you please) was that the customer was very rude and very rude about the paper boy involved and so our employee made the irate customer wait his turn after he tried jumping the queue.
Read on, dear reader…
The thing about having a large credit-based business is that you have to come up with new ways of encouraging people to pay. I used to send bills out every week, but I was spending so much on paper, self-seal envelopes and printer supplies that I decided to charge for the bills. This was a two-fold effort: to avoid a bill they would pay on time, and then I would also recoup my costs. Some people were not amused…and told me so.
Firstly, don’t think that there is any real profit to be made in newspapers. You get roughly 25% of the cover price back – so for a 30p Sun newspaper, I’ll make about 7p. It’s hardly enough to make Rockerfeller raise an eyebrow. So it is a misnomer to think that we were coining it in.
I also quickly discovered that many people who complained were either sons of newsagents (in the two letters above, both people involved were sons of newsagents and yet they only lived three doors apart. What a small world!) or they had owned a business in the past. And these people would fill themselves to the brim with piss and vinegar in order to tell you exactly how wrong you were running the business. Ahhhh, yes, I will miss that a lot.
But meeting the great unwashed was an eye-opener. I’ve heard all the excuses why people can’t pay. Some can’t figure out that if you don’t pay for a newspaper for nine weeks, your bill will start to reach the £70 mark. Some will blame their drink problem. One person couldn’t pay because they had to pay for a grave stone.
Oh what happy memories…
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