The Local where Locals Matter, or not?
Mon, 3 Jul 2023 10:17:20 +1000
By: gosh'at'DigitalFriend.org (Steve Goschnick)
The City fringe post-Covid, where Country meets Suburb, which business-style will win out? How does your Local measure up?
My father was an unlikely success in business. He went from Farmer to Service Station Owner in a country town, over a short period of time, and so all the conventional rules of business were mostly unknown to him. From cows and mutton on the hoof, to petrol pumps, hot hamburgers and cold milkshakes indoors. As a microcosm of his approach, I remember my mother and his business partner complaining to him about lopping off another 5 feet of her garden hose and giving it to yet-another stranger who ran out of petrol down the road, usually a city person unused to long country miles and the distant-spaced service centres. Off they went with a can of fuel in one hand, and a piece of her garden hose in the other, sometimes at no cost to them at all. They usually returned to fill up and paid up, but not always. He did the same with tools and lost many a Sidchrome spanner. That was typical of his approach. The customer was always right and needed service. He was generous, trusting in strangers to a fault, he liked a yarn, and cleaned people’s windscreens way after it was considered no longer a part of the expected service. He was buying wholesale petrol at a figure well above what company-owned service stations in the City were retailing it for - just one of the reasons the petrol supply company couldn’t understand his growing demand upon their tankers.
In the city he would have gone broke, but in a country town his business thrived and grew. Reputation matters in the country, much more so than in the city - being kind to people both sides of the counter, counts. Upset a city customer and another one is likely to come along anyway. Its hard to cross the road for the cars going by. Furthermore, the amount of young people straight out of school looking for work experience in the city these days, allows for a lot of employee churn*. Many a city business exploits that to the detriment of many of our young people starting out in the working world. Those young people are gaining the wrong sort of experiences for our society in the long term.
This all came to my mind when my youngest son was taking on his first regular job. He was the first of my lot not to go to uni straight after high school, to take a gap year or two. So, I really had to recall my distant teenage casual work experiences (of which I had many - paper round, making pallets - the forklift variety, planting trees, erecting fences, hay carting, constructing seed containers, cooking hamburgers, serving petrol, cleaning camping ground shower blocks, surveyors assistant, digging drains - the 2 metre variety with a Kato, and so on), to give him some useful advice. It was advice that came my way from my father back then, in the country proper.
Belgrave (including Heights and South - more so) was once a country town too but now they are on the city fringe, its half-suburban. There are many people here that have been locals for 3 and 4 generations, and then there are many others that come and go as their kids pass into and then out of the local Primary Schools. So its sort of half-country half-suburban in that regard and in others too.
Back in the day, my non Anglo-Celtic surname attracted the usual degree of flack in country Australia, as it had been for my father and for his father before him, and of course, as it has for many Australians old and new. So, one of his good pieces of general advice regarding work, was about countering perceived bias against you. He simply said (paraphrased):
“Put your head down, work hard, do what you’re told, don’t worry what other co-workers are doing or saying or receiving, don’t show too much initiative too early, and eventually, any initial biases will become irrelevant and you will be appreciated for who you are and what you can do. You will invariably cop some crap along the way, but you will advance on merit and attitude. Give it some good time. If you don’t, if they don’t - if your qualities aren’t recognised in that time - then the employer isn’t worth your employ anyway. Their loss, because I know how good you are.”
Well, that advice served me well across my whole career, and I believe it is still very good advice in current times - up until you are about 50 years old... After that, you are expected to either: be the boss; or be well-placed financially in your own circumstances - i.e. many people used to retire at 55 in days gone by, and now, they are still expected to have that financial fall-back at that age, despite the Oz Government wanting everyone to work until they’re 70. But I digress…
So, off he went with that re-worked advice, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, stacking shelves and serving customers at the check-out… It went well for some months but the biases weren’t going away. Everyone makes assumptions dealing with a new person. It is a necessity as you can’t know a person from day one. It is only when the assumptions aren’t altered as the facts accrue that an actual bias is revealed. He didn’t like the football-coach approach to management. Sure, I’d had football coaches in the Under-16s who yelled their heads off, and that was why they were football coaches in the under-16s comp. As he asked for and tried to take on more compliant instructions to achieve the desired outcomes, the ‘coach’ became worse. He was taking my advice to ‘hang in there and do a good job, ask for advice on doing things better’ but that just seemed to exacerbate his situation, rather than help it, which to me is a tell-tail sign of actual bias. There was potentially more to this than just his youthful inexperience of work, so I thought I should get my own gauge of it as unobtrusively as possible. It didn’t take long for me to see he wasn’t exaggerating. This owner-manager wanted him gone. I concurred with his assessment and agreed he should take his skills and good attitude elsewhere, rather than suffer daily.
Covid hasn’t helped - when the Vic State government put in a 5k radius travel curfew in Melbourne, the outer suburbs ended up with many a monopoly service, raking in the money. Some businesses had never seen such good sales, ever, pre-Christmas included, any Christmas on record. To their great credit, most didn’t price gouge at all, during Covid, and they catered well for the increased demand upon their physically constrained premises. But, when that 5k travel limit was disbanded, it was back to substantial competition and a drop in custom for local businesses. Prices became more competitive, margins more important, sales dropped, and existing positions more coveted and defended. This is a city fringe dynamic more so than in the densely populated inner city areas or even the middle-distance suburbs, where competition never totally disappeared.
I have long enjoyed living on the outer fringes of Melbourne. Coming from the country and initially going to the city for a university education and then to work in it. The city fringe is a nice in-between environment wrt residential quality-of-life. Post-Covid, the jury is still out on working conditions in many businesses. It will be interesting to see if that country success factor - i.e. a good reputation and a caring attitude, to both customer and employee, in local business - the approach that served my father so well, wins out over a cutthroat city approach to endless customers and an endless queue of young people coming out of school and looking for work. Of course, reputation is also king in the city, in the long term. Its the shorter-term where shortcuts in management, cut down young expectations, and in doing so, lessen the strength of our community over time.
I wish him well in his next working venture - may he get a boss next time around like the many I’ve experienced over the years - professional, people-person people, those that nurture new talent rather than squander human potential, and one that appreciates good manners and a great attitude to both customers and co-workers alike, in the store and out the back **.
Steve Goschnick, B.E.(Civil), M.Eng.Sc.(Research).
Postscript:
* Young employee ‘churn’ is not that uncommon, unfortunately. And not just in Australia, here’s an article about it in the UK, for instance:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230111-the-companies-that-churn-through-young-workers
** He did get a much much better boss in his second and current position. An owner boss that is indeed one of those rarer “professional, people-person people, those that nurture new talent rather than squander human potential, and one that appreciates good manners and a great attitude to both customers and co-workers alike, in the store and out the back”. He’s gone from the worst sort of boss to the best sort. Still in the food business, still in the Hills (Kallista this time), but serving Tea, scones, great coffee and brunch, rather than shelf-stacking and the checkout.