INDEPENDENT VOICES: CHRIS CONNOLLY
Frightened, but perhaps enlightened Chris Connolly of Birmingham independent merchant Connolly’s takes stock of a nerve-wracking few months – and begins to plot a path to recovery out of the coronavirus wreckage
F
ML, where do you start?
I remember just after Christmas
being seriously brassed off by a
customer who had had umpteen samples and demanded endless list re-writes
before announcing that someone else was marginally cheaper so they were going to transfer the business to them.
I was bloody fuming, incandescent,
beyond seething. But I wasn’t scared. Now I’m spending a lot of time feeling scared. Not worried as in “business is a bit slow, how are we going to pay the VAT?” but
“are my loved ones going to survive this?” scared. Business worries come in a very distant second. Even Brexit pales into insignificance.
Life for the vast majority in post war
Britain has been pretty good, all things
considered; the occasional economic blip but largely pretty good. We’ve got used to being safe and secure. SARS, bird flu and Ebola were all things that affected
other people – then midnight struck on
December 31 and 2020 knocked on the door with a scythe over his shoulder saying “here’s Johnny!”
So, January was OK; we had a sale which
went well, shifted a lot of “slower moving stock” and made way for the tidal wave
of new arrivals that we went in search of.
Connolly’s branch in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter
Heard a few stories about Wuhan (WTF
And then it hit Italy and suddenly things
is Wuhan?) and dismissed them ‘cos it’s
started to feel a bit more real, particularly
something and nothing. Mind you, you’ve
three months previously had been telling
on the other side of the planet and it’ll
be just like bird flu that turned out to be got to wonder how on earth they shut down a whole country, haven’t you?
THE WINE MERCHANT may 2020 10
if you were running short of bog paper.
But interestingly, although those folk who, us that “we’d got through two world wars
so Brexit will be fine” were now scrapping