Laydeez and gennelmen, it’s John Crichton from Automatic Retailing! Is there any better way to kick start the new year?
Hello again.
If you’d have asked me last January what my predictions for 2017 were, they wouldn’t have included Palmer & Harvey going under. Like you I suspect, I never saw that coming.
It’d be easy to conclude that wholesaling is something of a dying art – like clog making or Sunderland F.C. winning football matches – but that’s not the way I see things at all.
Wholesaling is getting harder and harder, that’s for sure. There are some customers out there that will change allegiance for the sake of saving a few pennies on a single line. We’re not immune to that at Automatic Retailing, but what we have found in the past 12 months is that the odd customer that did leave us, quickly came back to us.
That’s because it’s the service we offer that makes us unique in the vending trade. We keep our prices keen, that’s for sure; but what’s just as important to us is that we keep our promises. You can count on us to do what we say we’re going to do and these days, where we’re all beholden to a ‘just in time’ approach to the job, reliability is massively important. It’s the difference between running out of stock or not and nobody makes any money from an empty spiral…
You don’t have to take our word for it. 2017 saw us win the AVS Outstanding Customer Service Award for the 13th year running and when she was asked to pinpoint the secret of our success, the AVS’s General Manager, Louise Cummings said it was because ‘they understand the importance of quality and they understand the importance of service.’
That was music to my ears.
2017 was a good year for Automatic Retailing. We welcomed a number of important new customers and we were swamped by enquiries from manufacturers, who see us as their ideal gateway into the UK’s vending machines. The way we conduct our business continued to evolve in 2017, especially in terms of our procedures and our approach to IT. The web site, for example, has really come into its own as more and more customers use it to place their orders. The evolution will continue next year, too: the warehouse will benefit from advances in technology and we’ll be looking to reduce our carbon footprint by becoming increasingly paper-less.
My colleagues and I are all very proud of AR’s position as the wholesaler the vending industry prefers and I want to take this opportunity, as the festive season approaches, to thank-you for your business and to wish you and your family a healthy and prosperous new year.
And think on: gan canny.
