25) A Pay Rise

Jonny and I worked hard in our delivery business to give a good service and to increase the volume of our work. We printed flyers detailing our service and put them at the checkout desks, distributed them in the area and popped them into hundreds of letterboxes. After a while the manager of Coles asked us how things were going and we had to admit to him that we were not getting as many deliveries as we would have liked and hinted that we might not be able to carry on with the business. The assistant manager said that she thought that we were pensioners and were only doing the job to supplement our pension. When we assured her that this was our only means of earning our living and that we would be starving if it were not for the generosity of our children. They asked us what they could do to help us so that we could continue with it because they were pleased with the way we were handling the business. We thought it would have been nice if they could have given us a retention fee equivalent to a good basic wage but of course they would not agree to this but were prepared to listen when we talked of raising the fee paid for each delivery. At first they said “But the customers will not agree to pay any more than they are now” We explained that we had not thought of putting up the price to the customer but were thinking that they could supplement the extra cost to make it a more viable proposition. When we left our meeting with them they agreed to put our plan to head office and would get back to us. Within an hour they phoned us and said that head office had approved the extra payment and we were very pleased. This made quite a difference to what we were earning but it was still not a living wage so we had to continue to try to boost our volume.

We were getting on well with our customers and making friends with many of them who usually had nice things to say about us to the staff in the stores. Coles’ manager did not want to loose us and went out of his way to give us extra work. He would get us to transport goods from one store to the other and paid us well for this.

I remember one such job he gave us. We were called in on Easter Saturday to take Easter eggs to the Coles in Bateau Bay as all the stores in that shopping centre had run out of eggs. The manager of Bateau Bay Coles was very pleased to see us, so welcoming and happy. Well on the Wednesday after Easter we were asked to deliver another couple of loads to him. When we arrived on Wednesday it was a very different story. Obviously no one wanted Easter eggs in their shop on the week after Easter and so Coles Erina were off loading them on to Coles Bateau Bay and although they were fine with us it was obvious that they were not so happy to see the eggs on Wednesday. It would seem that having accepted the first load before Easter the Bateau Bay manager had to accept the second load after the holiday. I told the Bateau Bay manager "Don't worry it's only 51 weeks to Easter" and he said "Yes but these eggs have a 26 week sell by date" he did not think it was very funny.

24) A Large Family

One Friday we were given a very large order to deliver, it almost filled our little car. Off we went to Greenpoint, a suburb we did not know very well at the time. We found the house, it was small and looked like a “housing commission” (council house) there were two young children playing in the garden and when they saw us they got so excited. Running into the house to calling “Mommy, Mommy the groceries are here”. We thought that maybe they were hungry; they were so pleased to see us. In response to their delighted cries their mother came out of the house to greet us, and other kids arrived from everywhere. They all seemed so pleased to see us and wanted to help us with the unloading. They started taking packets from the car and we had to stop them as they were just grabbing any packets, some of which belonged to another delivery we had on board. While I stood at the back of the car making sure that they only took groceries that their mother had paid for Jonny tried to make sure that all the parcels were going into the house.

The customer introduced herself as Cassandra and told us she had four children, but there were far more than four children there. All the kids in the neighbourhood seemed to have arrived to join in the fun. I suspect that Cassandra was a generous woman who shared what she had with the children around her so they were also pleased when her groceries arrived. When we first started delivering to Cassandra we were concerned that the neighbours children might in all the hustle and bustle take one of the packets to his own house but this never happened.

Cassandra only shopped once a fortnight and with her large family you can imagine how large her order was but as there were so many willing hands it was soon in the house. Then we had to count the packets and make sure that it was all accounted for. There would sometimes be as many as 30 packets and as they would not all fit in the small kitchen they would spill out into the dinning room too. Sometimes one of the children would leave one in the lounge or in a bedroom so that counting them was a hard job. Also the kids were always excited to see what treats Mum had bought for them and would start unpacking before the count was completed. There were times when we ended up counting the empty plastic packets to get a final tally. We would try and deliver the order before the school children came home, it did mean less willing hands to help us but at least it was much easier to count the order.

Cassandra was a Christian and always said that her faith was what helped her cope with her problems. Her husband was unemployed so I suppose money was a little tight but it did not stop her from being a generous and positive person. She was looking for work and eventually got a part time job as an assistant in a home for the elderly. How she managed to run her home look after her children and work I will never know but she was always cheerful, friendly and generous. One of our favourite customers.

23) What a Waste

During the first few days we were in the delivery business we needed to see the manager of Franklins about something. One of the staff told us he was in the back section, near the fridges and told us to just go through. We found him standing beside three crates of milk. Each crate held six bottles and each bottle 2 litres (36 litres) and he was opening each bottle and pouring it into the sink. I was amazed and asked him if it had gone rancid but he told me that it had just passed its ‘sell by’ date so he could not sell it. I stuck my finger into it to taste it and there was nothing wrong with it at all. I asked him if he couldn’t give it to an orphanage or an old peoples home or something, rather than throw it away. He told me that he could not give it to anyone, his staff, the homeless shelter or even a local farmer to be fed to the pigs. It was passed the ‘sell by’ date so it had to be disposed of.

I remembered this incident when I recently read an article on the Internet about how much food the world wastes. It said that Australia throws away 3 million tonnes of food a year, the equivalent of 145 kilograms for every man, woman and child. I am sure that Australia is not alone among wealthy nations to have this fault but having spent so many years in the third world we have learnt not to be too fussy. I once told someone that I only threw out food if it had long green mouldy hair on it. When I saw the horror on her face I had to explain that I was only joking but that I did feel that a lot of food was wasted here because of the ‘use by’ date. Many of the Australian people have grown so used to this practice that they have begun to think that everything automatically goes bad on that date and would not think of eating or drinking it after that. Many companies are so afraid of litigation that they are not willing to take the risk of selling products that are not 100% and probably all have a wide safety margin. Of course I could be cynical and say that if the companies can get the public to throw away more food and replace it with a fresher product they will obviously make more money.

I well remember my mother taking milk that had gone sour and putting it into a muslin bag. She would then hang it over the sink in the kitchen so that the whey (the liquid portion) would drip off, leaving the curds (the solid portion) to continue to mature into a soft cheese, rather like Feta. She called it Cavallo cheese, and I think that Cavallo is the word for horse in Italian so I suppose this was “horse cheese”. Although we girls did not like it all the adults seemed to so I suppose it was for a more mature palate and the adults did not seem to be harmed in any way by it.

In Africa food that is passed its prime condition is given away, given away not sold, to orphanages, old peoples homes and the very poor. I am sure that it does them more good than harm. But as there are not so many really poor people in Australia and no one wants to take the chance, however slight it might be that someone will get sick, a great deal of perfectly good food is just wasted.

It’s obvious that not every man, woman and child actually throws away 145 kilograms of food each year so a great deal must be thrown out by the producers, the wholesalers and the retailers. Are we producing too much? Many people in Africa and Asia cannot produce enough to feed themselves and yet the Western world throws so much away. Surely we should be able to come up with a solution to this problem. When we first came to live here I was very impressed by the amount of food, especially the fruit and vegetables piled high on the shelves. I wondered who could consume it all. But I have learnt now that so much of it is just thrown away and find it disturbing.

In this day and age when science has so many answers, we can put a man on the moon, give a person a new heart or lung. We can sew back a severed finger and operate on an unborn foetus. We can increase the yield of our fields with fertilisers or with genetically modify crops to give us bumper harvests but we can’t seem to work out how to have the right amount of food in the right place and at the right time.

22) The High Life

One of our early deliveries was to a house in Riviera Road in Terrigal. The road winds along the side of a hill. The houses on both sides have very steep driveways. The houses with even numbers have steep driveways down from the road to the houses but the houses with odd numbers have steep driveways up to the houses. Some of the driveways are so steep that cars cannot be driven up to the houses. The garages are on the same level as the road and there are steps up to the houses.

We arrived at the house with the huge order and started to climb the steps to the house. The steps were narrow, uneven and badly maintained. About half way up we were feeling very puffed and wishing we had not started a delivery business. To cheer ourselves up we thought of the wonderful view we would see when we go to the top and struggled on. By the time we got to the top we had decided that we were not getting paid enough for this delivery and we jokingly said that we would ask the client to help us with the rest of the groceries that were still in the car.

Someone told us later on that according to building regulations one could only have 17 steps and then there had to be a landing. So 17 steps is the equivalent of one floor. We counted 75 steps so it was higher than a four-storey climb but was harder than most as the steps were so poor. We got to the top and knocked on the door but got no answer. No one was at home.
So there was no way we were going to get any help. That was obviously why she had had a delivery; she did not want to carry all that food up the hill. We joked that she was probably hiding under the bed or behind the curtains waiting for us to finish the task before she showed herself. We thought of just leaving the rest of the parcels beside the road but we knew we could not do that. We sat on the top step to look at the lovely view but we were very disappointed. Terrigal is a seaside village, very popular with tourists, as the beach is very attractive but from the front of that house you could not see the sea at all, it faced the wrong way. The view was only of the valley below and the rooftops of all the neighbouring houses.

We looked through the large windows of the house into the lounge. It was nicely furnished with a large comfy looking lounge suit. I said to Jonny that we should be grateful that we were not in the furniture delivery business, can you imagine how hard that would be. I think we did three trips each up those stairs carrying about six packets of groceries each time all for a payment of $6. We were quite ready to give in that day, but of course we didn’t.

Over a year later we had another delivery to do to that very same house but we did not realise it until we got there, as the name on the docket was different. I asked the customer if she had lived there long and she told me that she had only just moved in. I once again felt sorry for the removalists (as the Australians call furniture removal men.) I asked her how they managed to get her furniture up the steps and she said “We paid” and I remembered how, when our furniture was going to be delivered the company wanted to know all about the lay of the land. I suppose this lady had had to pay a very high premium to get her goods into her new house. We tried to think of ways to make the same principle work for our business but what works for furniture does not necessarily work for groceries.

We did do other awkward deliveries over the years but we always hated to see Riviera Road appearing on the docket but were less upset if it was an even numbered house.