Unexpected

You know how we’ve become accustomed, in North America at least (where working in a retail service position is generally viewed as something you do until you get a real job — more about this below), to being served at “big box” stores by mindless drones with no real product knowledge or experience…

And yet… the unexpected sometimes happens. Twice now we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the knowledge and hands-on experience of the staff of the Michaels® crafts store in Waterloo.

Once was when K (aside: the link is to her new blog “42.1“; wabi sabi has been retired from active blogging duty, although it’s still on-line if you’re looking for her earlier knitting posts — she’s consolidated her on-line knitting presence at the shownotes blog of her Purl Diving podcast) and I were shopping for a stamp-pad to make Christmas cards. To make a long story short, the woman working there had been doing stamping for a good decade or two and provided us with very helpful guidance on which brand and type of stamp-pad would work best for the cards we were using — a heavy, textured stock in a dark red. She explained the pros and cons of the different ones they carry and said which one she preferred, and why — longevity, quality of the impression and so on.

Then, today, K was in search of some Japanese seed beads, size 6 and 8, which are on the requirements list for a beaded knitting workshop she’s attending next weekend. First, we tried the specialty bead store in Waterloo — no luck. They did have some seed beads, but much smaller than the sizes K needs.

The clerk was pleasant enough, but wasn’t experienced enough to suggest alternatives they might have other than to point out the section where there might be something that would work. Now, they do have a lot of beads… which is admittedly A Good Thing for a bead store, but makes finding just the right one a bit like the proverbial needle in a haystack endeavour.

The best she could suggest was to call back Monday and speak to the owner, who knows about beads and might be able to help. Riiight.

So, off to Michaels… but K didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything remotely like what she needed at a big box store. Still, it turned out they had some seed beads, and what’s more — they had, once again, a staff member who actually knew about beads and beading. She was able to at least find us some that should be suitable for one of the projects on the agenda for the workshop.

On top of that, she recommended a couple of bead stores in the area — well, actually, three, including the one in Waterloo that we had just come from, which we mentioned — that might be able to help us out with the other, slightly smaller size bead. We will likely try out at least one of them to see if anything suitable can be found in time.

Now, perhaps the store management at Michaels might not be too keen about staff referring customers to a competitor (albeit a small one), but in this case, we did buy some beads from them, and based on our experiences there with staff that actually know something about the products they sell, we’ll definitely be back for other purchases. In my mind, that’s a pretty good payoff for them.

Now, of course, Your Mileage May Vary and I can’t say that every Michaels will have the same quality of staff, but it’s at least encouraging to know that big box does not always equal the death of decent service.

Oh, and about the earlier observation about service jobs being looked down upon in North America (and with some justification… can you say “D’ya want fries with that?”), it’s in contrast with what we experienced when we lived in France for several years (and had the opportunity to travel a bit throughout Europe, as well). There, service jobs, at least the ones where you don’t ask “Voulez-vous des frites avec ça ?“, are still respected and reasonably well compensated. As a result, you get people doing these jobs who enjoy it, who are knowledgeable about the field and are proud to serve you professionally.

Miss that, a lot. Ah, well — small finds like the staff at Michaels keep the flame alive…

The Good, The Bad and The Miscellaneous

The Good

Yesterday evening, we (me and my wife, K, that is) were in The Big Smoke for a book launch party that K had been invited to. She’s known Amy, the book’s author (she’s also Editor/Publisher of the on-line knitting magazine knitty.com), for some time so to show support we schlepped into town to help her celebrate.

The book’s title, No Sheep For You, alludes to Amy’s allergy to wool and fabrics made from it — as a knitter, this has a somewhat limiting effect… The book is filled with information about substituting alternative fibres in hand knit garments — the characteristics of each type of fibre and the yarns made from them mean that it’s not always a straightforward substitution as adjustments need to be made to accommodate the differences in order to make a satisfactory finished garment.

The book has actually been out for a while now, but Amy wanted to have the launch party outside of Lettuce Knit, a local yarn shop that she frequents and which holds weekly “stitch ‘n bitch” knitting get-togethers. Weather was therefore a determining factor, and it’s finally becoming seasonable enough in these parts that she was able to schedule the party with reasonable confidence that there wouldn’t be snow…

It was a great party, and Amy deserves lots of congratulations (and success) for all her hard work in putting together the book and knitty.com — here’s a picture of the get-together, with arrows to point out K and Amy:

During the party, I did wander off while everyone knitted and chatted, exploring old familiar stomping grounds: Kensington Market, Spadina Ave (including walking by the El Mo, where I had seen George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers perform an amazing set many moons ago), up through the campus of the ol’ Alma Mater and on into Yorkville.

Which leads to…

The Bad

Walking back to Amy’s book launch party from Yorkville, I passed along Cumberland St, where there are a number of chi-chi re$taurant$ and boutique$. Now Cumberland is a no parking zone, but I came across a Mercedes-Benz AMG SL55 AMG folding-roof convertible (I can tell you exactly what kind of car it was because it had the “V8 Kompressor” logo on the side of the front fender — I am an admitted, life-long gear-head, and didn’t need to look at the trunk lid for the model badge to identify it) parked at the curb in front of one of those aforementioned restos. It had a handicapped-parking permit on the dashboard.

Now, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the owner/driver, or perhaps their passenger, were legitimately entitled to be issued the permit by the authorities — but it certainly made me go “hmmm…” and wonder if there had been some monetary influence involved in getting the necessary medical certificate required to obtain said permit.

Then, a short distance down the street: another fancy-schmancy car parked in the no parking zone, also with a handicapped permit. If memory serves me correctly, this one was a Bimmer, a 6-series if I’m not mistaken — I wasn’t paying as much attention at this point (being distracted by my thinking about the possibility that fraudulently obtained permits were being used to abuse a privilege that should be reserved for those who truly need it), so I can’t say with authority whether it was the vanilla version or the M6 überwagen with the V10, or even whether it was a coupé or cabriolet.

So, while it’s possible that both of these were legitimate applications of the handicapped parking privilege, the circumstances — two very expen$ive cars parked in front of expen$ive restos on an up-scale street in a trendy neighbourhood…. well, let’s say that I’m leaning heavily towards believing that everything was not exactly on the up-and-up.

The Miscellaneous

There were a couple of other items from yesterday’s foray into T.O. that were interesting (well, at least to me — Your Mileage May Vary) that I will mention here:

While driving in to the city, we came across a pixelboard displaying the following news item:

Which was immediately followed by:

An unfortuitous (or perhaps intentional ) — but amusing — juxtaposition…

The other miscellany: while walking along Yorkville Ave, I noted on the hoarding in front of a construction project a sign reading something like “Funding provided by BNP Paribas (Canada)“.

Why did this seemingly mundane sign catch my eye? Well, BNP Paribas is a French bank that I am familiar with from my time living/working in France — but I had no idea that they had a presence in Canada.

Certainly not an earth-shattering observation, just one of those connectedness things that strikes you at odd occasions and in odd places.

Paraphrasing William Shakespeare

To paraphrase Dick the Butcher in William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 Act 4 Scene 2:

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the MBAs

OK that may be a bit harsh. What’s prompted it is a bit convoluted; bear with me.

The story starts in the Shetland Islands, north-east of Scotland. A particular style of knitting has evolved there, called Fair Isle, which involves creating intricate patterns of colourwork — here’s a few examples:

That’s the body of a Fair Isle sweater in the process of being knit — the pattern is, I believe, called Henry VIII.

This is a detail of Henry.

This one’s a Fair Isle vest; the pattern is called Reef, I think.

In case you’re wondering, these were knit by my wife, K, and she’s the one who passed on a bit of information that led to me writing this.

You see, in order to knit Fair Isle, you need a huge palette of colours, in subtle gradations. What’s more, you may only need a small amount of some of the accent colours — possibly less than a full skein or ball for one pattern. You might use the leftovers of the colour for another pattern, perhaps not.

The results, I think, speak for themselves… the garments can be simply stunning.

What, you ask, does that have to do with paraphrasing Old Will and wishing harm to MBAs?

Well, there are principally two manufacturers of real Shetland yarn for Fair Isle knitting: Jamiesons of Shetland and Jamieson and Smith Shetland Wool Brokers. And it seems that the latter, known as J & S in the knitting community, has announced that they will be discontinuing about half of the their colour palette.

Apparently, the company has been bought by an English firm from the mainland. And they’ve decided that because the minimum economic production run for a colour is something like 1780 skeins, that the business can’t be run profitably with such a large range of colours — particularly when some of the accent colours do not sell in high volume (for the reason noted above).

Now, I’m all for running a business at a profit; that’s not what’s got me going here. It’s the stunningly shortsighted inability of some off-shore management group (likely composed at least in good measure of young MBAs hungry to make a name for themselves) to understand the fundamental nature of the business.

Dropping half the colours from the palette is not going to achieve the desired result, which I expect they believe will be increased inventory turns on the remaining colours. But it doesn’t work that way — you can’t knit Fair Isle properly without the subtle gradations of colour; removing half the palette will just destroy the beauty of the pattern. In fact it will make it un-knittable, as you can’t just say “Right, can’t get that accent colour anymore, I’ll just use a bit more of this other colour they still make”.

An analogy would be if Crayola were to decide that it’s really not cost effective to put 64 different colours in a jumbo box of crayons, and then eliminate a whole whack of them — maybe you’d get 4 crayons of each of just 16 colours instead.  I mean, really, who needs that many colours — MBAs seem to get along fine with just black and red ink, and the less of the red the better.  Surely kids will be just as happy to draw a less colourful, more homogenized world — won’t they?

So it’s quite likely, at least in my opinion, that in the end they’ll sell less yarn overall. Not a good way to increase your inventory turns and profits.  And, more’s the pity, there will be fewer Fair Isle garments knit; perhaps eventually the style will die out — what a loss that would be.

But I suppose they’ve run a case study, built an economic model based on some assumptions learned at MBA school and ran the numbers to determine that this, the conventional (business) wisdom, is The Answer To The Problem.

I suppose the point of all this, the Unconventional Wisdom on the matter, is that a business is more than a case study: it’s knowing how the product is really used, the history, the culture and — most of all — knowing your customers.  From what K has said, from reading between the lines it appears that the people working at the J & S mill in the Shetlands have been quietly encouraging knitters to bring this small fact to the attention of the new owners, before it’s too late — because they, not the MBAs, know what Fair Isle knitters want.

Oh, and once we’re done with the MBAs, we can resume Dick the Butcher’s original plan and go after the lawyers…

PS feel free to submit all your favourite MBA or lawyer jokes in the comments; here’s one to start:

Q: What’s brown and black and looks good on a lawyer?

A: A pack of Dobermans.