Skinflint's City Diary
The Marlborough Street magistrates have been handing out brisk justice to foreign shoplifters to the delight of some, particularly those who own shops in Oxford Street.
An acquaintance of mine has two busy shops in Oxford Street and has been plagued by shoplifting since he opened for business a few years ago. But the worst and most difficult to detect thefts have been those involving young girl assistants whose friends visit them and are under-invoiced. Recently, after a few weeks of patient and expensive observation by private detectives a cashier and her fellow conspirators were caught. They were hauled off to Marlborough Street where they were fined £5 with £2 costs to the dismay of the shopkeeper.
Nevertheless, I am inclined to tolerance, perhaps because years ago, as an army trooper, I was grilled by railway police for niovmg my own kitbag ' suspiciously' on Kings Cross station. I have a nasty suspicion that rough justice sometimes starts a little further back in the line than at Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court.
Discount man
Richard Tompkins saw the Green Stamp concept in the United States in the 1950s, and had the idea of starting a similar and strikingly successful scheme over here — Green Shield. Now he has imported another American idea — catalogue discounting.
His Argus Discount Shops have been lent £5 million by his private Green Shield company as well as a wide range of initial stock.
If anyone with less market power than Tompkins had started Argus there would have been pressure from the major stores and retailing groups on the manufacturers to withhold supplies. As it is they are hopping mad.
Argus hand out a fat full-colour catalogue with 40,000 items listed. The shops carry many of the items in stock and the discounts they offer give the conventional retailer a cold shudder, though Argus hope to finish with a 25 per cent gross margin across the board.
It's unnecessary to be sorry for Richard Tompkins on margins, though it is perhaps worth sharing a tear with him on the trouble he is having getting replenishment stock during the present crazy. consumer-led inflation spiral.
Who said that?
"Order in the universe is kept by the inter-action of two forces, the centripetal or socialistic, and the centrifugal or individualistic. Every department of life that the individual can control should be left to him, for he stands for initiative and progress; but all the departments of life and public service, which he can only control through joint stock companies or with others, should be given over to state control, such as railways,' gas and water companies; and of course the land must belong to all."
Can you remember who wrote this and went on to state that Goethe was the first to state the truth: in the fragment of a play on Prometheus, Epimetheus asks, "What then is thine?" arid Prometheus answers, "The sphere that my activity can fill: No more, no less."
Skinflint offers a bottle of cochineal-tinted Bordeaux for the first correct answer.
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