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Fri, Mar 21, 2008

I was in the Co-op in Broadford today, otherwise known as the Naked Dick Turpin Emporium. Why? Well, it’s daylight robbery and mostly bare of anything useful. The Co-op prices are way above any of their competitors on the mainland as there are none on the island and they effectively have a monopoly, although Lidl are holding a public meeting in Portree about plans for a new shop. But that’s not the story I want to tell today. Today I had a glimpse of a very different world. A world where people with nothing better to do, sit in the carpeted corridors of government and make up novel uses for everyday products. Or perhaps it was Co-op policy. I’m not sure so I might email them, just out of curiosity.

We’ve got an old friend staying for the Easter weekend, Graeme, who’s an ex Lonely Planet author and tutor and keen hillwalker, so we’ll be heading for the Cuillin for some gale force stravaiging and there’s nothing I like after a wild day on the hill than some local real ale. So I nipped into Turpin’s Emporium to get some Isle of Skye Brewery ale to stock up for our post prandial drinkies, plus some other stuff, like food for the hill. I wondered round the expensive and sparse isles, throwing odds and ends into the basket and then made my way to the checkout, where a wee chap sat ready to rob me of a week’s wages worth of goods, which didn’t even fill the basket. He scanned each item, passed it on and I bagged it. All was going smoothly until he came to the bottles of Porridge Ale and Red Cuillin. He stood up, turned round and shouted something across the packed shop, then sat down and all activity ceased. Was this the Co-op lunch break? Would I have to stand here for the next hour while he sat motionless, staring at the till? My curiosity piqued, I asked him what that was all about and he immediately opened up.

He was 17 you see and he couldn’t sell me alcohol without a supervisor being present. There was a button on the till that needed to be pressed to verify that a supervisor was indeed present and had allowed the sale to go ahead. Quite what the supervisor was meant to do prior to pressing the button I have no idea. Presumably breathalise me or make sure I wasn’t a raddled jakey who might drink it on the spot, smash the bottle and chase the clientele round the shop with the jagged remains. The lad was obviously intelligent and rather embarrassed and when I prompted him, he enumerated the list of items he wasn’t allowed to sell me without getting the ok from a supervisor:

Bottle openers, corkscrews, knives, forks (anything pointed in fact), firelighters, alocohol. He could drive a car but could not himself buy nor sell de-icer. But the piece de resistance was this:

Boot polish.

Yes, dear readers of this wittily informative blog, the wee lad of 17 was not allowed to sell me boot polish, without a supervisor pressing the button. Why? quoth I to the lad. Qouth he back:

“You can melt it down and sniff it”

Apparently some credulous cretin, either in government, quango or Co-op had sat down and come up with 101 uses of boot polish which don’t involve polishing your boots. And they’d reached the conclusion that a polish sniffing maniac, upon seeing a Co-op till staffed by a 17 year old, would think Christmas had arrived early and would rush in and buy the whole lot. However, if I was a polish sniffing weirdo, which I’m not, I hope, I’d just walk in and steal it. I wouldn’t care about the guardian of the till. I’d just nick it and leg it.

The pair of us had a right old laugh about it, with me rocking and rolling in the aisle and making it quite plain to all and sundry what I thought of the Co-op and their pathetic rules. I noted loudly that they didn’t have a rule whereby customers could purchase a wide range of reasonably priced goods. All in all a Victor Meldrew moment. I must be getting old when I lambast the bare corridors of Co-op power and ridicule their health and safety laws in public.

So next time you’re in the Co-op in Broadford, ask an assistant if they stock low temperature boot polish as you’re an environmentally friendly polish sniffing crack head who would also like some edible firelighters, all washed down with lashings of hot de-icer.