Post Office Manager
The Co-operative Group (The Co-op)

Kenneth J

00:00:03 I’m Kenneth J and I’m the post office manager. I’m in charge of five permanent staff and two casual staff basically controlling all stock levels and controlling the staff, doing rotas, basically organising all the day to day runnings of the post office.

00:00:24 When I was at primary school, very popular. I suppose everybody says that. Always a good student. High school did a lot of sports, county rugby, county athletics, head sort of prefects and sort of those things at school so, usually quite well behaved but had my moments. When I left school I started as a domestic appliance engineer as a YTS, Youth Training Scheme, and served my time with that company. I then went on and got a job with Master Care who is another appliance service company and after six months I got made redundant and after several sort of in and out jobs, eventually my Mum and Dad had a post office and they asked me to work for them. When they retired I took over that post office and ran that for several years and with the reinvention scheme from the post office, they closed that office and I got the manager’s job in the Co-op within the post office in here.

00:01:29 Being made redundant was quite a shock because you get a career when you’re that age, at 18 when you left school and you’d done your apprenticeship, you expected to be in that trade forever more and quite happy at that. But when you’re made redundant, it makes you stop and you have to take check of your life and which way you’re going to go from there. And sometimes the opportunities aren’t there at that time that you would like to take, so you just do what you can at the time. But then when my Mum and Dad asked us to start working in the post office for them, it worked out very well. So, that was one of the better things and hurdles we got over.

00:02:10 You know, you’ve got to be friendly with the customer, make sure that you stay calm in any situation and that you can carry on a transaction even if you’re being quite, have a problematic customer. So it’s really being very good with people. You know, just making sure that you can come across very well. A lot of them you know them quite well because you’ve served them once or twice a week for the last certainly three years here and certainly several of them from when I had the office down at Tweedmouth, so I’ve served them basically for 15 years, I’ve known quite a lot of them and sort of you meet them every week and you have a good chat with them all and a good laugh.

00:02:51 It’s hard to be on top of people all the time and, you know, running them, you know, getting them to do this, getting them to do that. You’ve got to be able to lighten the mood as well and keep everything in a sort of light hearted way. So, as long as they know that they’re doing their job right, then you can have a much more sort of enjoyable sort of relationship with them. So, I mean, that’s why I like coming to work because it’s much more enjoyable. Because you can, you know, you have a laugh at times and have a good carry on with the customers, they like that as well. They don’t just want to come in and see a miserable face, they like to see somebody that’s up beat and chatty and have a bit of a laugh with them.

00:03:26 Motivation mainly family, I’ve got a family, I’ve got two children. So, I mean, it’s not a…you can’t sit down and stay at home sort of thing. You’ve got to come out to work and just coming to work, it’s an enjoyable job. I’ve been in jobs where you wake up in the morning and you wish you wasn’t going to work. You know, you dreaded going to work and this is not like that. I enjoy coming to work, I enjoy meeting the people. So, that’s motivation. ENDS