THIS IS AN OLD WEBPAGE
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VIRTUAL SHOPPING VERSUS REALITY ...

This morning a lady from an outlying village came into the shop and asked for an item that was temporarily out of stock. It was a long time since I had seen this lady, who used to be a good regular customer of ours when we first came here in 1990. In fact, I had not seen her in our shop for many months, and it could have been well over a year since she last bought anything from us. This lady had for many years constantly complained about the difficulties of parking in Tetbury (which is strange, because we ourselves have never had any problems in parking here) and had always moaned that she could never park as parking used to be free and therefore every space was occupied by shopkeepers who had nowhere else to park their vehicles and by people coming into Tetbury to work at solicitors’ offices, estate agents, banks, etc. Once parking charges (quite low) were introduced at the two town centre car parks (and a new free car park was built on the edge of town) the complaint from this lady has been that ‘there is never anywhere to park’ as she obviously resents paying a few pence to park her car and refuses to walk in from the edge of town!

Fair enough! But in that case, why not take the matter up with the local councils, who are responsible for parking in Tetbury? I suggested this to my ‘customer’, who didn’t want to do this. However, what she did want to tell me, as she tells me every time she sees me, is that she now always shops at a large food multiple in Cirencester. Now, I don’t mind if anyone wants to do this – but I do object to them hardly ever using our shop, telling me they always shop somewhere else, AND moaning all the time about parking!

This is one of the negative sides of a ‘real’ shop. Other ‘minuses’ include constant grouses about the lack of shops in Tetbury (not justified, as we have two bakers, two butchers, two florists, many clothes shops, a shoe shop, a travel agents, a bookshop, two jewellers, gift shops, antique shops and restaurants), children repeatedly and loudly commenting that ‘this shop stinks’, ‘customers’ devouring all the samples and then walking out without a word or a purchase, and the occasional crooks who palm off forged £20 notes on us!

However, thank goodness there are many ‘pluses’ – all the positive comments for a start, and the customers who regale us with funny stories, jokes and local gossip (plenty of this!), and seeing people discover new cheeses by trying them – usually on a Saturday when they are in the mood to treat themselves.

How does this compare with the ‘virtual’ shop? Well, one advantage of shopping from the website is that no time is wasted – a customer can just place an order on line and we can assemble it and send it out. There is no ‘I need twenty minutes to look’, ‘can I try this?’, ‘no, I would rather have fifty grammes’, ‘do you have the cheese which I had at a restaurant six months ago and I have forgotten the name of it and everything about it …?’ This is quite good, especially at busy times like Christmas when we can get through a huge amount of business very quickly! We can also take orders from people in Australia, Japan, Egypt, the USA, and Outer Mongolia who might find it very difficult to travel to our shop, and we can send cheese to people in the UK who might have the same problem (those on coastguard stations and remote Scottish islands, for example).

We are discovering, though, that online shopping brings its own problems. The main one, in my opinion, is that there is no direct communication with customers. For example, if a customer’s credit card doesn’t work in the shop, we can always key the details in manually, or they can produce another one immediately. Online, if a customer gives credit card details which are incorrect, we do not find this out until we process the order, and then have to try and contact the customer, which can take some time. We are also experiencing problems with goods being sent to people who are out when their delivery arrives – neither the Post Office nor couriers will leave parcels in case they are stolen – and on one occasion the recipient was actually on holiday and returned to find his cheese after a week of sitting unrefrigerated in its box! Incorrect post codes (or zip codes, as our American customers know them) can be hazardous in these days of computerisation – unless the code is right, the parcel tends to go into a sort of limbo! Then there is the problem of ‘special days’ such as Christmas, Father’s Day, Easter, etc. – there are always some customers who miss the deadline and so we end up, for instance, making up Father’s Day gifts the day after the Sunday in question! Finally, in spite of stating quite clearly that we only deliver within the UK, numerous online browsers from the USA ask us to send them cheese – we would love to, but we can’t!

In conclusion, there are both positive and negative aspects to both our shops, but they complement each other really well and the combination of both means that there is rarely a dull moment at Church Street!