Thirty years ago this evening I started my first official part-time job, in Crazy Prices, Dunmurry. I was fairly nervous. Dressed in one of my dad’s crimson red shirts and a navy blue kipper tie (it WAS the 1970′s), I was introduced to the rest of the staff and then shown how to gather shopping trolleys from the car park in Kingsway Shopping Centre without damaging any cars. 73p an hour was my starting rate and I felt like a prince collecting my pay the following Friday. After deductions, it came to £14.73, of which my mother promptly deducted another $10.
The retail grocery trade then was vastly different to today’s slick operation. When I moved onto the Dairy Cabinets after a few weeks, I noticed that we could sell three or four full pallets of whole chickens on a Saturday. Now it’s all chicken breasts and added value prepared meals. All of our chickens came from Moypark in Dungannon and most of our butter came from Mourne Maid in Banbridge. Other differences include the introduction of sell-by dates on biscuits and breakfast cereals around 1982 – a real shock to us at the time. Now we were going to have to pack out stock in rotation on the shelves; something the customers caught on to very quickly. I used to wonder what eejit would ever buy bottled water. At the time, we sold only Perrier Water and it wasn’t exactly in demand for anything other than it’s novelty value. Now water has meters of space, sometimes half an aisle! The introduction of barcode scanning brought us into the twentieth century and there were many other changes that made it an eventful time.
In 1982, Crazy Prices was bought over by Associated British Foods who also owned Stewarts Supermarkets Ltd and Quinnsworth in Ireland and Fine Fare in GB. Before very long, we had a trainee management course made available to us and I was signed up. Out of the six trainees, four of us still work for the company as senior managers and I still see the other two regularly. We were a tightly knit bunch. It was a two year course but after ten months (and the unexpected dismissal of a hooky store manager) I was promoted to assistant manager at Crazy Prices, Springhill, in Bangor. Back then, the store didn’t open on Mondays and only opened one late night a week. We also traded on Sundays only once a year, the Sunday before Christmas. And at the time, I thought I was overworked!
This was a store that was to feature a lot in my future. I was sent there as a trainee manager on my first trainee day. I couldn’t drive so I blagged a daily lift from one of the bread delivery men in Boucher Road and generally got the train home. It was in this store I would meet my future wife, Geraldine Morrow, who worked on the health & beauty section. We had many run-ins before I asked her out. She told me years later that she called me “that bastard Parte” when talking to her mother, who was rather surprised, it transpired, when she brought me home to meet her family. As I lived in Belfast and she lived in Bangor, logistics could be a bit of a problem. We generally met in the disco at the Stormont Hotel. Strains of Spandau Ballet and George Benson remind of this time… Anyway, that’s another story – back to the exciting world of the NI grocery trade in the 1980s. In March 1986, I was made store manager of Crazy Prices, Central Arcade, Belfast. We bought our first house in May and got married in November – a busy year.
I managed the Crazy Prices, Springhill, store for ten years as store manager until 1999. Between 1984 and 1999, I must have had hundreds of students working for me before they went off to university or obtained full time jobs. I have met a number of these guys and girls over the years since, usually when they’ve come into the shop with kids of their own and introduced themselves. One night, I was treated rather lightly by an RUC man after running a questionable red light coming along the Holywood bypass at a rate of knots – once I’d been admonished, he reminded me that he used to work for me. Lucky me! I might have had a a few penalty points – I must not have been too bad to work for then 
Over the years, I’ve had a store blown up while I’ve been managing it (Dunmurry), a colleague shot in the leg during a robbery (Newtownards Rd), my cash office door blown off by a shotgun in an attempted robbery (Donegall Rd), many, many wrestling matches with shoplifters and a few other remarkable incidents, such as Stewarts in Clandeboye Shopping Centre, burning down. Despite all of that hassle, I’m delighted to say over the past thirty years, I have never personally experienced any political or religious-based animosity from any colleague at any level or in any store, even when Northern Ireland was going through it’s most difficult times – something I’ve always been proud of my colleagues for. I’ve worked in Dunmurry, Springhill, Belfast (Central Arcade), Newtownards Rd, Donegall Rd, Carrickfergus, Glengormley, Ballymena, Craigavon, Newcastle, Portadown, Lisnagelvin, Coleraine, Bloomfields and Newtownbreda, and probably a few more I’ve forgotten about.
In 1997, Tesco took advantage of the looming peace in NI and bought Stewarts and Quinnsworth off ABF. At that late stage, ABF was losing £1M every four weeks in NI. It was a welcome relief when it happened. This last twelve years in Tesco have been fast and furious. At times, it felt like I’d died and gone to retail heaven. Of course, at other times, I’d wish I’d worked harder at school and become the photojournalist I had always wanted to be. Tesco brought (much!) better pay and benefits, innovation and drive and are a great company to work for.
After some illness four years ago, I decided to step down from the responsibilities of the store manager role. I’m now deputy in a bigger store and enjoying the work even more with a better work/life balance than ever before (most days!).
I’ve made many strong friendships for life and run multi-million pound stores – not a bad result for someone who has yet to pass his maths o-level!
