On 1st october
2005 Daily Bread
Co-operative Ltd will have been trading for 25 years. To
celebrate this milestone we had several events, instore
tastings and displays over the year most of which
were instore.
Daily Bread held a major outside event
on 19th November 2005 which was themed on Daily Bread’s
25th but also there were displays and stalls from Worker
Co-ops, Social Enterprises, Community Co-ops, Credit Unions
and Enterprise Solutions, the County’s Support Agency
for all the above.
October 1st 1980 won’t stand out in many peoples’ minds
as anything too eventful in the annals of local history.
Just an ordinary mid-week day when not much remarkable was
happening in Northampton. Even the weather was nothing special.
But for those associated with a project to breath new life
into some old, rather shabby disused buildings on the Bedford
Rd, it will be remembered as the first day of something rather
unusual. This was the day when Daily Bread Co-operative first
opened its doors to the buying public. It passed me by I’m
afraid. From the Company Minutes, apart from maybe a couple
of dozen curious individuals, it seems to have passed by
just about everyone else living in Northampton at that time.
Twenty five years on, from the outside nothing much seems
to have changed. The gabled redbrick building that was once
laundry to St Andrews Hospital up the hill has stayed very
much in character. Some say it has the style and charm of
a small Victorian railway station or primary school. No bad
thing - the Victorians built to last. The huge black wooden
door that opens for business every morning is much as it
always was except that these days it opens promptly at 8.30am
instead of the leisurely 11o’clock start enjoyed in
those early days of trading.
Inside, the scene was very different. The ‘shop’ at
that time was almost embarrassingly spacious. With only 33
products on offer - all of them basic items like fruit, nuts,
seeds and grains, there was plenty of room to spread them
out alongside the sacks and boxes they came in. Not much
there then to excite the sort of shoppers who might be expected
to turn up for the opening of a brand new store in town.
But then, there weren’t meant to be many ‘shoppers’ in
the modern trolley-pushing sense. And there certainly wasn’t
any ‘brand’ awareness. The original idea was
to sell mainly wholesale goods to local small businesses
and only pack down to consumer quantities when someone asked
a favour.
The area we now know as ‘front of shop’ was
basically a cash-and-carry checkout. You could also get small
quantities weighed out right in front of you. In those days,
the serving area was positioned at the far end, with its
back to the Nene Centre. Two huge baskets hung like chandeliers
from the rafters, carrying a display of dried vegetation.
Not surprisingly, the baskets were deemed to be a dust trap
and soon disappeared. Now, this area has shelves stacked
high with fruit bars, nut bars, muesli bars, seed bars, books,
balms, bodycare bottles, eco-clothing and jute bags. Where
once was just a simple mechanical till that wouldn’t
have looked out of place in Open All Hours, there are now
two computer-driven electronic point-of-sale terminals that
fairly hum with activity at busy times of the day. Packing
down is now performed out of sight, sacks are stored for
as little time as possible ‘out back’ and the
only large boxes you should see have been stacked well above
eye level.
Today, when over 4000 products are on display, it’s
easy to lose sight of just how basic and primitive those
early days of trading really were. It’s recorded that
in the first four days of business just 42 customers passed
through the premises, spending a total between them of £100
per day. Compare that to now when £7,000+ turnover
in a single day is quite the norm and the average number
of customers is around 2000 a week.
So, what’s happened in the intervening years? To an
outsider, it might appear that the business has barely grown.
The premises have hardly changed, there’s been no nationwide
expansion along the lines enjoyed by supermarket chains.
There have been many challenges and even a few near disasters
along the way. As for business growth, that’s not a
major preoccupation. We’ll never be another major supermarket,
thank you very much. We’re not really supposed to grow
at all, except in a spiritual sense. Yet it seems, despite
all attempts to hold back progress or squander profits on
outdated systems, inefficient processes and happy but carefree
staff, no one seems able to stop the business flourishing.
We have more shelves, more stock, more workers, more customers,
more trolleys, more of almost everything that existed at
the time of opening. Except that one thing has not grown,
one vital commodity without which we couldn’t exist
at all. It’s called space - our final frontier. All
that’s happened is everything and everyone have grown
closer together. Some would call that crowded, others take
delight in the feeling of cosiness. Even the addition of
a mezzanine platform, whilst it contributed to multi-level
working, made little difference to the overall capacity of
the building.
The above is an edited extract from the forthcoming new booklet
about Daily Bread by John Kerr
|
In
the Beginning....