We used them regularly, between Woolworths' main offices: Marylebone (London), Castleton (nr Manchester), Swindon.
Not in all cases. When I helped my in-laws move house in 1986, mother in law was mortified she couldn't offer the removal men a cup of tea. Father in law was not the most practical of men, so it was left to me to spend a long afternoon replacing the plugs on every single appliance they had brought with them. Starting, of course, with the kettle!
As a child I remember the kettle had a circular plug with an extra pin that if the kettle was switched on with insufficient water, this pin would eject the lead, causing a problem if there were cups in the way.When I worked in a school we had a internal post system of trays in the staff room, the recycling of previously used envelopes would have kept Mother Nature very happy indeed that is for sure! The guy responsible for doing all the post was a legend too, he had no aspirations ever to be anything more than the bloke doing the post and everyone loved him!
I shiver when I look back at the days of a holiday request involving filling in a slip of paper, leaving it on your line manager desk, having to eventually ask them anyway as they had inevitably not noticed it in the mess of all the other paperwork on their desk, then they would have to sign it and send it off to HR who would finally log it on the system about a millennium after you had come back from the day off!
We used to have PAT Testers coming in and charging 20p a go or whatever - fair enough until they spotted that full box of power cables that were brand new, still in packaging, probably never ever going to be used they just came as standard with the new computers each year, 'ah we better test every single one of those just in case of course...'
Eventually I think we managed to train someone internally in the Estates department to carry it out instead!
It was ALWAYS the kettle that would fail...
Every time I've moved house, (I'm in my 6th house now), I/We've always taken kettle/cups/spoons in the car so that we can brew up on arrival. The alternative is to pack them for the removals van and no matter how planned it is that box might not be first out.
One hopes that but taking them along is better, - on two of my moves the removers have beaten us to the new house.It will be first out if the removers know what's in it
https://issuu.com/retromash/docs/argos-no01-1973-74 has the 1973-74 Argos catalogue. Page 84 has a Swan kettle for £3.95 or a Russell Hobbs one for £6.10. With the Bank of England RPI inflation calculator, in today's money those are £43.50 and £67.17.
My parent's Swan kettle may have been a 1940 wedding present and was still used daily, possibly into the 1990s. We had an older kettle in reserve that went on the gas cooker.
Also of course, if your cheap kettle stopped working you could usually replace the element with a generic spare quite easily, they were widely available.
Good point - that hadn’t occurred to me!
Kiss of death here:
Strange how those “exceptionally high call volumes” and “busier than usual” phone lines happen every single day - just like “more trains than usual needing repair”. How long before “more than usual “ becomes “the new usual”?
Try ringing the sales department,your call is answered so fast it's almost telepathic !
Same, since I was doing Physics at that time.
In my job I receive calls classified "cancellation" that are not actual cancellations. I reckon customers press the cancellation option because they think they are more likely to reach a person that way!
Still very much around but done largely digitally these days, nevertheless those on the ground now use tablets instead of clipboards and stopwatches are not as prominently visible. Only a few weeks back, I was talking to a (now) retired gent, who said that he was involved in essentially time and motion studies of binmen (waste operatives) just a few years ago...resulting in numerous redundacies. I can attest to this; just before COVID I was accompanying bin crews visiting flats and houses: I had to check on whether more recycling bins could be accomodated, I had to jog all the time to keep up with them!
True! I once worked in a retentions team. Keeping the business is a priority with incentives on offer to do so. Some customers are wise to this and regularly threaten to go elsewhere.
Time management wasn't just clipboards and stopwatches, in the '60s and '70s MTM, (Method Time Management, a set of tools to analyse hand, body and sensing interactions), was a very useful tool for designing products and their manufacturing processes for time efficiency. It resulted in products, tools and work environments being designed to aid time efficiency and reduce manufacturing errors.
Time and Motion Man was memorably played by John Le Mesurier
I was trained in MTM with a major clearing bank. Unions and branch managers complained that staffing was too tight while regions and head office thought it too lax so we reckoned we had things about right.
Yes, people will sometimes phones seeking incentives to stay with a company, typically if not necessarily discounts.
