The Boom and Bust of Business

It was a known brand opening on a prime city centre square and no expense had been spared in adorning the building with jolly cartoon balloons to entice the punters and refitting the inside in rustic fashion. It was a proven fact that people liked a pie. What could go wrong? Certainly it seemed to do a roaring trade for the first few weeks. Yet less than eighteen months after opening, my partner and I noticed Pie Society had closed and its catering equipment was for sale.

We ourselves had only visited Pie Society once, as a break from last Christmas's crowds, to find surly staff who took an age to serve, lukewarm, so what? pies and a drafty upstairs room furnished with uncomfortable metal stools. Our hot drinks were unappealingly contained in retro (none-too-hygienic) chipped enamel mugs, supposedly evocative of the past. The loos were also pretty grim. Great as the view from upstairs was, we didn't enjoy the experience, but assumed we were not the demographic the place was appealing to and the youth of the city probably loved it.

Apparently not. The franchise really had gone feral.

As an ardent fan of Channel 5's The Hotel Inspector and Channel 4's Country House Rescue, I take a keen interest in which businesses survive and thrive and which bite the dust. Western Road has a particularly high proliferation of eateries, takeaways and cafes with almost every second premises occupied by one. They can't possibly all make a living, even in high tourist season, and they don't. In fact the national success rate for food outlets is apparently 1 in 7 surviving for up to three years, so it is is a much riskier business than the wannabe eaterie owner seems to consider when they dream how nice it would be to run their own cafe, probably imagining it is almost a failsafe business as everyone needs to eat, much like an undertakers (of whom there are also a huge proliferation in Brighton and Hove), probably assume a high and continuous demand for their services.

The Just Eat campaign has undoubtedly given the eating out and takeaway industry a boost. However eateries still need to raise their game, particularly in an area of intense competition. And sometimes they provide great food, friendly staff and a unique identity and still fail, such as the lovely vegetarian cafe Aloka, which looked more like a high-class chemist from the outside, presumably trying to ape the Damian Hirst 'Pharmacy' look. Then there is a wonderful ice cream parlour which makes all its own ice cream and cakes and has a fantastic premises quite near the seafront with a funky upstairs, but which seems to be largely empty most of the time, apart from closing off the upstairs for the odd children's party. but what is the point of trying so hard with the food offer if it is signing its own death warrant with a dearth of marketing? Our favourite toasted sandwich cafe has been through hard times but has reinvented itself and seems to be doing a little better now, but again one senses that it suffers from little or no advertising budget, no matter that the product is good and it is one of the cheapest places to eat in the city centre.

I would love to go into business myself, so am noting everyone else's triumphs and tragedies with interest and taking lots of notes, but one thing is for sure, when I take the plunge, it will not be in the catering sector. I bet many of those who go into it don't expect it to be nearly as tough a business as it really is. And let's not forget 95% of pubs now offer food (of which there also many in Brighton), making the local market even tougher.

Meantime I am looking forward to starting a new day job next week, in my professional area of expertise, the housing sector.

Who will buy my luvverly useless mobile?

I saw this on a noticeboard the other day and was immediately suspicious when I recalled the advice given to me by 3 (ie if your phone does not work, why not sell the rest of your contract to a friend or relation?). I can imagine this desperate 3 mobile owner will be rapidly disowned by all, in addition to evidently having been dis-phoned by 3! Distressingly I realised I do not possess one single friend or relation I hate enough to sell my contract to and the only selling points I can think of to tempt anyone else to invest in a phone that cuts out at every opportunity if it rings at all is 'reduces mobile bills - and brain tumours'
Amusingly the uselessness of 3 coverage even cropped up as a comedy topic on the Alan Carr show the other day! Talking of which do please sign my online petition No coverage? No contract! against mobile phone companies committing this superhighway robbery of making customers pay for their entire contract length despite getting no signal! And outrageously this practice is currently entirely legal. I've also been lobbying BBC's Watchdog into an anti mobile-phone company abuse campaign too. What other company is allowed to charge for a service they cannot provide, after all?

Other news: My local radio station is currently running a series of 'Happy Scrappy!' ads on how if your car is over 10 years old and you have owned it for over a year, you can trade it in for scrap against a £3k discount on a new car. How green, I thought, appalled, giving my little 11 year old racing red Felicia a reassuring tap. Googling the scheme, apparently it is all about boosting the flaccid car industry rather than the Government honouring its own hollow green rhetoric, but whose car industry, since the vast majority of cars are no longer British-made?

Oh, and I have a new job, hence have been away from the blogosphere for a while, learning the ropes. Things going ok so far and my new colleagues seem nice. It is certainly a relief to have got something to pay the bills in the middle of a recession anyway (albeit after a great deal of trying). It's still in the educational sector, but since this blog is not meant to be about work...

Creative things have kind of been on the back burner a bit lately anyway, not to mention blogging, although I did enjoy a most congenial evening with my fellow Oxford writers at Mostly Books where we led a round table discussion on how we achieved our short story book success and options for new authors generally, to a packed house. Furthermore we seemed to have inspired the birth of a new writer's group in Abingdon, which is nice! Mark was the sort of friendly, enthusiastic, switched-on independent bookshop owner who gladdens the heart and really ought to be cloned. He had thought of everything, not least choosing suitably shaped premises in which to host events in the first place. Anyone who despairs of the future of independent bookselling ought to go and see what he is trying to achieve at his fine establishment, not to mention all his 'outreach work' organising author and reader events at festivals and schools as well as in his shop.

On a visit to Peterborough at the weekend, I was surprised at how seriously they seem to be taking the swine flu outbreak











And how blatantly they celebrate their medieaval scandals...
















En route to Peterborough we witnessed a smouldering burned out lorry and several burned out mangled lumps of metal which only hours before had presumably been cars on the closed opposite lane of the A14 attended by a plethora of emergency vehicles. Not a sausage on the news that night though, or to be found on the internet. Has anyone else noticed this disturbing trend of unreported major happenings? A couple of years ago my former line manager witnessed a young boy run out to be killed by a car on the ringroad from the bus he was travelling in, but it too never reached the news that night or the newspapers next day.

And on that cheerful note, I look forward to catching up with you all in the next few days. It seems a long time.

Heart FM Comes to Town!

Put up the bunting, get out the flags, don those pom poms folks, for we have a new radio station in town. Yes, Heart FM has extended its romantic remit of mass audience seduction beyond the Midlands at last!

And guess what? They are seeking someone innovative with a brain that can think around corners and outside of boxes for events and marketing!

Needless to say this New Romantic is submitting her CV and working on her podcast jingle ideas as we speak!

That really would be a dream job promoting lurve, romance and music! Easier than trying to sell overpriced underperforming mortgages anyway (one of my previous lives). And unlike most markets the lurve market can never be saturated - if anything demand will always, sadly, outstrip supply! It's also a station big on community and knitting commuties together in these increasingly fragmented times, which is an issue close to my own heart.

Wish me luck. No further responses from any of the other 25 or so jobs I have applied for anyway, though I am trying not to let my motivation flag.

I'll be round to visit y'all soonest dear blogging brethren.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with one of my fave romantic tracks from the 1980s. Although Billy Idol was way too scary for me to fancy as a timid young adolescent of sheltered upbringing (hard to believe, I know!), Mr Idol is at his snarling finest in this heartfelt rendering of his hit 'Sweet 16', and watching it now, I find myself in awe at how he balances such cheesiness with such soulfulness. Around the same time I remember stealing downstairs after my bedtime curfew/parents' bedtime one night to discover the incredibly haunting film Badlands with Martin Sheen at his brooding best as the troubled young James Dean lookalike who goes badly off the rails in a pan-state killing spree with his naive teen girlfriend, and find that Sweet 16 always acts as the additional soundtrack that never was in my head whenever I think of the film.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGxwaYyjfUU