Spotlight is not a store that most men would recognise. It's a place for chicks to buy things for sewing and beading and stuff. It is full of curtain material and lace and things that I just don't want to go near.
I have had the misfortune of having to venture into our local store from time to time to buy things for the house - material for wrapping up little monkeys and that kind of thing. After every visit, I have resolved to never set foot in the store again. Apart from the store being laid out like Bedlam, the place has a staff to customer ratio similar of about 1 per thousand. You have probably heard horror stories of the rationing and queueing that used to happen in the Soviet Union before the whole thing fell apart - well, Spotlight seems to be owned by a couple of Russian emigres whose purpose in life is to bring a little part of the Soviet Union to Australia - and I am not talking about vodka and caviar. If you have McDonalds at one end of the service spectrum, then you have Spotlight at the other.
The reason was on the front page of the Fin Review today. Apparently under the old award system, it was too expensive to employ the necessary number of staff on weekends, weekends being the time when all the pensioners and housewives and other people that can shop all week decide to descend like the Golden Horde on their local Spotlight store. Watching them pore over a pile of dress making material reminds me of watching a rampaging swarm of mice devour a pile of grain.
The new industrial relations thingy means that Spotlight can now employ lots of useless staff on weekends as they aren't being paid triple time and a half plus meal breaks and smoko breaks and all the rest of it. That must be a good thing. Only the Labor Party could think that this is a bad thing.
Then again, given the way Beasley and Co. dress, it is clear they have never actually set foot in a Spotlight with the aim of buying something. Keating certainly would not have been seen dead near the place - even if he was making his own suits, it is not the sort of place you find luxurious Italian fabrics. Spotlight is the Cash'n'Carry of the fabric world. In fact I can't think of a more obviously blue collar shopping mecca.
What the fuck have I been doing in there then? I only wear pure cotton shirts and pure wool suits and pure silk ties. My towels are all thick, Egyptian cotton. There is no rayon to be seen around me, baby.
I am digressing. Spotlight needs lots of checkout staff because your average shopper goes in there and buys lots of little things - 3 different types of buttons, 5 spools of thread, a couple of different zippers, 37 varieties of beads - that sort of thing. And those fiddly little things are impossible to barcode efficiently or economically, so you have lots of people manually bashing numbers into cash registers. People are also buying funny lengths of cloth from bolts - 5 metres of curtain fabric, 5 metres of backing, some lining etc etc etc. Your average transaction at the checkout makes an enormous weekend trolley filling expedition to Woolies look like a picnic.
In short, Spotlight needs to import about 50,000 Indians to man its checkouts.
That won't happen of course. So what you get is blue collar, battling women who work all week racing into Spotlight on Saturday morning to buy some curtain material for the new house because the family can't afford to buy ready made curtains thanks to the fantastically enormous mortgage.
She wastes about an hour standing in line because the store can only afford to employ 3 people on Saturday rather than the 30 it actually needs. (Gee, maybe youth unemployment would drop to about zero if all the little zit faced dole bludgers could be booted out of bed on Saturday morning to man a till in Spotlight). Who suffers? The blue collar shoppers, and the unemployed yoof. Rich people simply ring a decorator and get the bloody curtains made up to fit.
Who's side is the fat bastard on?
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