Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  * In his time Frank has successfully sold people worthless properties, blighted land, timeshares, conservatories and insurance. But undoubtedly his best and biggest offer has been himself, gift-wrapped in Armani and presented to us as mayor and councillor and pillar of the community – an offer which, like the people of Troy, we did not refuse and have come bitterly to regret.

  * The Two Little Fleas has long since been deleted, alas, but copies do occasionally crop up on on-line ukulele music and memorabilia auction sites: the last copy to have surfaced, on www.ukesandbanjeleles.com, sold for £800 within forty-eight hours, which is ironic because Bill and Antonietta had had to pay to have the record produced in the first place, and when their son Richard was clearing out the house a few years ago, after they’d died, he threw away about 500 unsold copies which had been kept in the loft, and he has been kicking himself ever since. Now he saves everything that might one day be worth something: hundreds of his children’s drawings and paintings, in case they become artists, thousands of photographs of them in case they become famous, their shoes, their clothes, hours of home-video recordings. His wife Lena is threatening to divorce him unless he stops. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he tells her. ‘This is history in the making.’ ‘Well, it looks to me like a rubbish dump in the making, ’ says Lena, ‘and I can’t get into the cupboards to put away the laundry. So it’s your choice: it’s either me or it’s your memorabilia.’

  * Although if there was no Catherine Cookson in the library she’d settle for a Joan Jonker, a Nora Kay, or a Mary Larkin. Philomena, one of the librarians, who is studying part-time for an MA up in the city, and whose tastes run more to the Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson and Orange Prize for Fiction end of the literary spectrum, tried to set up a women’s reading group in the library a couple of years back, to encourage some of the older ladies to experiment a little more in their choice of reading. She started them off with Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which was a surprising success – there are a lot of older ladies in our town, it seems, who can readily identify with a story of sadomasochistic sex, love and abjection – and there was a brief period when Sylvia Plaths and Kathy Ackers were being requested on inter-library loan almost every week, but people’s enthusiasm soon faded and Catherine Cookson re-emerged triumphant.

  16

  Speedy Bap!

  On the beauty of franchising

  It hasn’t rained for almost a week, but the Quality Hotel, like a lot of the older buildings around town, still has its big rain stain, right down the middle, which makes it look like it has peed itself, like the front of an old man’s trousers, but it makes no odds to Bob Savory. Every man, after a certain age, knows what it is to feel a little dribble and dampness after rains, and so it didn’t worry Bob, the sight of a building looking a little leaky. Like a member of the family, like all of us, Bob had seen the Quality Hotel at its best and at its worst, trousers up and trousers down, in all our four seasons: Soaking, Wet, Damp and Almost Dry.

  Bob was driving past nearly every day now, on his way to see his mother, in his BMW during the week and his Porsche at weekends, eyeing up that precious, damp little corner on Main Street and High Street, imagining what it was going to look like once the Quality Hotel had gone and the space was cleared, and the new development was finished, and the first Speedy Bap! was opened, nice and prominent, at the very front of the mixed retail and apartment development, the big flagship scheme that Frank Gilbey had promised him he was planning. Bob had become obsessed with the Quality Hotel and the space that it occupied.

  More than anything he needed the Quality Hotel out of the way.

  He wished Davey Quinn would get on with it.

  He wished the hotel could just somehow pull up its trousers, make its apologies and leave.

  The funny thing is, Bob isn’t really that interested in property. He needed a high-street presence, of course, it was part of his game plan, but he knew that the future really lay in clicks not bricks – he’d read that in a management book and he could remember it because it rhymed. (All the best ideas in management books rhymed, in Bob’s opinion. In all books, actually: The Cat in the Hat, for example, that was a good book, according to Bob. Bob couldn’t see much point in books that didn’t have catchphrases and rhymes. There was no way you were ever going to remember the principles of sound accounting or refinancing, let alone the adventures of Flopsy Bunny or whatever it was, unless it could be reduced to a rhyme or a phrase. It was all about brand recognition, as far as Bob was concerned. He’d heard from Billy Nibbs that some poems these days didn’t rhyme, which made no sense to him at all: if it didn’t rhyme, how did you know it was a poem?)*

  Bob had had big posters and laminates made up of his favourite business and management rhymes and mantras in order to help motivate his staff, and he had them placed all round the Old-Fashioned Foods (Cooked the Traditional Way) factory and warehouse, including in the rest areas, the toilets and the locker room: ‘Success Depends on Choice Not Chance’ employees were told, as they flushed, or washed their hands, ‘Motivate Don’t Dominate’ they were instructed in the canteen, as they ate their subsidised Sandwich Classics and Snack Foods for the Discerning Palet, ‘The Objective Is Greater than the Subjective’ announced a sign in Accounts where you went to collect your wages, and ‘Zap the Gaps’ said the swing door into the packing room.

  Bob devoured management books – books by grinning businessmen about grinning businessmen for grinning businessmen, and he sucked out the wisdom from those big cheesy books like a cat in a hat at a bowl of Whiskas Supermeat, and he knew from reading the books that in the future his business was going to need more of an on-line presence. That was the marrow and the jelly, that was the guts of all those books, the liver, the kidneys and the heart. That was all the raw information he took from them. At the moment he has a pretty basic website put together by Carl and Calvin Mathers, who are the sons of Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers, our one and only remaining greengrocer there on Main Street. Carl and Calvin run a little graphic and web design company from the front room of their shared terraced house on Scotch Street, which constitutes our town’s very own Silicon Valley: most of the other houses on Scotch Street have cable and Mr Portek, at number 19, who is seventy and still working, is an amateur radio ham, and the Maguires, at the end terrace nearest the High Street, have six children, three bedrooms, two computers and a modem. Carl and Calvin also run a business selling corporate recognition products – keyrings, T-shirts, pens, mouse mats and mugs – and they used to have a stall in the market on Tuesdays, selling ladies’ clothes. Everyone in town agrees that they’re two young fellas with a bright future ahead of them and the boys both look up to Bob Savory, and Bob admires their entrepreneurial spirit, although in all honesty the website is not very good – everything they know Carl and Calvin have learnt from books on loan from the library. At the moment the site only gives information about the product lines and the history of the company and a contact address, and Bob knew that pretty soon Sandwich Classics and Speedy Bap! were going to need more than Carl and Calvin could offer: the sandwich of the future was going to need a much stronger virtual presence.

  The good thing about sandwiches, of course, their advantage in the twenty-first-century food retail market place, is that they don’t need to be hot, they’re small, they allow for an infinite range of variations to suit consumer preferences and they’re cheap to make. They’re a capitalist’s dream, in fact, sandwiches; they are the epitome of market populism. They’re economic and they’re democratic. The only problem with sandwiches is the delivery mechanism, getting them to customers when they want them, where they want them. Garages and corner shops are fine, but in the frictionless economy of the future, with everyone on the move and everyone connected, the sandwich presented something of a blockage. Also, some people still preferred to make their own.

  Bob’s answer to this problem – the essential stay-at-home stickiness of the sandwich –
was franchising and on-line ordering. He already had the catering contracts for a lot of local businesses and organisations, receiving orders by e-mail and telephone, manufacturing it all off site, in bulk, and shipping it in. Gourmet sandwiches with no fuss, no bother, no need for expensive facilities and hardly any wastage: offices, factories, schools, every institution in the county had lapped it up. That was pretty simple and the obvious next stage in the game plan, Bob believed, was taking the product to the streets and setting up his own franchise.

  The beauty of franchising was obvious to Bob, just like the music of Elton John and Sting, or the interior of a brand-new German car. It was self-evident. All you had to do was develop a successful business format – the System – which you then sold to other entrepreneurs, offering them some kind of training and support, and then you just sat back and watched the money start rolling in. You charged an initial franchise fee and then a continuing franchise fee, and suddenly it’s goodbye to local success and hello world domination. Like most people in our town, Bob had a vision of the Golden Arches on the horizon, except his wasn’t just a vision of the drive-in McDonald’s on the ring road. No, Bob had seen the future, and the future looked like two slices of wafer-thin honey-cured ham with freshly chopped vine-ripened tomato and French mustard between two slices of granary. Bob’s future was butter side up and slathered with mayo. Bob had the touch, he had the knack and he also had the vision.

  The great thing about franchising, the greatest thing, in fact, as far as Bob was concerned, is that you develop the product not by using your own finances, but by using someone else’s, the finances of the franchisee, so you’re spreading risk. Also, franchising relies on just one thing to make it work: quality and consistency. That’s two things, actually, but in Bob’s mind they were one and there aren’t many people around town these days who would be in a position to put Bob right on something like that. Actually, if Bob said salt was sugar there are a lot of people around town who would probably have agreed. But in fairness to him, Bob’s point held: there probably is no such thing as quality without consistency. In order to achieve quality you have to maintain your standards of service, that was the key, according to Bob. He already had his basic business concept: Sandwich Classics (and Snack Foods for the Discerning Palet) in a shop, with on-line and text message ordering available. He was going to call the shop Speedy Bap!. Like Pizza Express, except without the pizza. He’d employed a consultant from London to come up with that.*

  All he needed now was to get his pilot retail operation up and running.

  Which was where the Quality Hotel came in.

  As soon as the hotel was out of the way and the pilot shop was open, all Bob needed to do was develop a franchise package, an operational manual, market the package, select his franchisee, develop the organisation and roll out across the country, and bingo! A Speedy Bap! in every mall, every school, every business, on-line and in every town centre redevelopment project, so that it became unavoidable and inevitable. Ray Kroc, roll over.

  The one thing Bob could not afford at this stage was for anyone or anything to disrupt the System. The System was what he had worked for years towards establishing and he was pretty close to perfecting it, the whole thing, every aspect of the Speedy Bap! brand, from the exact weight of a spoonful of mayonnaise used in a BLT, to the optimum cosy-cum-industrial sandwich-buying environment, all light and spacious and airy but with no-nonsense straight-backed wooden chairs and tables, that he was planning for the first shop. This was definitely the beginning of the big time for Bob Savory, the saviour of the sandwich.

  He already had a head start, of course; he’d built up a certain amount of brand loyalty locally. If you were to stop at a garage on the ring road to buy a sandwich, for example, or even further afield, anywhere in the county, in fact, and in quite a lot of places up in the city, you’d automatically look for one of those distinctive red-badged Sandwich Classics triangular packs as a guarantee of quality. The little Sandwich Classics red badge shows a cottage loaf in profile, and the label reads ‘SANDWICH CLASSICS: QUALITY GUARANTEED’ and it tells you what your sandwich is, in writing that suggests it might be Bob’s own handwriting and Bob’s own signature, but it isn’t. The use of the handwriting is of course supposed to encourage the consumer to associate the product with all the qualities of the home-made and the natural, which is good, but unfortunately Bob’s actual handwriting is a terrible mess – the uneven, crooked writing of a man with better things to do than to write labels for sandwiches – and his signature is the signature of someone who’d never worked at it much beyond adolescence, so you’d be more inclined to associate the product with poor schooling at primary level. Bob had drafted in Calvin and Carl Mathers to design the labels, and they had chosen a nice handwriting font, the Edwardian™, whose tranquil curves and brisk uprights suggested both doughiness and mature good taste. It was the same trick with the cottage loaf. Bob had never actually used a cottage loaf in production, but in marketing and retail it’s the thought that counts.

  Bob had deliberately avoided the words ‘fresh’ and ‘freshness’ on all his packaging and products, ‘fresh’ being a word used by Bob’s biggest competitor, the 5F food company, who are based up in the city. The problem with freshness as a concept and ‘fresh’ as a word, Bob thought, and the mistake his competitor Foster’s Family Fresh Fast Foods had made was that talk of freshness immediately suggested staleness. Also, for a sandwich to be fresh was really the very least you expected of it. It was like boasting of water that it’s wet. Bob wanted to create greater expectations than that. The expectation in the Sandwich Classics brand was suggested by the word ‘Classics’, which Bob felt implied certain standards, a certain timelessness, a touch of the Elton John, perhaps, or Humphrey Bogart, or Jennifer Aniston. Bob believed that when you ate one of his salami, Swiss and coleslaw sandwiches you could imagine that you were on the set of Friends, or in the studio recording a version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ with the bigwigged one himself. The London consultant, Terry Carey of the Niche Naming and Product Placement Consultancy, had prepared a hundred-page report on the Speedy Bap! brand, which had cost Bob £10,000. It was worth every penny.*

  To Bob, this seemed obvious. He always worked hard to get the little details right, to create the right expectations. He obsessed about them and he couldn’t understand it when other people didn’t understand his obsessions. Like most successful people, Bob Savory secretly despised the unsuccessful. The reason he despised them was because Bob knew the secret of his success – and the secret of his success was simply that he worked harder than other people. That was it. Work – sheer hard dedicated work – was the thing that really mattered. If you worked harder than other people, Bob believed, you were bound in the end to succeed.†

  Bob had realised this when he was training as a cook. He went into the kitchens a boy and he came out a man – that’s what he told himself and the Impartial Recorder, if they asked, and it was true. Bob had gone into the kitchen thinking that hard work was completing his homework on time and without complaint, and doing a paper round. But once he’d started working in the kitchens he realised that hard work was something else entirely. Hard work was why his dad fell asleep in front of the telly at night, why his hands were calloused and his hair was grey. Hard work killed you. It took your life from you. But it also gave a life to you. It was a blessing and a curse. It was the thing that conferred meaning and in exchange for meaning it took everything.

  It was difficult, obviously, always to convince his staff of this plain truth. Most people, in Bob’s experience, are happy just to put in the hours and take the money and go home, and kid themselves that they’re living. In fact, in Bob’s experience, about 99 per cent of people are complete time wasters, perpetual paper boys on a road to nowhere, and they don’t even know it because they’re too busy browsing the tabloids, or too lazy to care. This was one of the main things Bob had learnt from working in business and employing people, and it was another of h
is mantras – 99 Per Cent of People are Time Wasters – but he could hardly put that up as a poster around the factory, so he just worked on that assumption. Everyone was a time waster in Bob’s book until they proved themselves otherwise. Bob believed that before you could expect any recognition or reward from your employer you had to prove that you deserved it: that was a basic rule of life as far as Bob was concerned, and it was reflected in the pay structures in the Sandwich Classics and Old-Fashioned Foods (Cooked the Traditional Way) factory. Loyalty and hard work had to be demonstrated and, if they were, if you worked really hard, your pay packet grew heavier, eventually exceeding the minimum wage. Bob could not tolerate time wasters, whingers and scroungers. He’d employed someone once who’d started at the end of a shift on a Friday morning and he’d sacked them by the afternoon, because they’d said to him, when he asked how they were getting on, ‘Well, at least tomorrow’s the weekend.’ They were joking, but Bob hated that sort of attitude.

  Food, Bob believed, was special and it deserved respect. It was not something to be scoffed at. People thought about food all the time, they devoted a lot of serious thinking time to what they were going to eat, and when and how, and Bob figured that if you could work out what people thought about food, you were close to understanding the secret of existence, or at least the secret of business. People thought about sex and money a lot as well, obviously, but for Bob food implied sex and money, and power. Food had given him all three things in abundance and he hadn’t sought them: they’d come to him unbidden. Which is why he loved food – the implications of food are what he enjoyed, as well as the stuff itself. Food, for Bob, was magical. It was sacred.