As most of you know, the majority of my working life has been dedicated to the profession of teaching, mostly in Primary schools but also in high schools, teaching History and English. However, there was a short period during the 90’s where I worked in the computer industry. I worked in several computer shops doing retail and also ran a small home business of my own with the assistance of my son. It was during my retail period that this rather odd story took place.
Canberra in the 90’s had a plethora of computer businesses of all shapes and sizes. Figuring that the home of the federal government would mean limitless opportunities to sell hardware and software to the myriad of government departments, many enterprising people set up businesses hoping to cash in. As well as selling to government, these retailers hoped to sell to the many small industries who relied on the federal government for their business as well as to the thousands of geeky public servants who spent all day every day working on their office computer and then went home to play on their home computer. The market was cut-throat and competitive with all the retailers watching the others in the hope of scooping them with that “one big sale”.
I managed several of these stores and it was pretty tense most of the time. The giant stores like Harvey Norman had just got into computers but weren’t the big players that they are now and the little independents shops could still do fairly well if they did it right. Prices were high (when I first started a 286 computer was still $15000) and margins were correspondingly high (around 33% when I first got into the industry).
So, when a big, Singapore-based company advertised that they were looking for staff for their projected 4 computer stores in Canberra, everybody in the game (pretty much) shot in an application. The rates of pay looked good and the opportunity to work for a bigger company who were taking the risks for you seemed too good to pass up. I was one who applied and, surprisingly, given my age, I got an interview and, in the process of time, was offered a job! The company was called IPC and their corporate logo was the letters in sky blue on a beige background (no surprises where they got that idea from). To start with we all received some training at the company’s main store in Fyshwick, Canberra’s main light industrial centre, and then we were farmed out to the regional stores to work under managers who had also just got their jobs with the company. I was sent to the Tuggeranong store and I was only there for a very short time when I was told by the powers that be that I was going to take over as the store manager and the existing manager was to go back to Fyshwick to manage corporate and government sales.
Thus began what soon became an almost constant roundabout of staff changes. This was probably mainly as a result of the fact that managerial changes within the company also seemed to be happening almost all the time! It became very clear to us lesser lights that IPC had grossly misread the Canberra market. Believing (it seemed) that most government departments were still wed to Big Blue (a large percentage of government offices still had IBM’s PS/2s on the desks) they based their business model on selling a better quality PC than what the shops were offering at a reduced price compared to IBM. Were it not for the fact that they were probably a couple of years late, it might have worked.
However, they were too late to the market to try and sell a bargain IBM clone. By this time even the government departments were purchasing cheap PCs and public servants who could see that having a brand name computer on their desk at home wasn’t really that much of an advantage, were snapping up the cheap and cheerful PCs as well. So we were faced with trying to sell a much higher priced product that had no real perceptible advantage over the “clone” PCs down the road purely on the hope that customers would be prepared to spend more for a better quality product. They weren’t and, though our shops continued to receive a never-ending supply of hardware and a plethora of software, the customers continued to stay away.
My store was by far and away the highest grossing of the chain and I was continually being told how happy management was with how me and my team were going. By this stage us peons at the coal face were always wary of a visit from the boss or an email or phone call from him, knowing that some other radical change of plan was going to take place. So it wasn’t really a surprise to be notified one day that the business model had changed again and that store managers, along with the demanding duty of running a store, would now be required to spend at least 50% of their work week doing “outward bound” business, in other words, cold calling customers hoping to increase sales.
Now I’d already done that at two other stores and I knew that the success rate from it in Canberra was minimal. Most businesses had their preferred suppliers and getting them to buy a DEARER product than that which they were presently buying with no perceptible advantage was always going to be a struggle. I told the boss that I wasn’t prepared to do so and I was promptly demoted for the store management position and put back on the floor of the Fyshwick store as a salesman. I managed to top the sales figures there also, much to their chagrin and it became clear to me that IPC was never going to make it in the Canberra market. After expressing this opinion in a staff meeting I was given my DCM and I went back to casual teaching.
In later years I pondered how come a big organisation like that could have so badly misjudged what they were planning to do. Not long after I left, IPC announced that they were closing most of their stores except for a few in major centres. Shortly after this, they closed those also and announced that they were ceasing retail to concentrate solely on corporate sales and support. I don’t know how long that lasted but it wasn’t long and, within less than 2 years, IPC had completely disappeared. So thoroughly had they done so that, when looking for their corporate logo to head this article, no trace of it could be found.
Now I have said many times that I was young and naive and I guess I must still have been. It wasn’t until many years later that it occurred to me that the whole IPC thing was probably a gigantic money-laundering scheme for some Mafia-style thugs in Asia somewhere. They spent money like it was water and didn’t seem to worry too much that they weren’t making the profits that I’d have expected a big organisation to want. I could be wrong, but, on reflection, I don’t think so. 🙂