The
Seadog's Magic Winkle -Part 3
By
Dominic Horton
In
the last two episodes of Lowlife I have illuminated you about
the secret, inner life of working in a petrol station (called PMG
Forecourts) in the West Midlands when I was a teenager in the 1980's.
This week the story continues...............
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| An Austin 1100 by request of Toby In-Tents |
One
of the other attributes needed to be a successful forecourt cashier
was the ability to sniff out and execute a variety of fiddles in
order to make a few quid to supplement the meagre wages. The first
exposure I had to the Seadog's web of swindles was when I was a
part-time member of staff and I was restocking the shelves of the
shop with goods. I brought out a box of containers of oil from the
store room and innocently started to put them on the shelves. The
Seadog hurried instructed me, “No, don't put those out,
there's no oil in the cans, only water.” The box was apparently
secretly marked to show that the cans only contained water and not
oil. The Seadog explained that he used the oil for his own car but
then filled the cans up with water so it would appear that they
contained oil. The can would be put back in the stock room, so all
would seem in order if Head Office did a stock take. It later became
clear to me that half of the oil containers in the stock cupboard
were full of tap water.
The
oil cans were not the only items of stock that actually contained tap
water instead of what was supposed to be in the container, according
to the product label. At the time bottled spring water was in its
infancy; well, least ways in the West Midlands it was, it had
probably been sold in London for the last two decades. The majority
of bottled water that we sold was bought by the salesmen in the car
showroom that was adjacent to the petrol station and was part of the
same business.
 |
| An artist's impression of PMG Forecourts in the 1980's. |
The salesmen liked the bottled water as they
mistakenly thought that it made them look cool and at the cutting
edge of fashion. What they didn't know was that the bottles actually
contained tap water as the Seadog and I used to take empty,
discarded bottles out of the bin and refill them at the tap and sell
them on again. We had discovered that the bottled water had no seal
on the screw-top lid, so it was impossible to tell if the bottle had
been used before. Each bottle we sold was 100% profit for us, so it
was a good little earner. One of the salesman, Nobby, even commented
on how much better the water tasted than tap water. Eventually the
bottles developed a seal, so the great spring water scam eventually
went down the drain.
Like
prison, snout (cigarettes) was the standard currency for the fiddles
that were mutually beneficial to the cashier and the customer. In
those days receipts for petrol were hand written chitties so a
customer who had £10 worth of petrol might ask for a petrol receipt
for £13.60 to give to his employer and he would pocket twenty fags
and so would the cashier. The oblivious employer would think that
the £13.60 was accounted for wholly by petrol. Some employers
would issue their drivers with special fuel credit cards which
technically they could only buy petrol with, but again we would allow
customers to buy whatever goods they wanted on the card as long as
there was twenty cigarettes in it for us. You didn't actually have
to take your cut in snout, you could just take cash to the same
value.
 |
| Monster Munch |
A
lot of our sharp practices involved the stock in one way or another
and we had a lot of room for manoeuvre in this regard as our daily
stock take was manual and the till was as old as the hills and you
had to reckon up everything in your head. So we had serious
reservations when we were told one day by Walker from Head Office
that a new till was to be installed which would modernise everything
and automate the stock taking process. Each item sold was supposed
to be individually input into the till and it would add everything up
for you and even tell you how much change you had to give each
customer.
After
the new till was installed the fella went to great lengths to explain
to the Seadog how it worked and what functions it could perform to
make our lives easier. But I could tell that the Seadog was paying
no attention whatsoever to the man as for the majority of the time he
was smoking a fag and starring out of the window. Once the man had
gone I asked the Seadog to show me how the till worked but all he
said was “press the button that reads '10 Benson & Hedges' and
press 'Enter' and the till will open and that's all you need to
know.” We carried on with our old methods of carrying out all
procedures manually, thereby protecting the latitude we needed to
fiddle a few pennies.
The
Seadog was in charge of ordering the stock for the shop and as far as
the perishable foodstuffs was concerned he had to strike the fine
balance of holding enough to keep the shelves stocked but not too
much as it might go out of date. Despite the Seadog's skill and
experience one time two boxes of Monster Munch crisps went over the
use by date and in order to shift them he was given clearance by Head
Office to sell them at half price. Seeing the chance of making a
few shillings he tippexed out the date on the crisps and carefully
wrote in a new one, sold them at full price anyway and pocketed the
difference.
Conversely
we actually encouraged the best sandwiches to go out of date by
hiding them behind cans of pop in the fridge so customers did not see
them. When we saw Salmonella Sid the sandwich man pull onto the
forecourt we used to take our sandwiches of choice out of hiding and
put them to the front of the fridge. Sid would breezily say, “here
we are lads, you might as well have these ones as they are out of
date and I am only going to throw them away. Nothing wrong with them
if you eat them today, waste not want not.” And they say there is
no such thing as a free lunch.
We
were always keen to make a quick buck so when Head Office wanted us
to raffle off twelve turkeys to attract business we thought it was
Christmas. In fact it was Christmas. A turkey was the be raffled
off once a day for a dozen days in the build up to Christmas and we
were instructed to issue customers with free raffle tickets with each
purchase of petrol. Foolishly Head Office left the draws entirely
under our supervision so it was no surprise that the Seadog and I and
the rest of the staff “won” a turkey each with some bagging two;
we fabricated bogus names for the winners so no foul (or fowl) play
was suspected. We did at least show some festive spirit and we
ensured that an impoverished elderly customer called Old Norman (who
used to put a fiver's worth of petrol into his Austin 1100) walked
off with a bird. He was astounded when we told him that he had won
as he said that he didn't even have a ticket.
Another
elderly customer, who was affluent, was not so lucky and she used to
come off the wrong end of a shakedown which I always thought was
morally dubious. But the Seadog convinced me that we were simply
playing Robin Hood and re-distributing money from the rich to the
poor (i.e. us.) The victim was in her eighties and she had a brand
new white Mercedes and lived alone in a massive house down the way
and she was clearly loaded. When she pulled onto the forecourt the
Seadog would rush out and ask her if she would like him to fill the
car up, which was a personal service that we didn't offer to any
other customer. As soon as The Seadog had finished filling up he
would give me the nod and I would press the button on the till that
cleared the display on the pump back to “£000.00”, so the lady
didn't have a clue how much petrol she had bought. The Seadog would
always add a fiver onto the price and she would happily pay up there
and then, not even having had to get out of the car. The customer
was so pleased with the service that she received that she even used
to give the Seadog a tip and shamefully he used to accept it.
Given
the above, my advice to you is that the next time you go to the
petrol station make sure the seal has not been broken on your bottle
of water and if the till is being manned by a seafaring type with a
drooping moustache and a Dorset accent then drive on by. Unless you
want a dodgy receipt of course.
©
Dominic Horton, July 2014.
*
EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com.
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