All Service Centre articles – Page 6
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News
Service Centre: Jac Roper covers home-made sandwiches as well as fuel card woes
Home-made recipes could go wrong Flaming June already although as this is being written I’m still ankle-deep in drought. Splish sploshing around in the darling muds of May. Still, two Bank Holidays in June should brighten things up and no doubt you have smartened up your barbecue offering ...
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News
Service Centre: Jac Roper looks at rates, a marathon deal and Britain’s first driver-less car
Cliff-hanger The little East Yorkshire village of Mappleton, 3km south of Hornsea, had been subject to intense erosion at a rate of two metres a year, resulting in the access road being only 50m from the cliff edge at its closest point, until it was halted by the erection ...
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Help and advice from jac roper
Digging deep into reservesIn the October issue I wrote about compensation (or lack of) when they come and dig the roads up, which prompted a call from Margaret, who is the company secretary at Tenybanc Service Station at Ammanford in Carmarthenshire. Essentially it’s a story I defy anyone to top.The ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
Vouching for new scheme?This helpline gets more than its fair share of complaints about the c**p commission offered by multi-tasking terminal suppliers. Paypoint, unsurprisingly as it has the most terminals out there gets the most complaints.The latest comes from Mr Anon (who has had previous rants in this ...
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News
Help and advice from Jac Roper
Where’s the compensation? Despite the fact that we live in a risk adverse/compensation culture for example, large lady falls over in store because she cannot see her feet and watch out for a just-as-large claim. It doesn’t quite work that way for retailers ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
Chill out and save moneyIt’s been a strip-to-the-waist summer for much of the UK this year which will have put a severe strain on the chillers. Following my piece in the July issue on Jonathan James’ advice to put the doors back on them following astonishing savings, Mike Stayte of ...
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Help and advice from jac roper
At your service Customer service is central to what you do but supplier service seems to vary rather a lot. Size doesn’t seem to have much to do with it although very small companies are probably stretched at times and very large ones have ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
The price of super petrol?Ah good, some feedback, but oops, not quite what I was expecting. Guy White, who runs The Laurels Service Station with his brother (in a business taken over by their father in 1963 at Horncastle in Lincolnshire) wondered whether I was encouraging everyone to buy supermarket ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
Many signs of these timesDo you have a No Smoking sign on your door? I expect most of you do. However Jay Patel, who runs a small kiosk-style forecourt site in north-east London, objects to the amount of clutter he has to stick in his windows and doors and would ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
A clause to remember The text book advice when it comes to contracts is that you should get out the magnifying glass and then run it past your lawyer. But most people don’t.And I always say that the only time you would read the terms and conditions on your airline ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
Who sets the standards?It has always struck me as ironic that you pay for insurance for peace of mind and wind up fighting for compensation when things go wrong. And obviously this does happen because some of the insurance packages these days, such as Bluefin’s forecourt policy, include a loss ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
Is the future miles away?Discuss: is it worth investing six-figure sums in developing your site or should you sit back and wait for the surely soon-to-be-annnounced mass market in electric cars?This was the question posed by Yusuf Dalli who runs Bury Rd Station in Prestwich, Manchester. "When we go to ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
Nothing up front and no back upLaurence Haring, who has three forecourts trading as Fuel 24 in the South West, (in Weston-super-Mare and Highbridge) is severely ticked off with Point Four. Two of his sites have the same HTEC Hydrapos till using Background2 software which he describes as "superb". The ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
Heading them off at the passForecourt retailer Jonathan James proves you can win at least sometimes. There was, until recently, a hand car wash next to his Slade End site."It was right next door just 20ft away and sharing the same access road so all my ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
He’s on a roll Tony Barlow of Local Service Stations has been in touch to tell me how ticked off he is with Saxon Paper. "You may remember when they sent me till rolls that hadn’t been ordered and my subsequent successful court action against them," he says. "But even ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
How clean are your tanks? I ask because they need to be very clean to accept E5 (5%) ethanol petrol which is now being rolled out by Texaco to all of its terminals this year. And once you’ve got 5% ethanol in your storage tanks, there is no going back. ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
The Big IssueBank charges are a big issue with retailers at the moment. Bernard and Adrian Shotter, who trade as LB Shotter and Sons, Waterloo Ave Garage at Leiston, Suffolk sent me the following email: "My brother and I read your piece regarding bank charges (Forecourt Trader September). Mr Vann ...
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News
Help and advice from jac roper
== All’s well that ends well ==Here’s a piece of advice which surely falls into the commonsense category, but it’s surprising how many don’t check out the cancellation clauses in contracts they sign. Or, as in David Taylor Garage Group’s case, it was so long ago that it was forgotten.Janine ...
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Help and advice from jac roper
== Cock-up or conspiracy? ==This piece could be quite important to those retailers with post offices who have had unexplained losses on their Horizon epos system. The Post Office has finally admitted that its Horizon system is not infallible.Bill Morrison, whose Budgens forecourt site trades at Ramsgate on the Kent ...
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News
Help and advice from Jac Roper
== With the right location and enough drive == There aren’t enough upbeat stories around these days and certainly Service Centre doesn’t hear many of them. If you’ve got the right location and the means to invest you could be quids in. No doubt that is stating the ...